Miscommunication
Show Notes
Why can't we just talk to each other? The Reformed Rakes have an honest conversation about why miscommunication is so reviled in romance, and argue that miscommunication is necessary for a genre that is so character driven. In this episode, we go over miscommunication vs miscommunication trope, outline different types of miscommunication, and talk about some of our favorite historical romance books where signals are missed, words are misinterpreted, and assumptions are made.
Books Referenced
The Proposal by Mary Balogh
Forever & Ever by Patricia Gaffney
A Woman Entangled by Cecilia Grant
Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed by Anna Campbell
Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught
Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale
Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas
The Bittersweet Bride for Vanessa Riley
The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian
Tempting the Bride by Sherry Thomas
Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Lady Gallant by Suzanne Robinson
Never Cross a Highlander by Lisa Rayne
My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas
At Your Pleasure by Meredith Duran
Keeper of the Dream by Penelope Williamson
References
Feminist Book Club - Toxic or Titillating: The Romance Tropes
BookRiot - Words Fail Me: Why the Miscommunication Trope is Here to Stay
This excellent TikTok by @bayleyreadsbooks about listening at doors
Transcript
Beth: Welcome To Reformed Rakes, a romance podcast built on perfect communication. My name is Beth and I’m on booktok under the name bethhaymondreads.
Emma: I’m Emma, I am a law librarian writing about justice and historical romance at Restorative Romance on substack. I’m also on tiktok under the name emmkick.
Chels: My name is Chels, I’m the writer of the romance newsletter The Loose Cravat on Substack, a book collector, and a BookToker under the name chels_ebooks.
Beth: Today, we’re going to talk about miscommunication in romance. It’s piled onto lists as the one trope that needs to die. One such article is by Jordy Macbeth of the Feminist Book Club. She says: “Positive communication is important in order to build a strong relationship rooted in trust and openness. Miscommunication in relationships should not be romanticized because it can lead individuals to believe that poor communication is acceptable and should be tolerated.”
One of the worst takes, actually.
[LAUGHTER]
Romance, like all genres, aims to entertain and make art. Articles like this are condescending to those who read romance, as if they can’t tell real life from the art they consume.
Now let’s examine the most common complaint: “just have a conversation.” Carina Pereira, writing for BookRiot, says: “After all, why can’t you just say what you have to say? Why can’t you find a way to pass on the message, or why do you continue to be in a situation you clearly don’t want to be in, when an open conversation could just solve it all? I know damn well that these conversations are harder in practice than they are in theory — even in books.”
What’s interesting to me about Pereira’s article is she acknowledges how she struggles with miscommunication in books at times, which fair. But she does find it to be quite relatable and similar to real life.
Why don’t characters just talk about it? Don’t you know that if you use words, everything you mean to say will come out in the right order and the person listening will completely understand? This only needs to happen one time as well. You don’t need conflict in your novels, dear reader.
So, as ardent defenders of miscommunication, we’re going to show how it’s essential to the romance genre.
Let's maybe start by defining miscommunication. Emma, we’ll start with you, since you had a good point in one of our conversations about the difference between miscommunication and the miscommunication trope. Could you explain what you see as the difference?
Emma: To me, in order for something to be a trope has to have beats to follow. Enemies to lovers is a good example, and that means there's going to be some sort of pre-existing conflict that has to be overcome.
Even something more simplistic like “Only one bed at the inn” can be resolved a few different ways, like they get into the bed and are overcome and sleep together, they get into the bed and build tension by not sleeping together, or someone valiantly decides to sleep on the floor to prove their integrity. All these books are sort in communication with each other, when they engage with that trope.
So miscommunication “trope” has to be in dialogue with other miscommunication tropes, and I think the word gets applied so widely applied, so the point where it can’t be just a trope. I think there are tropes under this sort of “umbrella” of miscommunication. I would class things like “eavesdropping and misinterpreting a message,” or “a message being misdelivered” tropes as under the umbrella of miscommunication--they are all carving out a path for a plot to either follow the beats or subvert them.
But romance tends to focus on relationships and what are the causes of interpersonal conflict in real life? Being scared to articulate your feelings or articulating them in a way that leads to misinterpretation! A lot of the romances that I can think of that don’t rely on some sort of miscommunication actually feel like hybrid genres--romance and mystery (if they are solving a crime) or romance and adventure (like if someone gets kidnapped in the third act). To create conflict in a romance novel, for there to be a plot, there has to be realistic tension and 99% of the time, that is going to come from people talking to each other and something not going quite right--that’s miscommunication, but to me, it isn’t necessarily always “miscommunication trope.”
Chels: On TikTok last year I said I was so curious about people who say they don’t like miscommunication because I felt like it was vital to romance, the response I got was pretty interesting. I listed out a few books that I love that are miscommunication books (some of which we will talk about in this episode), and people in the comments told me that my examples didn’t count because it was miscommunication done well, or because it wasn’t miscommunication that breaks up the couple. I don’t think there’s a standard understanding of what miscommunication falls under “miscommunication trope,” I think when people combine the two words it ends up being a pejorative, a way to talk about something that happened that you don’t like.
In fact, I think a lot of times when people say “miscommunication trope” they are thinking about a very specific book or a very specific scenario that doesn’t work for them. But the brush is way too broad for it to be meaningful in conversation or criticism. Miscommunication done well is still miscommunication, and if you acknowledge that it’s much harder to make sweeping statements.
Beth: You both basically covered on how essential miscommunication is to romance. So let's talk about that a little bit. So why would you say miscommunication is necessary to the structure of romance, or what is its purpose in romance?
Emma: So not to get too far into semiotic theory (I always say this when I am about to get too far into semiotics), but any system of reference, where we are assigning labels to things is inherently restrictive compared to the expanse of unlabelled meaning. Semiotics as a study distinguishes language from speech and language is a system of reference. Roland Barthes, who is a French semiotician, describes language as “a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate.” It is a social institution and requires buy-in from every party who is attempting to communicate.
But speech is individual, as opposed to language, each person gets to choose how they talk and what they say, and they are expressing personal thought.
One more relevant quote from Estonian semiotician Juri Lotman: “Non-understanding, incomplete understanding or misunderstanding are not side-products of the exchange of communication, but its very essence.”
To me, this is the great conflict of romance! How to get my speech to match up with someone else’s understanding of language. Romance characters talk about some of the most abstract concepts available to humans (feelings--of love, of loyalty, of duty, of anxiety) and they are bringing their whole past selves to each of these conversations. Characters have to work through the disconnects of personal speech and that is where miscommunication happens.
Chels: A lot of the conflict in romance novels is internal: Why do I feel this way I don’t want to feel? Why do I love this person when it’s the wrong time? Am I not good enough for this? Am I ready for this? When you have two people that you’re trying to bring together, they’re asking themselves these questions and filling in the blanks for the other person.
There are lots of romance novels where there are external forces keeping the couple apart and driving the conflict, but even these will have some level of miscommunication. Great romance novels revel in how we’re fallible, how even with the best of intentions we get it wrong. If there wasn’t some sort of miscommunication in the book it would be difficult to craft a compelling character arc.
Beth: Right. Since romance is a character driven genre, then communication itself becomes vital, and it's interesting to explore when communication breaks down, and what kind of conflict results from that. And then another main point, I would say, why miscommunication is essential to romance is that it drives the relationship forward as each character resolves those misunderstandings. And then you can now proceed based on your new correct knowledge, or you might break apart. In the process of resolving the miscommunication, then each character has a chance to learn something or grow. So obviously we love miscommunication. But other people say they dislike it as we've talked about, so they'll say, just talk to each other. Is that a valid criticism?
