Fiona J.R. Titchenell on Contemporary Women's Fiction

Writing Contemporary Women’s Fiction with Fiona J.R. Titchenell

Photo author Fiona J.R. Titchenell I’m primarily an author of Horror and Sci-Fi, and while I love bending and breaking genre boundaries if you’d asked me five years ago what shelves of the bookstore I could imagine my work being sorted onto someday, Contemporary Women’s Fiction wouldn’t have been anywhere near my first thought.

That’s partly because I’ve always been uncomfortable with the whole concept of the “Women’s Fiction” section — not with the content by any means, just with the categorization. Segregating female-focused narratives that way can easily play into the harmful idea that male experiences are normal and of interest to everyone, while female experiences are extranormal, niche, and of interest only to other women.

Then again, the world most definitely treats men and women differently, so many of women’s experiences are uniquely ours, and they tend to happen more quietly and with less fanfare than men’s. That doesn’t mean men can’t or shouldn’t take an interest in learning about them, but given how much less attention women’s experiences get in general, it makes a certain kind of sense to try to make representations of them easy to find, for those who care to look.

When I was writing The Future Mrs. Brightside, I had categorized it in my head as a “Literary Romance.” In other words, it’s a story that centers around a romantic relationship but doesn’t quite fit within the formula parameters for “Commercial Romance.” I didn’t find out until I started preparing for publication that “Literary Romance” is more of a theoretical concept for English majors like myself to debate each other over, rather than an actual classification for actual books on actual shelves. Most of the titles we might name as examples of Literary Romance in such debates would be categorized as Women’s Fiction in practice.

So, Women’s Fiction it is. If The Future Mrs. Brightside were a work of Horror, Sci-Fi, or other genre fiction that someone wanted to lump in with “Women’s Fiction” simply because it’s openly by and about a woman, I’d have something to object to, but it’s not. And our society still labors under the delusion that only women can enjoy romance, so calling it “Romance” would only cause confusion without doing anything to bridge gender gaps. “Women’s Fiction” really is the most accurate label of the accepted options, and it puts The Future Mrs. Brightside in good company where it fits in well.

But none of that explains why I decided to write a “Contemporary” story at all. I’m a strong believer in the value of genre fiction, including its power to explore human emotion, to comment on the real world, to tell stories that matter. So why not let it tell this one? Why didn’t I set this story of grief and love against a speculative backdrop, encode it in metaphor, draw out the characters’ true selves with the kinds of hypothetical dilemmas that only genre fiction can provide?

I chose a contemporary setting because The Future Mrs. Brightside is about the particular feeling of being trapped in an utterly unmagical situation. There’s nothing mysterious or special about Roger’s death, or about the fallout, Chloe and Jon are left with, and there’s no mysterious or special way to make things better. In fact, knowing that what they’re going through is normal, even mundane, actually makes it more difficult for them to face, not easier. It makes every emotional challenge they meet feel like the bare minimum that’s expected of them, rather than the colossal feat of fortitude that it is.

Of course, just because a character lives in a world that contains magic or incomprehensibly advanced technology doesn’t mean it will necessarily offer solutions to all their problems, or that they can’t experience all the same emotions as a character in the real world, including ennui. One person’s exotic is another person’s mundane. But speculative worlds do create a sense of novelty for the audience, if not for the characters. In many cases, that novelty adds clarity, but in the case of The Future Mrs. Brightside, it would only have added distance between the reader’s experience and Chloe’s.

Chloe is a woman of present-day planet earth, struggling to bear the weight of an invisible emotional workload and fighting to save her engagement and her career, and that’s exactly what her story demands that she be.

About Fiona J.R. Titchenell

Fiona J.R. Titchenell is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction, including Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir, The Prospero Chronicles, and the Summer 2018 Feminist Book of the Month, Out of the Pocket.

The Future Mrs. Brightside is her first foray into contemporary women’s fiction. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Cal State University Los Angeles in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband and fellow author, Matt Carter, and has also published under the initials F.J.R. Titchenell.

About the Book

The Future Mrs. Brightside by Fiona J.R. Titchenell
Genre: Women’s Fiction

Synopsis

After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse.

When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned.

Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song.

Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.

The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad.

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