Studded across what is known as “BookTok”—the informal TikTok-based digital hub for the greater romance community—are innumerable riffs on the same conclusion. Dozens of book-focused content creators have posted videos of the smile dropping from their faces upon discovering that the novel they have just cracked open is written in the third person. The emotions expressed often amount to a feeling of betrayal, as if an author is snidely trolling them by purging their prose of copious first-person pronouns. (Some of the more dramatic TikToks with this complaint end with the offending fiction getting chucked into the garbage.) Elsewhere on BookTok, readers mourn their own self-diagnosed ineptitude; they’d like to savor the richness of third person, they say, but, for whatever reason, are unable to wrap their minds around the vantage point. “I feel like I don’t know how to read!” said one exasperated TikTokker, bemoaning the all-seeing narrator pervading two books she couldn’t quite grok. “I can’t do it. I tried. It does not work for me.”
For decades, the quintessential romance novel was a gooey parlor drama with bursting corsets and lacy gowns written entirely in third-person omniscient. Within that framework, an author was liberated to accentuate the rippling deltoids of the novel’s rakish libertine, or to mire in the melodrama of a forbidden tryst, absent the limitations of personal subjectivity. Great sex requires a secret language shared by two or more souls; therefore, in fiction, the conventional thinking went, it’s most easily expressed by an all-knowing narrator.
Fan fiction has always been underpinned by the fantasia of exploring a beloved fictional universe on one’s own terms, and unsurprisingly, a good amount of the work is written in first person, particularly within the subgenre known as self-insert, in which authors imagine themselves—or a thinly veiled surrogate—into the source material so they too may join the House of Gryffindor or glitter in the sunlight with Edward Cullen. These days in particular, a lot of DNA is shared between these two modes of publishing—traditional and fan-made—with the barriers that once divided them blurring to the point of becoming effectively indistinguishable, as publishing houses scoop up beloved fics, slap a new coat of “We changed all the copyrightable identifiers; you can’t sue us” paint on them, and sell the remixed results for $20.99 apiece. If fan fiction asserts the primacy of personal wish fulfillment, then you could argue that this new wave of romance novels serves—and reflects—the same purpose.
Prokop maintains that while those complex themes can be explored in first person, off-loading narrative tension into an internal monologue has a way of flattening a romance narrative, hemming in the scope. “It limits the kind of stories you can tell,” she continued. “It’s a lot harder to keep a secret from a reader.” Prokop is especially weary of the clear-eyed mindfulness possessed by the wayward lovers that tends to populate first-person novels—how their acuities remain crystalline and sharp, as if touched by the divine, across the pages, in a way that requires almost too much suspension of disbelief, even for a genre that traffics in that suspension.
When I sit down with such books [as The Brothers Karamazov and The Recognitions], the experience is usually mustardy, adversarial, and homework-like, driven by some deep, subliminal conviction that enlightenment is the prime directive of fiction.
Lee, naturally, has the complete opposite approach. “I’m not reading difficult literature. It’s just not my relationship to reading,” she said. “Would I love to be an intellectual? Sure. But do I feel enticed to take on books like that? No, not really. I read to escape, not to learn.”
How, then, are we supposed to wring our hands over the fact that in 2026 some people are reading more than they had in the past—even if what they’re reading tends to conform to their preferred constellation of tropes, contrivances, and, yes, perspectives? After all, consuming these books changed Lee’s life. She never read much in school. She assumed that books were for brainier people, beholden to an academic milieu that had permanently sidelined her. Well, now she loves to read. Who am I to tell her that she uncovered that love improperly?