00:00:05
Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
00:00:11
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Tamsin Rose with the latest from the Quickie Newsroom. There's a buzz in the air and it's especially feverish near bookshops.
00:00:24
Speaker 1: This just in, we have been blessed with the titles and the covers for the two next installments of the ACOTAR series by Sarah J.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: Matt.
00:00:32
Speaker 1: If you're rushing through this series to get it finished before ACOTAR 6, stop!
00:00:36
Speaker 2: What are you doing?
00:00:37
Speaker 1: The only people that are allowed to rush this are people doing a reread, okay?
00:00:42
Speaker 2: Bookworms and romance lovers alike are preparing for the release of a book that's a big part of a genre that's grown and grown since the pandemic.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: In Romantasy, we are always in a secondary world. We're in a fantasy world. We're in Magical Kingdom somewhere. There always is an element of some kind of magic.
00:01:02
Speaker 2: Today we're exploring why romanticism got so big and what the love stories we love tell us about ourselves. But first, here are your headlines for Friday, October 23. Independent MP Helen Haynes' staff have been left deeply traumatised after their boss was allegedly deliberately struck by an SUV outside their workplace on Monday afternoon. Haynes remained in a critical but stable condition at the Alfred Hospital on Thursday night. Kaz Rourke, Dr Haynes' chief of staff, provided a statement about the events to the ABC. She said that most of the team was in the office when the incident occurred and that some were involved in Helen's immediate care. She said it had been deeply traumatic for the team. She says they were hoping to reopen the office next week as floral tributes and letters with well wishes for the member for Indi continue to grow. In the first Australian study of its kind, Flinders University researchers have spoken with women with postpartum psychosis. The condition is experienced by an estimated 300 to 600 Australian women each year with symptoms including hallucinations, delusions, mania, depression, paranoia or severe sleep disturbance. Researchers who spoke with 15 women found they contacted health services an average of seven times before getting the care they needed and many felt their concerns were dismissed or misunderstood. Women told the study they recognised something was seriously wrong and actively sought help, but experienced lengthy delays before receiving an accurate diagnosis. New South Wales residents will soon have the option to be turned into human compost after Australian first laws were passed allowing the alternative to burial or cremation. The laws that pass the Parliament on Wednesday create a third legal option for people. The practice involves placing a body in a temperature-controlled vessel with organic matter. The body then rapidly decomposes and after about 30 days the body is transformed into soil. The New South Wales government now has 18 months to create regulations to control the practice. Coming up, romance is on the rise and Good Samaritans save a man from floodwaters. Australians are being warned to stay vigilant amid fears of an increase in future data breaches after a software that many critical websites run on was forced to go offline when a flaw was found in its coding. AI helped find the vulnerability in a piece of web architecture known as PHP. Companies and governments globally have been working to patch millions of devices as a result of the finding, but cybersecurity experts are concerned the issue could now allow for major breaches. And in hard times emerge wonderful people doing extraordinary things, and that's exactly what happened when two bystanders rescued a driver from a sinking car in floodwaters north of Brisbane. The man drove his four-wheel drive through water in Morayfield when it began taking on water, stalled and started to sink. A nearby ABC reporter, Will Murray, and another man then swam out to the car and pulled the driver out of the vehicle. The whole thing was captured on video where you can see the man hugging his rescuers while still in the water. Romance novels used to be relegated right to the back of bookstores.
00:04:31
Speaker 1: So if you think about where romance might have lived in a bookstore in the past, often it was in a like secret shame shelf up the back if it existed there at all.
00:04:40
Speaker 2: But things have changed.
00:04:42
Speaker 1: Genuinely, the biggest shift that the kind of romanticcy plus romance boom of the sort of TikTok era has given us is how it's fundamentally reshaped the space of the bookstore. Now what we see is romance front and centre a lot of the time. We've got the kind of tables at the front. We'll have a romance section and a romanticist section and maybe even some more kind of sub-genre-fied spaces.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: This is Dr Jodie McAllister. She's not just a senior lecturer in writing, literature and culture at Deakin University, but also a romance author.
00:05:13
Speaker 1: It has fundamentally kind of reoriented the market in some pretty profound ways. We are no longer subscribing to this idea that this is a guilty pleasure that should be hidden and be on your secret shame bookshelf. People are loud and proud and owning their romance and romantic reading in a way that they maybe weren't before, which I think is really interesting.