Emma: I think sometimes when people are talking about the characters in a romance novel and they just want the characters to talk each other, I think might stem from people not wanting to criticize an author directly, so instead they say the characters are acting in unbelievable ways. So there is this distance between the critique and critiquing the author’s writing.
The few times I have thought “oh my god, just have a conversation!” it is because the author provides no scaffolding for the conflict. But in historical romance at least, there is always this layer of propriety that explains why people might not want to have a conversation. I think the distance between current day and historical settings is smaller than we might believe at first with regards to anxiety about intimacy or saying how you feel, but in historical settings, it is easier to believe “oh they’re worried about what the ton might think” if they are direct with their words and it comes back to bite them. So there is already that scaffolding that exists in historical romance, just because of the layer of society anxiety.
Chels: I kind of feel two ways about this. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll think “Just talk to each other!” when I’m frustrated, but I think a lot of times that’s because the characterization doesn’t fit the actions. We don’t have enough of an understanding of why a character would withhold information when, to us, it seems like only good things can come of it. I also think, particularly in dual POV, we get the benefit of seeing into both characters’ heads. If one character has a huge fear about how their love interest will react to a candid conversation, we might know that that fear is unfounded, but that character doesn’t necessarily.
Sometimes though, “Just talk to each other!” feels a little bit silly, like a refusal to empathize with characters or to take their fears and misgivings seriously.
Beth: Yes, I 100% agree with both points. Also, I think if you’re frustrated with the characters that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If the author crafts the tension well it can mean you’re deeply invested and you’re along for the relationship milestones.
I don’t want to invalidate all frustration people feel when reading miscommunication, especially where the author hasn’t pulled off a believable scenario. Of course that can still happen. Like what Emma said, I think if you’re feeling that way, is it that the writing is bad or do these characters have justifiable reasons to not talk yet? Fear, anger, jealousy, lack of trust—all kinds of emotions can take over our better judgment. Even once you know what both characters’ deals are, oftentimes, the emotional damage is done. Knowledge doesn’t undo hurt.
So we talked a bit about dual point of view. So I wanted to ask both of you. How does dual POV enhance miscommunication?
Emma: I love dual POV as a convention. It’s probably my favorite structural element that is a real sort of real convention in most historical romance. So many of my favorite books involve playing with dual POV and bearing witness to the misinterpretations by getting both sides of the story. Mary Balogh, who is not always the most exciting author, structure or plot wise, does this thing in at least two of her books where she shows the two POVs for the same scene. So you get the hero’s POV and then when we jump back to the heroine’s, we get the same scene over again. It happens in The Proposal, which I think is one of her best miscommunication books.
Hugo, who has been made an Earl because of valor during the Napoleonic wars, has a lot of pride in being middle class and this comes with speaking very matter of factly. Gwen, Lady Muir is used to coded compliments and insults, so she continually assumes that Hugo means more or less than his direct comments. There’s also an added element of Hugo having to relearn how to speak after the war--he is suffering PTSD from a particularly fatal battle that his troop was in, and this manifested in struggling to communicate at all.
We see Gwen process his baring his soul verbally as a form of intimacy that easily transforms into physical intimacy. She uses words associated with language like “translated” as they are becoming more physically intimate. But when Hugo suddenly proposes after they are physically intimate, he struggles to articulate much of anything and ends up asking her to marry him so that his sister can have entry into the world of the ton. When Gwen refuses, he thinks “she would have refused him no matter how he had worded his proposal, but he didn’t need to make such a mull of it.” When Gwen asks him if this is the only reason he proposed, he thinks of a few reasons that feel incomplete and is unable to say any of them to her. Gwen asks him the same question again--is his sister the only reason he came to see her and propose? And he responds with a simple “no,” still unable to articulate anything more concrete.
What Balogh does with the POV is that we then jump back into Gwen’s mind leading up to her asking him about his motivations for the proposal and she interprets his actions in the worst faith possible--with his sister’s advancement as a purpose to use her, but then she decides that there must be more. Using her in this way is incompatible with what she knows about his extreme black and white morals. She guesses that the speech he performed was a makeshift one, that he had forgotten a more romantic one because he was so nervous. So she takes a leap of faith and asks him clarifying questions.
This is not the end of communication questions for Hugo and Gwen and Balogh does the parallel scene structure a few different times, but it felt so novel to see both processes of the origin of the miscommunication. You see Hugo being literally unable to articulate his attraction to Gwen, even to himself, because he is already struggling with language of emotion from his PTSD and then you also see Gwen’s impulse to assume anything Hugo is saying is a coded insult to her.
Chels: I love dual POV because we get an inside look at why, exactly, two characters are not understanding each other. A lot of times miscommunication boils down to feelings, perception, and motivation, and when you’re reading a book with dual POV you get more of the framework of the miscommunication, and what baggage each character is bringing to the conversation (or lack thereof.)
In Forever & Ever by Patricia Gaffney, there’s a constant cycle of miscommunication between Sophie, who owns a mine that she inherited from her father, and Connor, the man who is undercover investigating that mine. They can’t bring themselves to be honest and vulnerable with each other - to clear the air, because they assume the worst about the other character. What’s so brilliant about getting into their heads is that they’re right. Sophie feels as though Connor thinks she’s a snob, and Connor most definitely does. Connor thinks Sophie is embarrassed by his station, and she is. But that’s half of the picture, because while they do have these uncharitable thoughts about each other, they also love and respect each other. The miscommunication is borne out of truth - and there are legitimate reasons they aren’t speaking and laying themselves bare, but if the book wasn’t dual POV you wouldn’t know that.
Beth: I also have a book I wanted to reference. There’s this great scene in A Woman Entangled. It’s 1817. Nick and Kate have settled into friendship after Kate rejected Nick’s marriage proposal. Nick’s brother has married a former sex worker so to save his political career, he’s cut ties with his brother. So, Kate and Nick are talking about Kate trying to enter a higher social sphere. Nick says it wouldn’t be easily done. Then Kate says, “I never supposed it was. I don’t limit myself to easy undertakings, you see. And you’ll pardon me, I hope, for questioning the extent of your authority on the intricacies of society.” She means it in the way that he doesn’t go out much--something she’s teased him about in the past. But when he’s shocked, she realizes how he could be insulted by her words because of his connection to Will.
A few pages later from Nick’s perspective, he’s still hurting from the insult even though he thinks she’s likely referencing how he doesn’t go out, they still need to clear the air. So, why I love that this is in dual perspective we can see Nick’s hurt and he knows the likelihood of what she really meant. Because Kate misstepped she has to focus on him and while she’s quite attentive to everyone in her orbit, she can be a little single-minded on her social climbing. So we get several things out of this one instance of miscommunication: a chance to repair the relationship and then move it forward, for Kate to open up to Nick, and then Nick frankly acknowledging he still has a regard for her but he won’t ever act on it. Dual POV allows us to see how each character views this interaction and how it changes them or their relationship or both.
Alright, so we ardently defended miscommunication but like all the other tropes it can be done badly. What’s an example where you think the author didn’t quite pull it off and what would be the fix for it? Or perhaps in general why miscommunication might not work.
Emma: So one book that really frustrated me with how miscommunication worked in it was Seven Nights in a Rogue’s Bed by Anna Campbell. The heroine is really adamant about never wanting to marry, even if it costs her the chance to have a family. For convoluted reasons, the heroine has an arrangement with the hero where she has to stay at his home for seven nights, and he is trying to seduce her.
