Every shelf of the bookcases in Elizabeth White’s apartment in downtown Brooklyn measures just over seven inches high and four and a half inches deep. That’s because the mass-market paperback romances she has spent her lifetime reading (roughly one a day) are a whisker short of the same dimensions: a perfect fit. She had the bookshelves custom-made when she moved from her previous apartment, in Brooklyn Heights, fourteen years ago. Even so, she had to sacrifice ten boxes of Jayne Ann Krentz and Amanda Quick and Jayne Castle (all the same person, as it happens) and other titans of the genre. She had the boxes delivered to local prison libraries, where, apparently, romance fiction is quite popular with the inmates. That’s no surprise to her. People read this stuff, she tells me, because they like it. Who am I to disagree?
The thirteen hundred or so paperbacks in Elizabeth’s current apartment are the merest tip of the iceberg. She keeps ready to hand only her favorites and returns to them during occasional bouts of sleeplessness. At three in the morning, a musty paperback recounting the amorous adventures of Miss Harriet Pomeroy and Gideon Westbrook, Viscount St. Justin, is a safe and efficient means of inducing slumber. Elizabeth knows perfectly well that it’s all trash. That’s why she likes it.
And not just romances. Although romance fiction will always be her leading preference, she has also consumed vast quantities of science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, and mysteries. If it’s genre fiction, she has probably read it. Black, Christian, gay, kinky, chaste: She’s open to all of it, with the partial exceptions of horror, hyper-violent thrillers, and what’s euphemistically known as “enforced seduction” (that is, women falling in love with their rapists).