00:05:35
Speaker 3: Dr.
00:05:36
Speaker 2: McAllister has watched a genre she's loved since finding her grandmother's Mills and Boone's books as a very young person to now being immersed in it.
00:05:45
Speaker 1: The dominant question of my research career is what are the stories we tell about love and what do those do to the ways that we think? So I'm really, really interested about the different kinds of stories about love we tell in popular culture. I think they are really indicative of the way we approach the world as humans because we approach everything as a story.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: And over the next week, a big new chapter in one of the defining love stories of the modern romance and romanticist genre gets its next installment. On Tuesday, the next book in the ACOTAR series is being released. And if that means very little to you, that stands for A Court of Thorns and Roses. This book is called A Court of Splintered Harmony, or ACOTAR VI. And industry consensus and pre-sale tracking says this is set to debut at number one on the global bestseller lists.
00:06:34
Speaker 1: With ACOTAR 6, part of the reason people are so excited is not just to kind of return to the world of Prithian and escape from ours. They want to, like, see what's going on with their friends, you know? Like, these are characters people have sat with for so long.
00:06:47
Speaker 2: It's one of the biggest series in the romanticist genre that's a combination of romance and fantasy.
00:06:54
Speaker 1: I think is a very 2020s phenomenon. But if we look at the kind of ancestors, we have sort of your twilights and such like in the 2000s and moving into the 2010s. We have these fantasy kind of romances, but they take place in our world. So Twilight, we're in a real place. We're in Forks, Washington, as we know. And if we look at the kind of wave of, usually we will use terms like paranormal romance or urban fantasy to describe these texts. We have this magical element, but we're in the real world. What we see with romantasy is what we call secondary world fantasy. We're not in our world anymore. We're in another world.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: And bookstores and retailers right around the world are capitalizing on the hype, hosting massive midnight release parties and launch events that are reminiscent of major releases in the past, like Harry Potter. Author Sarah J Maas announced its release earlier this year on one of the world's biggest podcasts, Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy. What is up, Daddy Gang?
00:07:56
Speaker 1: It is your founding father, Alex Cooper, with Call Her Daddy.
00:08:03
Speaker 2: Sarah J Maas, welcome to Call Her Daddy. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Mamma Mia's pop culture and social editor and co-host of The Spill podcast, Tina Burke explains.
00:08:16
Speaker 3: I mean, I think if we think of the kinds of people who've also gone on Call Her Daddy and who've used it as like a platform, it just shows how big it is. Like when Kamala Harris was running to become a potential president of the United States, she went on Call Her Daddy. It's where like people go when they have a story to share and like something big. And I mean, that was such an obvious place for Sarah to go. And that episode was just enormous. But it does tell us that like this is held in that kind of level of high esteem, the same way that we view like a really big film release or like a really big series. Like it has that same level of like virality and buzz that one of those big pop culture releases has.
00:08:51
Speaker 2: Romanticy went from a niche crossover genre to the fastest growing category in publishing in under a decade. helping romance and fantasy sales roughly double or triple in the US and UK since 2019 and 2020.
00:09:05
Speaker 1: And when you think that the romantic boom really popped off in 2020, I don't think it is difficult to connect those dots. We were living in a world that I don't think any of us really wanted to be living in at that time. So we moved to whole other worlds for our fantasies. These were the stories that really, really had enormous appeal.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: And that popularity has persisted.
00:09:30
Speaker 1: So if we look at, say, the New York Times bestseller list for last year, we think there's 52 weeks in a year. 19 of those weeks, a Romanticy title was number one on the combined print and e-book list. I think 10 different authors represented there. So there is a big market for these books.
00:09:48
Speaker 2: When we think about the state of the world and the role romance has played in the past, perhaps it's easy to understand why.
00:09:55
Speaker 1: And romance as a genre has always done really well in times of crisis. One of my favorite anecdotes is that during World War II, Mills and Boone was one of the only publishers to maintain its paper ration during the war on the grounds that it raised morale for women in the factories. I think Romanticy and kind of romance more broadly is actually doing a lot of that work in the 2020s.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: And so what should we be expecting from these new books? Well, to get you oriented, here's Tina Burke's top line.
00:10:22
Speaker 3: A 19-year-old girl, as all the girls are in romanticism sometimes, who sort of finds herself, ends up in this world of fae and like monstrous creatures and the high lords and night courts and all of this war and chaos and drama and also sexy times.