He insists that in this relationship if she becomes pregnant that she tells him and they marry. She continues to repeat that she does not want to get married. Basically the miscommunication comes down to him not listening to her. At certain points, I wasn’t sure if he even remembered having the conversation. She similarly is hiding information from the hero about his legitimacy, which would dramatically change the stakes of all the decisions he makes in the book. But this miscommunication is coupled with what I thought were underdeveloped characters--it is less about the mechanics of the miscommunication I had an issue with, but I never understood why anyone was doing anything because they were ignoring information that they seemed to already have.
Chels: As we’ve kind of mentioned, a lot of times miscommunication doesn’t work because it happens in a way that doesn’t fit with the characterization, but a miscommunication that doesn’t work for me is actually entirely in character.
I’m obsessed with Whitney, My Love, kind of the way that the hero of the book, Clayton, is obsessed with Whitney. I love it but I don’t really understand it! I hate it but I know I don’t really hate it. This book has such a staying power in my mind and it’s one that I reference all the time.
So Clayton, the Duke of Westmoreland, pursues Whitney throughout the book. He sees her at a masquerade in France and decides that he wants her, so he pursues her back in England. He comes to an agreement with her father - so he’s going to marry Whitney regardless of what she wants, but he decides he wants to circumspectly win her over. So he pretends to be a regular person who is DEFINITELY not a duke in order to get her to fall in love with him. Whitney has been obsessed with her neighbor, so this party is genuinely very funny because the duke is struggling to get her attention and is extremely jealous.
But when they actually get in a relationship their miscommunciations are cyclical. The duke, acting off of partial information, takes the least charitable interpretations of Whitney’s actions, viciously punishes her, and then has to grovel. This happens in a big and devastating way twice, which was one time too many. I really believe that Clayton would act this way: he’s bombastic, used to getting what he wants, obsessed with Whitney but unwilling to take the time to understand her well enough to stop putting their relationship in this situation. But the second go-round was exhausting, and the book is so lengthy that I think the story would only benefit from cutting it out entirely.
Beth: Okay, so we’ve covered some good points and I’d like to talk about different types of miscommunication and how it adds to the story. This isn’t all the kinds of miscommunication but enough to point out miscommunication is good actually. We’ll start with the seminal work, Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale. There’s multiple types of miscommunication throughout the book, but one’s well start talking about it miscommunication based on class:
Chels: So Flowers from the Storm is a Regency romance between the Duke of Jervaulx and Archimedia Timms, who goes by Maddy. The story starts with Jervaulx having a stroke during a duel. The effects of his stroke hinder how he’s able to communicate with his family, and since they won’t take the time to learn they just label him as aggressive and send him off to an asylum to “recover.” One part of his family, his sisters’ husbands, want to cut him off from the dukedom entirely and are using his incarceration at the asylum as an excuse to do so. His mother sees his stroke as punishment for the duke’s rakish ways, so her motivations aren’t as mercenary, but they are lacking in empathy.
The duke’s love interest, Maddy, is a Quaker in every sense of the word. She has notions of community and equality that are foreign and alienating to the non-Quaker population, who are more invested in upholding class stratifiers. Maddy knew Jervaulx before he had a stroke, as he worked on a mathematics paper with her father, so when she starts to work at the asylum that’s owned by her Quaker cousin, she instinctively knows that he’s not mad like people are saying, and she has a more vested interest in communicating with him.
There’s the obvious miscommunications here: Jervaulx is struggling with speech and has outburst borne of frustration when he can’t get Maddy to understand, but Kinsale rather brilliantly layers this with class miscommunication. Being a duke is even more unusual than being a Quaker, there are so few dukes in England and it’s a position of wealth and privilege that we can sort of grasp but not truly understand, because it’s so far outside of our own experiences. As a Quaker, Maddy is about as far removed from a duke as possible: she doesn’t believe in social hierarchies and insists on using “thee” and “thou” instead of “Your Grace.”
An early miscommunication that I think is the most heartbreaking happens within the asylum. Maddy finds the duke’s clothes, and she wants to make him feel more like himself by helping him get dressed. She picks out an outfit that she’s seen before, something that she thinks will make him look dashing, but she ends up dressing him in spurs. The duke interprets the spurs as a sign that they are going outside, that she’s helping him escape the hellish asylum. Maddy had no such intention, and the moment the duke realizes this he’s overcome with rage, thinking that Maddy was taunting him. Maddy is devastated to realize that she inadvertently gave him false expectations, and she chastizes herself for not realizing that the reason she recognized the spurs were because she’s seen gentleman wearing them on horseback.
Much later in the book, they are married (it’s a marriage of convenience) and outside the asylum, but there’s still the threat that the duke will have to go back if his competency hearing does not go well. The duke has recovered some of his speech but he still struggles. Word has gotten out that he’s in debt, which is causing all sorts of problems with his estate. The duke knows that, as an aristocrat, the best way to fight these rumors is to rack up spending as if nothing is wrong and slowly repay as needed, but Maddy, a Quaker that takes pride in honesty and modest living, does not understand this concept. The duke doesn’t have the words to explain it to her, but it’s very likely that even if he did he wouldn’t be able to convey this to Maddy. The way aristocrats behave are so divorced from her values that it’s possible there would never be an easy solution here.
Emma: So we've all three read this book before, and I think we all love it but with miscommunication in this book, the moment where the Duke gets dressed is so particularly heartbreaking. But there's this moment that happens immediately after it, where what Kinsale does--the Duke is only clear in his mind. He is able to think in full sentences even before he's able to articulate them. And you hear the Duke think like “I'm going to ruin her life over this miscommunication. And what Kinsale does is so smart--it feels like the other shoe has dropped, that this is going to be the defining sort of anguish of the book, that he is going to enact revenge on her for making him feel so embarrassed.
But because we're in his mind, and he's so unable to articulate anything or do anything he sort of has to abandon that anger over the miscommunication pretty quickly, because he just doesn't have any power that he's so used to having.
So I think that's a great way that the miscommunication sort of manifests for these two characters who are suddenly in a totally different power dynamics than they are used to. Miscommunication for him is not just embarrassment or confusion. It's a total upheaval of what he's able to do, even if what he's able to do is something that we don't really want him to do. He can't actually ruin Maddy’s life, we don’t want him to ruin Maddy’s life, but suddenly he can’t even enact a plan. He can't even move forward with his like worst impulses. He has to change everything about how he communicates and how he moves through the world.
Beth: The - the money part like, where Maddy discovers his finances, and it's just so outside of her world, and I love that Kinsale grounds like his dukeness?
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know, because it's kind of a thing in romance that we have so many dukes, but it is so rare, and how he lives and operates like you said Chels, is just so outside of her realm, like when she is looking at the papers, and he's like in his mind, thinking like. “I've got this under control. I know what I’m doing,” but he can't communicate it. I feel so much for him like he is such an angry character. But how else would you respond? Like your body is kind of failing you in a way.
Chels: Yeah. And it's heightened by the fact that he is dependent on her for the entirety of the book, like his well being, like his safety. So enmesh that with his feelings about her, and then also them not being able to understand each other. This book is so fraught.
And it's just like an angst train, and it's, I think of it as The Miscommunication Book, because I, everything, everything that Kinsale does in Flowers from the Storm just further builds the tension and makes it. You don't get a break. You don’t get a break till the end.
Beth: It’s a harrowing read. I will say that.
Emma: This is where I feel like people, if you suggest that this as a miscommunication book, people would say, that's not, it's not miscommunication trope like it's outside of that.
