How romance writers celebrate life and love with a disability

But the traumatic injury gave her something: a love of writing, which she has now turned into a successful career as a bestselling author of historical romance novels. “This injury got me writing again 100 percent,” says Matthews. “I wrote every book I wrote in bed.”

For Matthews, writing romance novels is a way to process the complicated feelings that come with living with a disability. Reading this genre “just reaffirms your belief that everything is going to be OK and that everything you’re going through has meaning. I find romance novels to be incredibly valuable in that regard,” she says.

Matthews isn’t the only one who finds comfort in the genre and its happy endings. Our media landscape isn’t exactly known for its positive portrayal of disabled people. But romance novels often portray disabled characters as they are – worthy of love and intimacy. They have sweet meet-and-greets, epic love stories, and good sex. And as the romance genre continues to diversify, more and more nuanced portrayals of disability are finding their way onto the shelves.

Before we get too far out on a limb, however, we should note that romance novels have not always been the best solution when it comes to portraying disability. For decades, physical disability was reliably portrayed as a barrier to love in the genre—particularly in the case of drawn war heroes in historical romance novels. According to Sarah Wendell, co-founder of the Trashy Books website Smart Bitches, this stylistic device was often used in the narrative as a shortcut to the hero’s emotional development.

Wendell says disability was often seen as a character’s defining characteristic, which could be a little over the top. It was used “to generate sympathy for a character who otherwise behaves abhorrently. And … that in itself is kind of disability-hostile, because it’s like saying, ‘Oh, you’re only sympathetic because you’re missing a body part,’ or ‘you have emotional issues.'” But things have changed in recent years. “I think we’ve moved away from ‘your disability as part of the conflict,’ to ‘any disability is actually just part of the character,'” Wendell says.

That’s the case in Erica Ridley’s upcoming Regency novel, “Hot Earl Summer.” The book follows Elizabeth Wynchester, an axe-wielding heroine with crippling chronic pain who is determined to defend a castle against a power-hungry aristocrat. Ridley says she approaches writing about disability like she does any kind of diversity. “I wanted to write about queer characters where the fear wasn’t that they were queer,” she says. “I feel similarly about disability. … It’s a part of who you are, just like any other aspect of your culture, religion or anything else.”

Ridley also notes that traditional publishers were not always open to romance novels about disabilities: “I was sure that the only way I would get published was if I wrote about rich, white, able-bodied aristocrats.” So what has changed? According to Ridley, the conversation in the industry only changed when the boom in self-publishing proved that there was a market for romance novels from diverse backgrounds.

And as the market has grown, the types of disabilities we see on the page have changed, too. “In the last, I would say, ten years or so, we’ve seen a lot more about neurodivergence,” says Jayashree Kamblé, an English professor who specializes in mass-market romance novels.

Successful romance author Helen Hoang didn’t think much of making Stella, the protagonist of her first romance novel, The Kiss Quotient, autistic. She was baffled that people thought otherwise. “It was shocking to me that it was extraordinary to write about an autistic woman who wanted to live a life like everyone else,” Hoang says. In writing the story, she drew on her own life experiences as a woman with autism. “I didn’t feel like I was being so, so outrageous and brave when I wrote the character because she came from a very familiar background,” she says.

Still, writing Stella was an act of self-love for Hoang. “It was very healthy for me at the time to write a female character with autism… to portray her with empathy and not as an infantilized character that you have to feel sorry for.”

Readers of romance novels could relate. Some have longed for positive representations of disability and neurodivergence in their favorite books for years. But sometimes that hunger translates into pressure to only portray differences in a positive light. Matthews says she felt that pressure. “I think when you’re trying to be a zealous advocate for disability representation, as an able-bodied person… you try so hard to advocate for a certain level of acceptance that you can’t take the life experiences of people who have suffered a traumatic injury and say, ‘I’m unhappy. I’ve lost something.'”

Although the genre has made strides toward more nuanced portrayal of disability, love stories between two disabled characters are still rare. Author Hannah Bonam-Young was looking for such a story when she wrote Out on a Limb, about Win, a woman with a leg deformity, and Bo, a man—and absolute dream guy—with an amputated leg.

Bonam-Young says it was important to her to write two disabled characters who have very different life experiences. “I wanted to point out that the experiences of people with disabilities are different,” she says. “I think unfortunately, even with the best intentions, in some love stories where only one of the main characters is disabled and adjustments are necessary, it can come across as a bit didactic or a kind of instruction manual on how to love someone with a disability.”

Ultimately, Bonam-Young wants to see more love stories that normalize disability. “I really hope we can continue to ride this wave of more subtlety and nuance and less… perfectionism,” she says. “We’re just messy people stuck in disabled bodies, making mistakes and, you know, falling in love.”

In a society where disabled people rarely play the main role, their love stories can be made visible. Wendell agrees: “The message of a love story is that you are lovable… that you don’t have to conform to some external standard to be lovable. You are lovable just the way you are.”

If you want to read a romance novel in which a character has a disability:

Mimi Matthews recommends “The Arrangement” by Mary Balogh

Erica Ridley recommends “Can’t Escape Love” by Alyssa Cole

Hannah Bonam-Young recommends “Act Your Age, Eve Brown” by Talia Hibbert

Helen Hoang recommends everything by Chloe Liese

Jayashree Kamblé recommends The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne

Kalyani Saxena recommends “The Winter Companion” by Mimi Matthews

Kalyani Saxena is a journalist and author who writes about romance novels and fantasy. She is an avid reader and is constantly looking for the perfect implementation of the enemy-to-love theme.