00:10:38
Speaker 2: Sarah J Maas has written a few series and people think this next book and the next that's coming out only a few months later We'll merge these worlds together.
00:10:47
Speaker 3: I started talking to all the girls in the office who were really into the Marsverse and they were like, well, now you need to go read Throne of Glass, which is another book series, and you need to go read Crescent City because what we are expecting is that there's going to be like an MCU level crossover of storytelling in this new ACOTAR book.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: So far, books in this series have been pretty long and we know there are three more to come out. one next week, one next year and one more, which we know nothing about.
00:11:14
Speaker 3: I do believe that the next book is a bit shorter and then the one after, like not short by any means, but shorter compared to some of hers. And then I think the seventh book is chunky. So I think that's why we're getting them so close together. I feel like maybe the sixth book is like a smaller transition book, kind of like the fourth, which was a novella, technically. I think that could possibly be what we're in for is like, it'll end on a cliffhanger. She'll give us 11 weeks to sort of like bask in that. And then the big chunky one's going to drop. And I think that is also going to end in a way where we're like, oh my God, what happens next to keep the buzz going for like a year or so.
00:11:48
Speaker 2: So why do we love these books and these sorts of stories so much?
00:11:53
Speaker 3: I think what they offer you is also the idea that good can triumph over evil. And you're like, what a good concept. And also in the middle of that, maybe there's a love story. And no one's on their phones and you're away from technology. And yeah, things are pretty bad and like grimy, but also like you're going on an adventure. And it feels like there's something more to the story than like I get up and I go to work and capitalism kicks my ass. The crux of a lot of the love stories in romance and romanticism is just that the guy likes her.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: For Dr McAllister, it's pretty simple.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: With the romance narrative, which only has two rules, really, which are that the romance plot has to be the main plot, can't be a subplot, it's got to be front and centre, and that in the end it will work out okay, that we will get a happy ending of some description.
00:12:35
Speaker 2: That's all for now. If you have a topic you'd like us to discuss, our inbox is always open. We're at the quickie at mamamia.com.au. And make sure to rate and review us in your favourite podcast app. It helps other people find us.
00:12:54
Speaker 1: Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.
Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mamma Mia podcast.
00:00:11
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Tamsin Rose with the latest from the Quickie Newsroom. There's a buzz in the air and it's especially feverish near bookshops.
00:00:24
Speaker 1: This just in, we have been blessed with the titles and the covers for the two next installments of the ACOTAR series by Sarah J.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: Matt.
00:00:32
Speaker 1: If you're rushing through this series to get it finished before ACOTAR 6, stop!
00:00:36
Speaker 2: What are you doing?
00:00:37
Speaker 1: The only people that are allowed to rush this are people doing a reread, okay?
00:00:42
Speaker 2: Bookworms and romance lovers alike are preparing for the release of a book that's a big part of a genre that's grown and grown since the pandemic.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: In Romantasy, we are always in a secondary world. We're in a fantasy world. We're in Magical Kingdom somewhere. There always is an element of some kind of magic.
00:01:02
Speaker 2: Today we're exploring why romanticism got so big and what the love stories we love tell us about ourselves. But first, here are your headlines for Friday, October 23. Independent MP Helen Haynes' staff have been left deeply traumatised after their boss was allegedly deliberately struck by an SUV outside their workplace on Monday afternoon. Haynes remained in a critical but stable condition at the Alfred Hospital on Thursday night. Kaz Rourke, Dr Haynes' chief of staff, provided a statement about the events to the ABC. She said that most of the team was in the office when the incident occurred and that some were involved in Helen's immediate care. She said it had been deeply traumatic for the team. She says they were hoping to reopen the office next week as floral tributes and letters with well wishes for the member for Indi continue to grow. In the first Australian study of its kind, Flinders University researchers have spoken with women with postpartum psychosis. The condition is experienced by an estimated 300 to 600 Australian women each year with symptoms including hallucinations, delusions, mania, depression, paranoia or severe sleep disturbance. Researchers who spoke with 15 women found they contacted health services an average of seven times before getting the care they needed and many felt their concerns were dismissed or misunderstood. Women told the study they recognised something was seriously wrong and actively sought help, but experienced lengthy delays before receiving an accurate diagnosis. New South Wales residents will soon have the option to be turned into human compost after Australian first laws were passed allowing the alternative to burial or cremation. The laws that pass the Parliament on Wednesday create a third legal option for people. The practice involves placing a body in a temperature-controlled vessel with organic matter. The body then rapidly decomposes and after about 30 days the body is transformed into soil. The New South Wales government now has 18 months to create regulations to control the practice. Coming up, romance is on the rise and Good Samaritans save a man from floodwaters. Australians are being warned to stay vigilant amid fears of an increase in future data breaches after a software that many critical websites run on was forced to go offline when a flaw was found in its coding. AI helped find the vulnerability in a piece of web architecture known as PHP. Companies and governments globally have been working to patch millions of devices as a result of the finding, but cybersecurity experts are concerned the issue could now allow for major breaches. And in hard times emerge wonderful people doing extraordinary things, and that's exactly what happened when two bystanders rescued a driver from a sinking car in floodwaters north of Brisbane. The man drove his four-wheel drive through water in Morayfield when it began taking on water, stalled and started to sink. A nearby ABC reporter, Will Murray, and another man then swam out to the car and pulled the driver out of the vehicle. The whole thing was captured on video where you can see the man hugging his rescuers while still in the water. Romance novels used to be relegated right to the back of bookstores.