But I think the stroke, and his inability to articulate words, Kinsale layers it like, there are other miscommunications that are happening, so it's like the the physical manifestation of his disability is speaking to the class differences and the personality differences. So it's not just that a message is being misinterpreted, and it's like this plot driver. It's everything about the relationship. So the physical disability that later leads to miscommunication which people might say “Well, that's not really miscommunication. It's something outside of that,” it speaks to the rest of it.
And I think the best miscommunication books often do that where it's about language and speech altogether. So it's going to be coming in all these different directions. So it seems more complicated then a misinterpreted message, or like overhearing something because it's layered. But it's still miscommunication.
Chels: 100%. Like I just think it is the miscommunication book, and you're absolutely right, because this is one of the books that I brought up on Tik Tok as being in miscommunication book, and then people are like “No, this one is good!” I'm like well, I know, but it's still.
Beth: It goes back to what Emma said, where it's like. There's a difference between miscommunication trope, and then miscommunication and this is miscommunication. Okay. We could talk about Flowers from the Storm…
Chels: We could do a whole episode!
Beth: Which we probably will! Stay tuned, everybody. But we’re going to move on to another book. Where holding back your feelings, or feelings are scary…
Emma: Yeah, I’m going to talk about Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas. This is a book where I feel people would say “just have a conversation!” because there’s not a whole lot of new information that is developed, like the characters have information already and they are working on sharing it with each other.
So Ravishing the Heiress is one of Thomas’ dual timeline second chance romances--she does this a couple of times and I think this format really lends itself to miscommunication. Millie and Fitz are in a marriage of convenience. She has loved him from the jump--immediately smitten with everything about him. But when they got married, primarily out of a sense of duty (she is the titular heiress, he is titled and his title and lands need her money), he was in love with his childhood sweetheart. Fitz initially acts cold toward Millie until she points out that he is not the only person in the marriage to give up opportunities for love by entering into this marriage.
Millie lets Fitz think that she has a sweetheart she gave up for duty, but what she actually means is that she gave up any chance at his true affection because he resents her so much as the manifestation of his duty trumping his romance.
They operate in this holding pattern for the first decade of their marriage, Fitz discreetly conducting affairs with other women, Millie pining after him as they fall into a relationship that is a hybrid of best friends and business partners. Even when they were engaged, Millie has told Fitz she wants to wait to consummate their marriage. She first suggests six years and he counters with eight--seemingly confirming to her that he wants nothing to do with her sexually.
Everything changes when Fitz’s sweetheart returns, newly widowed and he considers taking up with her again. Millie, prioritizing Fitz’s happiness, agrees, as long as they can finally make an effort to have a child.
Throughout the book, the way I would describe Millie and Fitz is entrenched. Because of the dual timeline, we see moments of each of them attempting courage, to drag themselves out of the stasis. On a trip to Italy during their marriage, they have to stay in the same bed and Fitz berates himself for extending the non-consummation agreement to eight years. He is fascinated by Millie, but believes her romantically indifferent to him. All while Millie is at a loss of how to communicate to her husband her feelings, since she believes it will lead to the loss of friendship that she holds dear.
Even when Millie is able to confess her feelings, Fitz is now at a loss of how to process them. He cannot simply respond that he also loves her, he has to realize that he has been loving her the whole as they built their life together. The words are not the hard part, it is the leap of faith.
Chels: I love this book so much, and I think this book also has such an easy answer to why don’t they just talk about each other? Because Fitz loads so many reasons why Millie would never want to speak to him at the beginning of the book. So at the beginning of the book, he doesn't want to marry her, and he throws a fit. Like he shows up to their wedding drunk. He he just kind of is listless for days. He's openly pining for his lost love, basically making Millie feel worthless.
And Millie has to slowly, carefully, over the course of many years, make their marriage work. So she's built this marriage kind of from the ground up, like Fitz does kind of like start to participate, too, but it's kind of like without her efforts it none of that would have happened. So she has done all this work to get to a place where things are finally okay, and why would she communicate to this man, who just was so openly disgusted with the idea of being married to her that she wants to, that she loves him. Why would she ever do that?
Emma: And he also doesn't understand that she could love him because he remembers all of his bad behavior, and he thinks her distance keeping is a response to that rather than a self protection. He assumes that she has become like, or is uninterested in him romantically because of those years of ignoring her.
Beth: I think he must also see her as someone in a similar boat, because she did say “Well, I was in love with someone as well.” So he's like “okay, we're both loyal to our first loves and just kind of hung up on that idea.” And I can sympathize with that, because sometimes it takes a while for you to shift your world view. As things have changed so gradually between them, as well. Like it's over 8 years. It's not like this happened in one month. It's a very, very set dynamic.
Emma: Yeah. The dual POV and the dual timeline is also interesting for the reader, because you're really, I always say with dual timelines and dual POV, you're not getting two perspectives. you're getting four perspectives, because you have to manage the knowledge that each character has on both sides of the timeline. And that's really interesting to see how Thomas manages those knowledge bases where it's like Fitz is sort of gaining affection for her, and he's like “oh, my wife is enjoying my company. I'm making her proud,” but he's constantly remembering that she has feelings for someone else, and he needs to respect her and keep this distance from her and keep it platonic.
And so, and both timelines are seeing him negotiate those things with different sort of intimacy levels. And it's amazing every time Thomas does a dual timeline romance. I'm just like agog at how good she is at managing all four knowledge bases.
Beth: Just yeah, we love Sherry Thomas.
Chels: Incredible Book. Incredible! Point for miscommunication!
Yeah. So I guess kind of to get into another type of miscommunication: one is when you make an assumption about another character that can lead to that. So the example I have for that is The Bittersweet Bride by Vanessa Riley.
This is a second chance romance between Ewan and Theo. They were in a relationship six years earlier, when Theo worked in a flower shop and Ewan had dreams of becoming a playwright - which is a pretty steep fall from grace for an aristocrat’s son. They sleep with each other since they’re intending to marry, but Ewan’s father discovers them. Ewan decides not to marry Theo immediately, but instead goes off to war, saying he will return for her after a year. Very soon after he leaves, Theo learns that he is dead. He isn’t - but this isn’t a misconception born of malice - Ewan’s death was reported and Theo never got the correction.
Alone and no longer virtuous, Theo quickly agrees to become another man’s mistress and marries him. When Ewan learns about this he decides not to come back home from the war - thinking that Theo is fickle, conniving, and that she betrayed him.
When Ewan returns, Theo is shocked to learn that he is still alive. They quickly reconcile the miscommunication - that Theo married because she thought Ewan was dead, but this doesn’t really change Ewan’s mind. He’s from a place of profound privilege and yet he feels like, because he wants to be a playwright, he’s being discriminated against and disrespected by his family. Theo is actually marginalized - she’s a Black woman who has an uphill battle for financial success. Everything Theo has worked for is precarious, and Ewan doesn’t understand that she would need to quickly find a new protector in the event of his death. To him, this just reads as conniving and ruthless behavior, so he treats her cruelly even though he still loves her.
So Ewan is very unlikeable in the beginning, and the miscommunication really does a lot of character work. Both Theo and Ewan have occupational dreams, but Ewan is so steeped in “second son syndrome” that he can’t empathize with Theo’s plight. To him, he’s the victim, first by his family, then by Theo.
So for this book I feel like Riley uses the miscommunication to build up Ewan's character, like she uses the miscommunication to make Ewan so thoroughly unlikable at the beginning and kind of create that character arc like him coming around him, finally doing right by Theo.
