Who doesn’t love 'LOVE'? In all its different shapes and forms, the good, the bad and the ugly.
It is the basic human emotion that comes the easiest, and can leave you feeling happy, but it also comes with the most heartache.
And when it comes to the consequences of "love", most of us have probably been the hero in one person’s story and the villain in someone else's.
However, when real life gets a little too hard to bear, there is always the romance novel.
You can disappear between the pages, fall in love with strangers, survive heartbreak without actually having your heart broken. You can close the book believing, at least for a moment, that everything might work out.
But love rarely behaves so neatly in real life, and the stories we tell about it do not always follow the same rules.
That was clear at the Open Book Festival’s "South African Romance Indaba" on Friday, where authors Sven Axelrad, Thandi Moagi and Cathrine Phiri joined Qarnita Loxton for a conversation about the good, the bad and the ugly of love stories.
Their books offered different ways into that familiar territory, shaped not only by the stories they wanted to tell but by the lives, relationships and experiences that have shaped them as writers.
In Thandi Moagi’s “Wisani and the Bafokeng Brothers”, romance arrives alongside family responsibility and the realities of trying to build a life.
Wisani is a Wits student working three jobs while caring for her family when she becomes caught up with the Bafokeng brothers, taking the story from Soweto to Lesotho.
For Moagi, however, romance begins with something much simpler.
“Romance is knowing that someone loves you, loving yourself. I make sure that my characters are written in this way as well,” she said.
Her approach is rooted in the stories she grew up with, the things she has seen and experienced and the people whose lives have shaped her understanding of love.
Moagi says she has always been drawn to Mafia love stories, so when she pitched one of her own stories on Facebook, she was surprised to discover that thousands of people were just as interested in the genre.
It was on the platform that she was discovered as a writer, turning what she had enjoyed reading into an audience of her own.
That personal connection becomes even more apparent in Cathrine Phiri’s work.
Her “A Love That Heals” follows Thandaza as she leaves Polokwane for Johannesburg in search of a better life, where a new relationship with Steven offers the possibility of something she has been missing.
Her latest novel, “A Love That Hurts”, moves into heartbreak, family secrets and the complications of starting again.
“Romance is very close to my heart because I love love,” Phiri said.
For Phiri, writing also became an escape during a troubled childhood, making the act of creating love stories feel particularly bittersweet. The love she has experienced through friends, family and her partner also finds its way into her characters.
“I love being loved and I am loved and you’ll notice that in my book characters as well. I take my personal experience of what love is from friends, family and my partner and sprinkle it into my work,” she said.
With “A Love That Hurts”, Phiri also wants to acknowledge the relationships that do not have happy endings, even when you have tried to do everything right.
Stating that you can love someone completely, give them the benefit of the doubt and still find yourself facing the reality that it will not work.
Sometimes, as Phiri puts it, it is simply “wrong person, wrong time”.
Sven Axelrad offered a version of romance that deeply resonated precisely because it does not promise the neat ending we often expect.
His work does not sit comfortably on the romance shelf, although love, sex, friendship and desire still find their way into his stories.
In "The Dogs of Vivo", Axelrad follows Art, Maggie and Felix, three twenty-somethings who spend their time drinking, talking and dreaming of making it big.
Art loves Maggie, Maggie is chasing her dreams in music and Felix, who is homeless, loves everyone. Their friendships and feelings become tangled as an enigmatic stranger enters their lives.
“My stories are when love does not work out. Romance takes on a different look in my books,” Axelrad said. “These are young people and young people ‘in love’ don’t always work out.”
And that is a sad reality of love; the person you loved at 18 may not be the person you are loving now, or the person you will love at 30.
Some relationships end, some change us and some leave behind stories we would rather forget.
Growing up in a broken home himself, Axelrad wants to show that throwing “all your chips in” on love might not always be the best option.
“It may not be true love but it is a form of love,” he said. “My characters are going through it.”
Perhaps the most striking thought from the discussion came when Axelrad drew a distinction between the fantasy of love and the reality of living through it.
“There’s a difference between the idea of love and what you have to go through in order to understand what love really is.”
Profound, yes. But also painfully true.
Put these perspectives around the same table and romance starts to look less like an escape from real life and more like another way of making sense of it.
Its tenderness, its contradictions and all the ways we can be good, bad or downright ugly in somebody else’s love story. It is in between the variations of love, that we truly start to understand what love is.
bernelee.vollmer@nationalmg.co.za