You only have to nip into any bookshop to become aware of the overwhelming rise in romance fiction. The covers boast cartoon couples and pun heavy titles. It's all a little too sugary sweet for me. Each to their own.
But there is a remedy to this: Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics is a collection of romantic stories that are anything but syrupy; these vignettes show, in the words of the narrator that runs through each of the stories, that 'love was flammable, unhinged.’
Here are twelve intertwined stories about Margaret’s trials in love, complete with all the hellscapes of dating, from unrequited love to humiliating rejections. This collection speaks back to the fairy-tale non-sense about love.
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Listen: Maggie Armstrong talks to Brendan O'Connor
Throughout the collection, the reader is guided through Margaret’s hopes and losses in all things love. Throwing herself headlong into the throes of romance, Margaret begins a parasocial relationship with her housemate in The Dublin Marriage, where she lives out an imaginary relationship entirely in her head:
Margaret views love and marriage as a rite of passage, an inevitability. While in Sparkle she is hovering at the end of the house party in the hope that patience will bring her into the arms of a guitarist she’s lusting over. It does not go well. In All the Boys, the narrator muses that ‘we are the loneliest of all the species… We are doomed to know how boundless is this loneliness.’
From one story to the next, Margaret grasps at connections, fleeting as they may be, hoping for fulfilment. Old Romantics shows that Armstrong is a master of her craft, knitting together with incredible beauty the pain and the hopefulness of an old romantic.
Old Romantics is published by Tramp Press
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