Emma: This, I think, speaks to what we talk about, like everyone always brings all their baggage to every conversation that they have, like, when you're reading this character. I've not read this book, but i'm very excited to, but it seems like Ewan is like we don't want him to act this way like he's being mean to the heroine right? We want him to get to a place where he's nice. But if he started off as like a good faith interpreter of her actions, there would be no conflict in the book, and then there wouldn't be a book. They would just get back together when he comes back from the war.
It's like a believable miscommunication, because he has not worked on his character. He has this chip on his shoulder from being the second son. And that makes sense! And so it's like that. Character work is grounding the miscommunication that makes it both believable and also interesting to read.
Beth: I do love the phrase “second son syndrome.”
Chels: I had to avoid looking at you, Beth because you’re my second son.
[LAUGHTER]
Beth: I am the second son of the podcast.
Emma: I wonder if second sons misinterpret things more often like, Are they more prone to, in romance novels
Beth: There's gotta be…
Emma: Bad faith readings?
Chels: I feel like second sons are always the ones that are just like. “I'm not the beloved child I have to prove myself by going in trade.”
Beth: Right!
Emma: Like “my dad always thought the worst of me, so I assume you’re thinking the worst of me all the time too, heroine.”
Chels: Everybody wants to be a duke’s wife, nobody wants to be a duke’s son’s wife.
Beth: Right, right.
Another type of miscommunication we wanted to go over is keeping a secret from the other person, and then it blows up in that person's face.
Characters keep secrets and it’s often to their detriment. Of course people keep secrets for lots of reasons: it’s emotionally difficult to talk about, it will hurt the person, they don’t want to risk the relationship.
This is exemplified well in The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian. Julian Medlock has honed his social skills to ensure the perfect image among the gentry. Lord Courtenay is a disillusioned aristocrat known for his exploits. A gothic novel featuring a villain with Courtenay’s looks and mannerisms circulates England. Because of this book, Courtenay is banned from seeing his nephew. Julian’s sister, a friend to Courtenay, arranges for Julian to rehabilitate Courtenay’s image so he can see his nephew again. As the relationship heats up between Courtenay and Julian, outside of what either was expecting, it’s revealed Julian wrote the gothic novel. He doesn’t tell Courtenay either, it’s Julian’s brother-in-law who tells Courtenay.
I think this is interesting because I definitely related to Julian in not telling Courtenay. How do you even start that conversation? By the way, I wrote a book about you when I was sick to pass the time? Then Courtenay might guess how long Julian’s been low key obsessed with him.
[LAUGHTER]
Once the secret’s revealed, unsurprisingly Courtenay breaks things off. Julian knows he’s messed up but really struggles to convey his regret. Even though Courtenay’s angry, when Julian falls sick again, Courtenay can’t stay away. Even that action of Courtenay nursing Julian back to health helps Julian realize his depth of feeling since Courtenay’s the only person he’s ever wanted to stick around when he was sick.
I think anyone who knows anything about me knows I'm obsessed with the Turner series. This is my favorite one of the four. I think another thing I should mention is there's like a bit of an age gap between Julian and Courtenay, not big like. I think he's like 24, and Courtney is 31, so I feel like Courtenay just does have that little bit more sense of the world, is just a little bit more set in who he is, where I think Julian is still struggling to find his footing. So there's that dynamic at play as well.
Chels: Yeah. Courtenay is very worldly, like he's had all these lovers and experiences, and he's very empathetic. He's a very empathetic person! His goal is to…he's curious about people. His goal is to understand them better, and he generally really likes people.
Meanwhile Julian is really good at reading people for one specific purpose, like he can read people in order to kind of assist in his social climbing. But he's not really as good at doing that, like interpersonally, and so he misreads Courtenay from the first time he meets him, which is kind of why the character that he builds off Courtenay, for his book is not like…
Beth: It’s not like Courtenay at all!
Chels: He’s like this Draconian evil man with sexy eyes like you can tell Julian was horny when he wrote it.
Beth: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Chels: I can absolutely like…so Julian has been obsessed with Courtenay for a long time is so much that he like kind of wrote Courtenay into this book. But like when he actually starts to build that relationship with him like how embarrassing like I don't think I don't know
Beth: Oh I would die. We’re never going to talk about this.
Chels: Because it's like, if you do tell him, you're tanking the relationship. So either way the relationship is tanked so he has to make the gamble of like “Well, maybe he'll never find out” which was silly.
Emma: This is one of those books that people would read, and they would think. “Well, just tell him!” That's the solution! But I was thinking of Beguiling the Beauty by Sherry Thomas, that's one where there's like a secret kept. The heroine has amnesia, and hated the hero before she gets amnesia, but when she gets amnesia she starts falling in love with the hero, so he has to decide whether to tell her, like their animosity before,
And he does! It's like it's not revealed to her by a third party. And there's still conflict! Like a secret is still a secret, and there's still like upsetting information, no matter which party tells the person. So just telling someone, and being forthcoming is not necessarily a solution to a secret or a solution that is neat and easy.
So I think, even if the secret was revealed by the person who's keeping it. There's still conflict, so that that's not a band-aid to miscommunication. It just puts it on a different path of like, what conversations need to be had.
Beth: That was Tempting the Bride.
Emma: Tempting the Bride! Oh what did I say?
Beth: Beguiling the Beauty. But Beguiling the Beauty is also very interesting. That’s the one-
Chels: The one has a secret too, right? Because she’s secretly the person that he has been obsessed with.
Emma: Right!
Beth: So we’ve got another obsession here.
Another a book we all love, Lord of Scoundrels. I wasn’t sure what to call this one, I put “a literal misunderstanding” or maybe “misinterpretation.”
Emma: So there there's lots of communication issues in this book, mostly stemming from Sebastian, or Dain, Dain is his title, or I guess, is it his title? He’s like Lord Dain, right?
Beth: Yup.
Emma: His deep like lack of self-worth. So I'm calling this misinterpretation the one the example that I’m gonna bring in because both characters are misinterpreting the same set of information leading to a miscommunication between them.
Dain is romancing Jessica and he is already assuming Jessica is only pretending to enjoy his company because he is so utterly convinced that everyone finds him ugly and unbearable.
[LAUGHTER]
He’s not ugly, he is just half Italian and his dad was xenophobic. And he’s mostly unbearable because he keeps insisting he is super unbearable. So when Jessica dances with Dain at a ball, and allows him to whisk her away to be alone, he is waiting for the other shoe to drop, where it is going to be revealed that she is laughing at his expense.
There’s another layer of miscommunication since Dain insists on speaking to Jessica in Italian during the seduction, so all his efforts to be earnest are just pretty noises in her ear. Chase just layering the disconnects that need to be resolved.
Jessica similarly is confused by her extreme desire for Dain--she is using language in her mind that matches how society talks about Dain: animalistic, monster, dangerous that is incompatible with her intimate vision of him, but she has not yet developed vocabulary of her own for him.
As they are kissing and about to do more, Dain and Jessica are discovered. She suspects that he arranged the audience so that he could get revenge on her for capturing his attention and making him have feelings for her. He similarly assumes that Jessica arranged the onlookers to make him look foolish--everyone will laugh at Dain for becoming besotted with this hoyden of a spinster.
When Jessica begs for him to “do something,” he assumes she is trying to bully him into a wedding proposal, whereas Jessica means something closer to “use your withering self to put a stop to the gossip and keep me from being ruined.” She wanted him to shield her, but she assumes that only she had anything to lose in the scenario, not quite understanding the extent to Dain’s self-hatred and embarrassment at being laughed at. He really assumes that she is disgusted by him and just has this deep, penetrating lack of self-worth that she can’t quite comprehend because she finds him so irresistible, and he can’t articulate because he assumes it is a truth that everyone sees.