00:04:31
Speaker 1: So if you think about where romance might have lived in a bookstore in the past, often it was in a like secret shame shelf up the back if it existed there at all.
00:04:40
Speaker 2: But things have changed.
00:04:42
Speaker 1: Genuinely, the biggest shift that the kind of romanticcy plus romance boom of the sort of TikTok era has given us is how it's fundamentally reshaped the space of the bookstore. Now what we see is romance front and centre a lot of the time. We've got the kind of tables at the front. We'll have a romance section and a romanticist section and maybe even some more kind of sub-genre-fied spaces.
00:05:03
Speaker 2: This is Dr Jodie McAllister. She's not just a senior lecturer in writing, literature and culture at Deakin University, but also a romance author.
00:05:13
Speaker 1: It has fundamentally kind of reoriented the market in some pretty profound ways. We are no longer subscribing to this idea that this is a guilty pleasure that should be hidden and be on your secret shame bookshelf. People are loud and proud and owning their romance and romantic reading in a way that they maybe weren't before, which I think is really interesting.
00:05:35
Speaker 3: Dr.
00:05:36
Speaker 2: McAllister has watched a genre she's loved since finding her grandmother's Mills and Boone's books as a very young person to now being immersed in it.
00:05:45
Speaker 1: The dominant question of my research career is what are the stories we tell about love and what do those do to the ways that we think? So I'm really, really interested about the different kinds of stories about love we tell in popular culture. I think they are really indicative of the way we approach the world as humans because we approach everything as a story.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: And over the next week, a big new chapter in one of the defining love stories of the modern romance and romanticist genre gets its next installment. On Tuesday, the next book in the ACOTAR series is being released. And if that means very little to you, that stands for A Court of Thorns and Roses. This book is called A Court of Splintered Harmony, or ACOTAR VI. And industry consensus and pre-sale tracking says this is set to debut at number one on the global bestseller lists.
00:06:34
Speaker 1: With ACOTAR 6, part of the reason people are so excited is not just to kind of return to the world of Prithian and escape from ours. They want to, like, see what's going on with their friends, you know? Like, these are characters people have sat with for so long.
00:06:47
Speaker 2: It's one of the biggest series in the romanticist genre that's a combination of romance and fantasy.
00:06:54
Speaker 1: I think is a very 2020s phenomenon. But if we look at the kind of ancestors, we have sort of your twilights and such like in the 2000s and moving into the 2010s. We have these fantasy kind of romances, but they take place in our world. So Twilight, we're in a real place. We're in Forks, Washington, as we know. And if we look at the kind of wave of, usually we will use terms like paranormal romance or urban fantasy to describe these texts. We have this magical element, but we're in the real world. What we see with romantasy is what we call secondary world fantasy. We're not in our world anymore. We're in another world.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: And bookstores and retailers right around the world are capitalizing on the hype, hosting massive midnight release parties and launch events that are reminiscent of major releases in the past, like Harry Potter. Author Sarah J Maas announced its release earlier this year on one of the world's biggest podcasts, Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy. What is up, Daddy Gang?
00:07:56
Speaker 1: It is your founding father, Alex Cooper, with Call Her Daddy.
