Ask a romance reader what the books do for her and the first word is escape. Stay in the conversation a little longer and something else shows up. A sentence she can finally say out loud. A fight a couple stopped having. A body she came back to.

Three readers from the romance book club at Sherwood Bookstore join me for a roundtable on how romance arrived at the hardest crossings of their lives, what these books do to a woman's relationship with her own body, the trope everyone wants retired that turned out to be the best teacher in the room, and the happy ending that doesn't wait for the last page.

Somewhere in North Carolina there is a padded room the size of a closet, and a woman goes into it alone and talks for three hours so that you can have one. That's the ratio. Every hour you listen to has been worked three or four times over by a body you will never meet, and by the time it reaches you all of that has been sanded off.

Christa Lewis has spent thirty years with the voice. In this conversation she takes apart what actually happens between a page and your ear: how she builds a character from the clues in the text, what the small space between the upper lip and the nose has to do with clamped-down emotion, and the thing she deliberately holds back from every listener, on purpose.

Romance novels are medicine for the crossing. Not a distraction from your life changing. Medicine for it.

Season two of Romancing the Threshold opens on its own, with the idea the rest of it stands on. When a crossing is real, the thing that's missing is almost never information. Most of us know exactly what we should do, and we sit in the chair another year anyway, fully informed and completely immobile. What's missing is appetite. And appetite is what this genre keeps handing back.

In this episode: the dream that moved me to Portland and taught me to follow an image long before I understand it. A stretch of depletion, and why romance was the only thing I could keep down. What Eros actually means, and why it goes quiet years before anything collapses. What the happily ever after is doing for the psyche, and why it's a matter of justice as much as feeling. Why "guilty pleasure" was never about the books. Where the eight Threshold Lovers came from. And the eight themselves, in the four pairs they arrive in.