I won’t spoil what happens next, though if you don’t know, you should read Lord of Scoundrels, it is as good as everyone says it is. But both characters are making assumptions about the other’s behavior and misinterpreting the same events based on information that they have. Dain keeps telling Jessica he is so so bad and cruel, so she assumes he does something cruel and vengeful. Dain really thinks Jessica finds him disgusting and embarrassing, so he assumes she does something to mock and embarrass him. And I love that this actual precipitating misapprehension is resolved pretty quickly--within two chapters, Chase has both characters understand that the other did not arrange the interruption of their assignation. But while *that* is cleared up with one conversation, the underlying communications are not, those take the rest of the novel.
Chels: It really all just boils down to Dane, thinks he's so ugly, and nobody could ever. Well, I I really it's so crazy to me to think about that like, I was trying to think of like other romance novels where heterosexual romance novels, where the man had, like such a low, low self-worth about his physical appearance in that way that kind of just like spread throughout the book, and I couldn't really think of one that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Beth: Chase lays the groundwork so well for his self-worth in the best prologue you’ll read in your entire life.
Chels: Oh my god!
Beth: Like that’s an argument for prologues. I was maybe in this middle, but it’s doing some serious work here.
Chels: Chase is like “so everyone hates this baby.”
Beth: You need to buy in that he feels so badly about himself!
Emma: And Chase calls this a Beauty and the Beast retelling and I love that it is a Beauty and the Beast retelling where the society doesn't think that Dain is ugly. Like it's so in his own head. It really is his interpretation of this like deep trauma of being unloved and hated by his father, for reasons that really have nothing to do with him.
But it's like you can become a beast of self-hatred. It's like he becomes this recluse. He becomes sort of like anti-social, just from his own self image, because he's always saying, like everyone hates me, and it's like he has friends, he seduces women. Like people are interested in having him around. He gets invited to parties. People are excited him for him to be there, but until he does his own like work on his self-worth it doesn't really matter what anyone says to him, including Jessica. Because she is enamored with him immediately! She can't get over how adorable she finds his big nose, which is his like big anxiety about what he looks like.
Just it works so well. But yeah, the misapprehension -I love that it gets cleared up so fast, but it it's the underlying issues are not solved with one conversation. It has to be work on both sides.
Beth: Also maybe an upcoming episode.
Chels: Oh my god, I want a Bertie Trent episode. He’s my favorite character!
Emma: Talk about a failson, like failing upward. But you’re like rooting for him.
Chels: I just want to see him…we can keep going!
Beth: Alright. We’re going to transition to another book / trope to talk about, but I wanted to preface it with a thought, an insight from one of our friends One of the most hated forms of miscommunication, and I’m going off a gut feeling here, not any sort of survey or something, is the half-heard conversation behind the door. Yes, this can be done badly. If the revelation is being held up because we need to add more time to the plot and nothing further is revealed about either character then, like I said before, it’s just pages.
I think it can work and does happen in real life and is something worth investigating. Like getting a text or email you weren’t supposed to get. Honestly, who among us hasn’t eavesdropped? What do you do with that information about you that’s not directed at you? What do you learn about the person who said it?
Friend of the podcast Bayley who you can find on tiktok under @bayleyreadsbooks and probably every under @bayleyreadsbooks had a great point on one way to make this work even better. We’ll link the video in the shownotes as well. So, the gist of the video is yes, when a character is listening in on a conversation and if they only stick around for a few more seconds then they’d learn the person actually meant something good. So that's not what she was critiquing, she was saying that authors shy away from having people actually be cruel to each other. And if the character does something bad, then there's an opportunity for an apology and/or for a character to learn something.
Chels: That was so smart. Just like the problem is that you want an interesting character. So you just have that like basic type of miscommunication that can be solved because nobody was actually mean. Well, what if they were mean?
Beth: Yes!
Chels: I would rather read that book.
Beth: We want them to be meaner. That's the gist of the video. If you're gonna listen in on conversation, it should be like that person's actual thoughts and feelings are being heard, and it's not going to be recontextualized into “Oh, they are actually good.” You just didn't hear all the information, or you misunderstood it. There is no character development from that. It's just you already thought they were a good person, and then you were scared for a second, and then you went back to thinking they were a good person like there's there's where are we going with that?
Emma: There’s no development and the relationship doesn’t change. It goes from annoyance to like. Oh, I like you again, because then I now have all the information. I think the best, like eavesdropping books are not actually solved by hearing the whole conversation, because they still said the cruel thing they heard at the beginning that there has to be like an actual conversation and work beyond just the explanatory phrase at the end of the overhearing.
Chels: That’s actually a really good point to your points, Emma, so why don’t we skip ahead to what you have to say about some books that are not genre fiction romances?
Emma: Yeah. And this is one of the things that I'm always surprised when people say that they don't like miscommunication, especially this type of miscommunication. Because two the like foundational texts of how we talk about romance in Western culture involve overhearing and misinterpreting information.
So in Pride and Prejudice, when Lizzie overhears Darcy say that she was “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt him.” She interprets it as confirmation of his uppity nature, coloring every interaction they have for the rest of the novel. She cannot understand his earnest overtures later in the book, because she interprets them based on this phrase that was based on his social anxiety. She's interpreting it as cruelty, something that he never would have said in front of her. But he's just sort of trying to move through the motions of this ball that he doesn't want to be at.
And then Wuthering Heights, which is one of my favorite novels, and not a romance novel. But I do think it colors how we talk about romance. In Cathy's big speech to Nellie Dean, where she famously says, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Heathcliff only hears the first part of the speech where Cathy announces that marriage between the two of them would degrade her, not the part about the fact that she's in love with him. He then leaves Wuthering Heights, thinking that Cathy has no feelings for him when the opposite is true.
But both of these characters do say something cruel, and that needs to be worked through in order for the relationship to be repaired. Darcy and Lizzie's relationship obviously is repaired to a successful conclusion while Cathy and Heathcliff’s ends tragically.
There's not an interpretation of the phrase or the sentence that they said that's cruel, that makes it not cruel. It just is context, and additional information that maybe would lead to a more charitable interpretation. But it still needs to be problematized in the individual relationship.
Chels: Yeah. And people love…those books are classics! People love them, and they don't really come up in the frustration with miscommunication, because I think maybe deep down, we know that miscommunication isn't really the problem.
But yeah, speaking of cruelty. So I have a book. So it actually is a genre romance. It's not quite listening at door, but it's basically the same concept. So it's Lady Gallant by Suzanne Robinson. So instead of listening at a door, it’s done through a note or a cipher.
This is a Tudor-era romance set in Queen Mary’s court. Christian de Rivers is a handsome, bombastic spy who is used to getting what he wants and bowling over people. He saves Nora Beckett, who is nicknamed “Mouse” at court, from highwaymen, and he becomes obsessed with picking and prodding at her and testing her boundaries. Nora is *also* a spy for Elizabeth, although neither Christian or Nora know each other is a spy, and they have no reason to reveal to each other their occupations. Nora really is a mouse, she’s extremely shy and cautious, which makes what she is doing all the more brave.
