![]() ![]() Once, in my early twenties - when Papa was gone, and Granny was fading - I said something to one of my older cousins about that coconut cake, and how it was Granny’s favorite cake. She made it for every event, every birthday, every holiday, and though I don’t even really like coconut cake, I always ate it. But the thing I remember more than any other that Granny made was her coconut cake. There were always cookies in the cookie jar, popsicles in the freezer, and often gumbo on the stove. And we all spent a lot of time in Granny’s kitchen. ![]() We all played in the backyard, fighting and making up and having constant adventures every day. We all crowded into the living room, where Granny’s stories were always on the television, and Papa always rocked in his rocking chair and pretended he wasn’t paying attention to them. Granny and Papa - my father’s parents - had what I now realize was a pretty small house, when you consider they had eight children and seventeen grandchildren. Cooking someone’s favorite dish for them, cooking your own favorite dish to share with them, making sure someone is well nourished and well taken care of - those are some of the many ways my grandparents taught me how to show love. And, I’ve realized, they do so because my family - especially the elders in my family - modeled this to me throughout my life. ![]() Well, apparently not, but my characters all do. At first I didn’t really understand it: I write romance novels, of course there’s a lot of food in my books! Doesn’t everyone show love through food? That comment - one I’ve consistently gotten on all of my books since my first book, The Wedding Date - is one that’s always bemused me, especially at the beginning. And I think I couldn't write a book last year that didn't deal with that theme because it was so important to so many of us in the past year.In this essay from the new collection Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happily Ever Afters, romance author Jasmine Guillory reflects on how she was taught to show love through food. You know, I know that my most recent book, While We Were Dating, I wrote during the pandemic, and there's a lot about mental health in there. And so while none of these books that I've read, at least, have specifically touched on it, I think a lot of the themes really have touched on it, right? There's a lot about friendship and how our friends evolve, about loving family, about mental health. It's an interesting year, right? Because I think a lot of the books that have come out this year were written at least partially during the pandemic. And that's one of the things that I loved about it so much. Does she want to be in this relationship? Does she want to be an NFL girlfriend? And there's so much about friendship and family and knowing who you are as a person before you're in a relationship in this book. And so she's figuring out herself and kind of who she wants to be as a person. She finds out that he's cheating on her, breaks up with him, but then there's a new player in town, and she has kind of a past with him. This story is really about Marlee, who starts out the book dating an NFL player. And Alexa Martin really knows how to deal with all of that - both sides of it. There's so much that we love about watching them, but we all know so many of the bad things that happen in sports, from the health struggles to assault to all of the kind of ways in which the teams don't treat their players well. And I've always had a kind of love-hate relationship with football and, I think, a lot of sports. One of the things that I love about Alexa Martin's writing is a lot of her books have been set in and around a football team. And I kind of loved the way that they learn about each other, figure out their families and figure out their selves as they're working through their relationship. And so she gets Luis to pretend to be her fiancé. They broke up right before, and she feels like she has to save face in front of her family. ![]() So that's why she has this fake fiancé, because she was supposed to come on this family vacation with a fiancé. And Sara, especially, feels like her family looks down on her. They both love their family so much, but have kind of difficult relationships with different individuals. And I think there's a lot of that in this book.īoth Sara and Luis are figuring out their families. And so, sometimes, you're really figuring out who your family is in relationship to you. And they - I should have probably said this at the beginning - one of my favorite things about romance novels, honestly, is I feel like they're always kind of secret family stories, right? Because when you think about who you want to spend your life with, a lot of times that's because of your family and the people that you grew up with. ![]()
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