00:08:03
Speaker 2: Sarah J Maas, welcome to Call Her Daddy. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Mamma Mia's pop culture and social editor and co-host of The Spill podcast, Tina Burke explains.
00:08:16
Speaker 3: I mean, I think if we think of the kinds of people who've also gone on Call Her Daddy and who've used it as like a platform, it just shows how big it is. Like when Kamala Harris was running to become a potential president of the United States, she went on Call Her Daddy. It's where like people go when they have a story to share and like something big. And I mean, that was such an obvious place for Sarah to go. And that episode was just enormous. But it does tell us that like this is held in that kind of level of high esteem, the same way that we view like a really big film release or like a really big series. Like it has that same level of like virality and buzz that one of those big pop culture releases has.
00:08:51
Speaker 2: Romanticy went from a niche crossover genre to the fastest growing category in publishing in under a decade. helping romance and fantasy sales roughly double or triple in the US and UK since 2019 and 2020.
00:09:05
Speaker 1: And when you think that the romantic boom really popped off in 2020, I don't think it is difficult to connect those dots. We were living in a world that I don't think any of us really wanted to be living in at that time. So we moved to whole other worlds for our fantasies. These were the stories that really, really had enormous appeal.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: And that popularity has persisted.
00:09:30
Speaker 1: So if we look at, say, the New York Times bestseller list for last year, we think there's 52 weeks in a year. 19 of those weeks, a Romanticy title was number one on the combined print and e-book list. I think 10 different authors represented there. So there is a big market for these books.
00:09:48
Speaker 2: When we think about the state of the world and the role romance has played in the past, perhaps it's easy to understand why.
00:09:55
Speaker 1: And romance as a genre has always done really well in times of crisis. One of my favorite anecdotes is that during World War II, Mills and Boone was one of the only publishers to maintain its paper ration during the war on the grounds that it raised morale for women in the factories. I think Romanticy and kind of romance more broadly is actually doing a lot of that work in the 2020s.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: And so what should we be expecting from these new books? Well, to get you oriented, here's Tina Burke's top line.
00:10:22
Speaker 3: A 19-year-old girl, as all the girls are in romanticism sometimes, who sort of finds herself, ends up in this world of fae and like monstrous creatures and the high lords and night courts and all of this war and chaos and drama and also sexy times.
00:10:38
Speaker 2: Sarah J Maas has written a few series and people think this next book and the next that's coming out only a few months later We'll merge these worlds together.
00:10:47
Speaker 3: I started talking to all the girls in the office who were really into the Marsverse and they were like, well, now you need to go read Throne of Glass, which is another book series, and you need to go read Crescent City because what we are expecting is that there's going to be like an MCU level crossover of storytelling in this new ACOTAR book.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: So far, books in this series have been pretty long and we know there are three more to come out. one next week, one next year and one more, which we know nothing about.
00:11:14
Speaker 3: I do believe that the next book is a bit shorter and then the one after, like not short by any means, but shorter compared to some of hers. And then I think the seventh book is chunky. So I think that's why we're getting them so close together. I feel like maybe the sixth book is like a smaller transition book, kind of like the fourth, which was a novella, technically. I think that could possibly be what we're in for is like, it'll end on a cliffhanger. She'll give us 11 weeks to sort of like bask in that. And then the big chunky one's going to drop. And I think that is also going to end in a way where we're like, oh my God, what happens next to keep the buzz going for like a year or so.
00:11:48
Speaker 2: So why do we love these books and these sorts of stories so much?
00:11:53
Speaker 3: I think what they offer you is also the idea that good can triumph over evil. And you're like, what a good concept. And also in the middle of that, maybe there's a love story. And no one's on their phones and you're away from technology. And yeah, things are pretty bad and like grimy, but also like you're going on an adventure. And it feels like there's something more to the story than like I get up and I go to work and capitalism kicks my ass. The crux of a lot of the love stories in romance and romanticism is just that the guy likes her.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: For Dr McAllister, it's pretty simple.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: With the romance narrative, which only has two rules, really, which are that the romance plot has to be the main plot, can't be a subplot, it's got to be front and centre, and that in the end it will work out okay, that we will get a happy ending of some description.
00:12:35
Speaker 2: That's all for now. If you have a topic you'd like us to discuss, our inbox is always open. We're at the quickie at mamamia.com.au. And make sure to rate and review us in your favourite podcast app. It helps other people find us.
00:12:54
Speaker 1: Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast.