So Christian basically bothers Nora into marrying him, and it’s honestly so sweet and charming and funny. But the night before the marriage, he discovers one of Nora’s ciphers that reveal she’s a spy. He thinks that she’s a spy for Mary because he can’t fathom that his sweet mouse of a Nora would risk violent punishment at Mary’s court by being a spy for Elizabeth. Not only that, but he believes that her actions, because of what he found in the cipher, almost got his father killed.
So he runs with that assumption and wants to kill Nora, but can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he marries her and then proceeds to treat her so horribly. I think Emma has said before that it’s basically the worst thing that you can do outside of bodice ripper violence, so I want to reiterate that he doesn’t physically abuse her, but that’s not likely to offer much comfort while reading it. This book is famous for its grovel - truly the most epic, satisfying grovel I’ve ever read, and Christian has to really work to redeem himself once he learns the truth about Nora and realizes what he’s done.
So this is the listening at doors type of miscommunication. When someone listens at a door, hears half a conversation, then walks away without getting the full context. Christian gets half of the truth, that Nora is a spy, but he bends that half-truth into something sinister, that Nora is a spy for Mary and that she’s working against him. The reason he doesn’t tell her what he thinks he knows right away is because he wants to punish her. He wants her to wonder why he doesn’t love her anymore and what’s causing his cruelty. When they met, Nora never told him that she was a spy because the cost was too high. She didn’t know what Christian’s politics are because he’s also at Mary’s court. There’s an easy fix here, just a brief conversation between the two of them, but Robinson gives you compelling reasons for both characters to hold their cards close to the chest.
Emma: This is a great example of where we want people to be meaner. It makes so much sense for Christian to be cruel to her, because he thinks she's a political enemy, and that she has sort of tricked this raked man into devotion, and so he has that sort of embarrassment too, where he's been duped, because he considers himself so capable and able to manipulate other people. He feels very manipulated, and he thinks she's operating with the same level of like spy machinations that he has. But really, he doesn't understand that someone who is a mouse and is timid would also be willing to like stick her neck on the line for these, like political arrangements that come so easily to his like charming self. He doesn’t get her, he doesn't understand her being able to do what he does because he thinks he only has like one facet of her personality on the surface. That's what he gets, and what he's attracted to. But he, as he learns more about her everything sort of clicks into place.
Chels: Yeah, I think that miscommunication just honestly is that book is it's nothing without it like it's just it like, builds up this like huge emotional climax like this devastating moment where it makes sense, because Robinson builds out each character so well, like you really love Nora, and you think, like you become kind of protective over her. Like she's just like a very sweet, very gentle person, which makes Christian's assumptions about her all that more heartbreaking.
Beth: Related to that, I think, is that he doesn't think he can trust her. He thinks that she's his political enemy. I don't she doesn't know he's a spy, right?
Chels: No.
Beth: The stakes are high. But I'm going to transition into our next book, based off of…
Chels: The Highlands!
Beth: Yes, we're going to go to the Highlands like: why are you holding back information? And can I trust you?
This is Never Cross a Highlander by Lisa Rayne. It’s the early 1600s and Aisla Connery has been kidnapped and enslaved. Now she serves the spoiled princess Elizabeth Stuart at Stirling castle. Aisla longs to return home to the Connery clan. A tournament brings various clans to the castle, including the warrior Kallum MacNeill. While he serves his adoptive clan leading the warriors, he doubles as the Shepherd and frees enslaved people. No one, not even his kin, knows he does this.
The night Kallum leaves he orchestrates the others escape. He notices Aisla is missing from the group and asks where she is. The other enslaved people have talked to Aisla about escaping, but her response is always the same where she says she needs to stay put. They don’t know a lot about Aisla since she works separately from them. Kallum thinks about how he’d encounter people in the past “whose fear of the unknown kept them from seeking freedom” but he’s intent on freeing her so he goes to look for her. He finds her because he doesn’t know she’s planning to sneak away with the Connery clan who is also there and he basically abducts her.
Aisla has no reason to trust Kallum. At the tournament earlier in the day, she saw him accept the “gift” of two women. Kallum doesn’t want to insult the king by saying no, but he doesn’t believe you should give away another human being either. He accepts them and then turns to his cousin asking him to ensure they safely reach MacNeil land. So all she knows about him is this action and what she doesn’t know is that he’s the Shepherd.
She has no reason to trust him yet she goes with him when he finds her and like I said, basically kidnaps her. Her making a fuss would put the others at risk. Yet after time has passed, you wonder why she hasn’t told him why she wanted to stay and then it comes out that their clans are rival clans. So this initial miscommunication serves multiple purposes where we see at one point Aisla starts to trust Kallum more that she does divulge this, we learn more about their clans, and then we get more questions. Why didn’t the Connerys ever look for Aisla?
So I think that's another aspect of this communication people need to keep in their minds is like what is the level of trust between these two characters, and once people do start revealing information that is telling to the reader, “hey, this relationship is progressing!” yeah, relationship is progressing.
Chels: Yeah, this is such a really great example of like when the reader has so much more information than the two characters do about each other, so naturally there would be assumptions.
Beth: Yes, yes there is.
Emma: I think political enemies lend themselves to this communication because of this like cross-cultural aspect of it. I think that's even more acute in My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas.
My Beautiful Enemy also deals with two people who are at odds with each other, culturally. Catherine, or Ying-ying, is a half Chinese, half English woman who is coming to England to try and find jade tablets that her stepfather, a powerful Chinese politician, wants returned to China. When she gets there, she realizes that her past lover, Leighton Atwood, is not a Persian man that she thought he was, but a proper English gentleman and engaged to another woman. The book is really adventurous and mysterious, so I will try and talk about it without giving too much plot away.
This is another dual timeline book from Thomas and the primary miscommunication comes in the earlier timeline, when Catherine and Leighton are lovers in China and they both discover the others’ political motivations for their travels, Catherine as a spy for her stepfather and Leighton as a spy for the English government. They both assume that the other was sleeping with them for information, and not for romantic reasons.
But this is coupled with Thomas spending a lot of time with Catherine and Leighton thinking about communication. First, they are both speaking a second language to each other--their shared language is Turkic when they first meet, so there are multiple moments of grasping for words to describe big feelings. They both have a skill for language and assimilation, but they acknowledge that part of this comes from their own reticence to speak about themselves at all--it’s a cover. Speaking this second language also has them struggling to covey the tones to they actually mean each other.
Catherine, especially as she arrives in England, thinks about the differences in communication style between England and China--she points out that England makes small talk about weather, China makes small talk about meal times. Small differences that create unease for the communicator.
Catherine and Leighton also talk about the respective functions of language, how Chinese does not have consonant clusters in its representation, which makes it incompatible with representing in its characters an alphabetic language, like English. But lends itself to the calligraphy of poetry, one of the skills that Catherine practices throughout the book.
But all while struggling with communication, Catherine and Leighton both feel an immediate connection because of an understanding they have each other--they both think the other person is the first person to *get* and understand them. I think this speaks to the limitations of language as a bridge between people; Catherine and Leighton’s communication troubles come when they speak and attempt to limit and confine their shared reality, when they bring their pasts to their relationship. They know this on some level when they first meet each other as lovers--they don’t even tell each other their names because they both know that their names would define them for each other as British and ethically Manchurian, giving away information that would only lead to bad faith interpretations.
Beth: I feel like this is right up Emma’s alley because she knows so much about language and stuff. But we all have someone in our lives where they’re maybe not speaking in their first language and the difficulty of finding the right emotion to match the word you’re looking for.
