True Romance. - periodical reviews

National Review, Sept 2, 1988 by D. Keith Mano

TRUE ROMANCE AT 65

She's AS commonplace as a lampshade finial. (THE BOYFRIEND I LOVED SO MUCH...NOW I JUST WANT HIM OUT OF MY LIFE.) She lives, quite invariably, in a small town. Of late she has been working part-time for her dentist or at the Main Street nail salon. (WHISPERED LIES . . . WHY DID I BELIEVE THEM?) Her husband--he sells for Amway--proposed just after their high-school graduation. They have a mortgage now and at least two children. (I MADE BELIEVE I WASN'T MARRIED AND TOO MANY MEN BELIEVED ME.) Her self-image may be snake low: by a worldly standard she is neither attractive nor bright nor thin enough. (I'LL STAND BY YOU . . . WAS IT FOR LOVE OR OUT OF GUILT?) And, yes, she has been reading True Romance, cover to cover, since adolescence, 116 minutes per issue.

She doesn't read it for the sex: there is no explicit sex in True Romance. (Well, there is no implicit sex either--unless you consider pregnancy suggestive.) Despite an occasional advertisement for discreet sex equipment or Big Bosom Tablets, urban permissiveness is contemned. The first-person protagonist in True Romance won't husband-swap, nor will she abort if she can help it. She is your benchmark social conservative. These women love romance, but they never romanticize. Men in the text may be rather more attractive than you'd comfortably credit, but there are no stories about meeting David Bowie or some guy with his own Quotron. The True Romance heroine wouldn't want to write a novel or vacation in Paris. True here means, above all, realistic. The magazine should be called Plausible Lower-Middle-Class Love.

Bernarr McFadden thought up True Romance in 1923: it is still published along with the flagship book, True Story, by McFadden Holdings, Inc. McFadden was an amiable sort of crank: one would like to derive the word "fad" from his name. Among other mcfads, he invented health food as a concept, made strenuous exercise and pulp love profitable, and came up with "Cosmotorianism," known as the "happiness religion." The former True Romance editor, Patricia Byrdsong, told me, "His idea was to have women talk to other women about their lives. The high point was maybe thirty years ago. But we're seeing a renewed interest in romance. Women's clothing --four years ago there were shoulder pads, squared. Now they're softer. Your average bride will spend $13,000 on her wedding." The McFadden romance group (there are seven magazines altogether, including True Love and True Confessions) still has an aggregate circulation of over three million.

Western civilization, Miss Byrdsong felt, had acclimated women to romance. "Teenage books for girls are romance books. I was geared in that manner. I would ask our librarian to suggest a book, and she would immediately give me a romance." It isn't, mind you, that one gender or the other has more narrative imagination. Women, for instance, don't tend to coin elaborate fantasies during the sex act. Men, by contrast, do. But our culture, even today, requires women to be passive in the social round. By that I mean: they wait a great deal. Where men are expected to overcome their fear of rejection and initiate relationships, women reside in long uncertainty. During that time, maybe as sub-magical act, the woman may concoct scenarios that decorate and make tolerable her suspense. Romance is, first and foremost, projection and a way of inducing love. Men use fantasy to escape the real. Women use it to make the real--or what they hope will be real--appear.

But there is no predictable formula in True Romance: no Gothic mansion, no Rochester's mad wife lurching through an attic crawl-space. Realism is the ambient element here: an alcoholic husband, spendthrift wife, dead lover, whatever. In fact (and quite to my amazement), text and subject matter are, indeed, provided by the readership. "We're dependent on what we get each month," Miss Byrdsong said, pointing to her squat pile of manila envelopes. "Maybe half these are what you'd call semi-professional. The other half is first-time writers." (Last time, too, I'd think--they get three cents per word.) Rewriting, of course, is inevitable: that first-person humdrum style couldn't be coincidental. The True Romance writer has trouble, in particular, with her pay-off. "Often people would rather not tell you that their story didn't end well." It must take courage, I think, to sit down in Raccoon Gap or Euphoria and write about a homely disaster: the laid-off husband, unfaithful lover, miscarried child. And yet women have done so--for 65 years--often enough to populate a magazine each month.

Misery, it may be adduced with confidence, is fond of company. Such suffering, though, can instruct as well as titillate: through the shared experience in True Romance, a certain portion of our culture receives both support and encouragement. Women we encounter here are not aggressive. Most have become lovelorn and disappointed because they place unnecessary obstacles in their own way. They are wholly without self-esteem. "Boring. My life was boring. Average was the word for our family. I seemed to melt into a crowd." The amount of yearning out there is terrific. True Romance, I find, has a responsible approach to this constituency. If the confessional tales don't end with happiness, there is at least some moving along, some sensible resignation. Women are comforted and taught. In a rural environment True Romance may be their one available therapeutic resource.