I feel like so much miscommunication has happened with like my German grandmother and my mom, because of that, even though she like, lived in Canada for 50 years. But it's real, and
Emma: And Thomas, English is her second language. She moved to the United States when she was 13 from China, and I wonder if that like, we’ve talked about now I think, a three Sherry Thomas books on this episode, and I think she really does lots of miscommunication books, and I think it makes sense, like the My Beautiful Enemy is maybe the one that deals with like language as like English versus Chinese, or the characters speak Turkic, I don’t think they mention they don't mention Mandarin or Cantonese specifically, like which dialect they're speaking. But they're dealing with that you have to learn how to speak to someone else, and it's like, even if you're both speaking English or you have the shared language, the language that you're bringing to each other might not be the same.
And that's why we have like class difference communication issues where, if someone has been raised as a Duke versus raised in the working class, they may both be speaking English, but all those subtleties, and that's why I brought up the small talk like with when the English people bring up weather, Catherine is like this. “Is not that interesting? Like why are they talking to me about weather all the time?” And she remembers, “this is their sort of like social grease, that they put on for social conversations.” So she, in order to be polite, she has to learn how to talk about weather and those sort of small differences where she understands the words that they're saying, but she doesn’t understand why they’re saying it.
I think that can happen whether you're speaking the same language or you're even speaking your native language or not, but that Thomas bringing in multiple languages for the characters like, makes them more acute for the reader to see how often that happens.
Chels: I’m so excited to read that one.
Emma: It’s so good and the prequel is also good! The prequel is different because it is a prequel for both of the main characters. So it's like you get to see them as teens. So you get to see them become the people that they are in the book. It's very interesting. I wish that more things were structured that way. It’spretty cool, it's not a different couple, but they don't meet each other. They're just like teens on the opposite sides of the world. It's so good.
Chels: So yeah, I have another book, and it's also another one of the political intrigue books. So this types of communication is when characters are kind of deliberately misled to believe fallacies about each other, and also how talking after the miscommunication is resolved doesn't solve everything. So the miscommunication isn’t really the problem. So this is At Your Pleasure by Meredith Duran.
This is one of those true enemies to lovers that everyone says they want! This is set in 1715, it’s a second chance romance between two lovers on the opposite side of a rebellion.
To understand the miscommunication, you have to go backwards: Nora and Adrian are young neighbors who have fallen in love. Adrian and his family are Catholic, and at the time this meant that they lived under restrictive laws that limited property rights. Nora’s family is Church of England, so their relationship is already taboo, but the young lovers want each other badly enough to want to run away together and marry.
Nora’s family finds out about this, and Nora’s brother beats Adrian within an inch of his life and tries to scare him off and Nora is forced to marry someone else. Adrian arrives at her wedding, and leaves despondently, thinking that Nora rejected him out of cowardice. This is a spoiler, so skip this part if you’d like maybe 30 seconds, but Nora was also pregnant with Adrian’s child and was abused by her father until she agreed to marry another man. So Nora is young, frightened, and alone. Her father then tricks her into taking a supplement that causes her to miscarry.
When they meet again years later in 1715, Nora is now a widow, and Adrian has renounced Catholicism in order to gain social mobility and get an in with the King, George I. Nora’s family are Tories who have aligned themselves with James Stuart, the Scottish Catholic who is attempting to usurp the throne. Her father and brother are in exile, but they’ve embroiled Nora in their scheme and put her life in danger.
So there’s the miscommunication from the past that keeps them at arm’s length, as both of them have good reason to believe that they're hated by the other party. Nora had seen Adrian at court, but he studiously ignored her, angry at what he saw as her perfidy.
But even when they come together and rekindle their relationship, and they both learn the truth about what happened - the uprising is keeping them apart, so talking doesn’t solve everything. Adrian’s main task is convincing Nora that her family is fighting a lost cause and they’re dragging her down with them by her skirts, but she’s fiercely loyal to them, and she doesn’t understand how Adrian could so easily renounce his own upbringing - his Catholicism- for self preservation. It’s honestly so gut-wrenching, because Adrian is put in this impossible position where he realizes that he will do anything to save Nora’s life - but whatever he chooses is likely to be seen by her as a betrayal.
Beth: I am very excited to read this book.
Chels: It’s just one of the most…I read this and Ravishing the Heiress back to back and I was just like “I need a nap.” I had the full body tension. Duran’s books shift a little more in tone than Thomas. Thomas, I think, keeps her foot on the gas pedal for almost all of them. Whereas Duran, not necessarily all of them are like that. I think this one and Duke of Shadows in particular, she does political intrigue very well. Yeah, but about the miscommunication in this book, it’s a big misunderstanding! That kind of colors how they see each other, and how they approach each other for a lot of the book. But when you take away that miscommunication, they're still in the same place.
Beth: Yeah, the damage is done like we've talked about. You can't just undo that because you talked about it. And even if you understand why the person acted that way based off half information, It still hurts like you can't just think away your feelings.
Chels: Yeah, it's like they're both still a little bit raw from that, and they're both still on opposite sides of the rebellion.
Emma: Yeah, when people complain about miscommunication, often my response is often like, “Well, what do you want? Do you want external conflict?” Because to me, like bringing in some of that political intrigue makes the book like a hybrid genre? But I think this is a good example of where it can still be this true romance, but in historical romance, things are going to be in some sort of context, I think that is a boon of a genre. That some of the most satisfying books have this very specific political moment that they are in.
There are books that sort of exist in like a Jane Austen sort of bubble, and those are also fun to read. But when these books have like, we're talking about very specific political figures, we're talking about very specific sort of political intrigue, those sort of external factors shape all of our lives. Even though we may like in our everyday lives, we don't necessarily feel like we're in the middle of political intrigue. Our whole worlds affect how we communicate with each other, and it does…like real communication doesn't happen in a vacuum. So those books that happen in the Jane Austen bubble, where miscommunication can be sort of like that one layer of misinterpreting words, or overhearing something, and misinterpreting it or not hearing the whole thing.
But on the other side of the spectrum, historical romance that is specifically situated, you can't have miscommunication be solved by one conversation, because it's gonna have to take action and some sacrifice.
Beth: Yeah, this is a brilliant blend of internal and external conflict. Sometimes when I think people are asking for low stakes or just little conflict between the actual couple. I'm like, okay. So you should read like romantic suspense, like all of your conflict is coming from other sources, as opposed to the internal, “does this person like me?, am I showing too much emotion?” Those types of questions.
Chels: And while thinking about this Duran book, I thought of another like the “enemies to lovers.” It's also another one like I see a lot of people, and I think these are contemporary readers who are like “to be enemies to lovers. they have to actually be like. I want to kill you enemies,” and that's something that you do get in historicals a lot like at least some of the older ones that deal with more politics outside of the Regency.
And so a lot of the historicals I've read like I was thinking of Keeper of the Dream, by Penelope Williamson, and I was reading that that's another of this brand of enemies to lovers where the conflict is they kind of want to kill each other like they’re on opposite sides. They've been raised on opposite sides. And so, but that's not the crux of it. They're also like little misunderstandings that are built into it like cultural misunderstandings or actions that are seen in the worst possible light, because you've been raised to believe that this person is your enemy.
Beth: Yes, I agree! and we're running close on time. So we hope this episode about miscommunication was interpreted correctly,
[LAUGHTER]
and then this new understanding will lead you to your character, growth, and will aid in your interpersonal communications henceforth.
Thank you so much for listening to Reformed Rakes. If you enjoy the podcast, you can find bonus content on our Patreon at Patreon.Com/ReformedRakes. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram for show updates, the username for both is @ReformedRakes. Thank you again, and we’ll see you next time.
