Your Bookshelf Is Your Grimoire
Three questions to discover what your reading life wants you to know
In today’s new episode of Romancing the Threshold, I tell a story I’ve shared privately but never in public like this, how a dream about a wedding made me abandon my serious thesis on Saturn and depression and write instead about the healing power of romantic comedies. How that thesis became a spell I lived: ritual, artwork, dreams, and meeting my husband more than a year later.
How I forgot about that spell for almost two decades. And how, after my mother died and I fell into 131 romance novels during a cave year of grief, the spell cast itself again.
Same medicine. Deeper cauldron. Different question.
The thesis asked: how does a woman follow desire to find her partner? The question now — eighteen years and a whole life later — is bigger:
How does a woman discover her desire as a compass to becoming more fully herself?
If you listen to nothing else, the origin story of how a dream changed the course of my thesis, and my life, is in the first few minutes of the episode.
But whether you listen to the full episode or not, I want to give you something you can use tonight.
Three Questions for Your Bookshelf
Here's what I've discovered: most of us read for the plot, the pleasure, the enjoyment of a good story — and there's nothing wrong with that. But early in my deep dive into romance novels, I started noticing I was reading on three levels simultaneously. The first was the story itself. The second was something personal stirring underneath. And the third was something I could only call the collective dream. Once I saw them, I couldn't unsee them — and they changed everything about how I relate to my bookshelf.
I want to invite you to try this tonight.
Pick up whatever you’re reading, or the last book that really stayed with you, and ask these three questions.
Level 1 — What’s my reaction to this story?
This is the surface read and it matters.
Did you love it?
Was the plot to your taste?
Did the ending land or feel rushed?
Were you hooked from chapter one or did it take a while?
Did you feel excited, emotional, flat, annoyed?
Did you want to throw the book across the room or immediately start the sequel?
This is where most book conversations live: the review, the star rating, the “OMG you have to read this” text to a friend. It’s BookTok territory. It’s valid, it’s fun, and it’s the foundation of everything else. Without this level of pleasure and preference, none of the deeper work happens.
But notice what’s already here: the cover that made your hand reach out before your mind decided. The trope that makes you click “buy” before you’ve finished the synopsis. The scene you screenshot and return to like medicine. Even at this surface level, something is choosing, and it’s worth asking what.
Start noticing your reactions. That noticing is where everything begins.
Level 2 — What is this mirroring in my life right now?
Now look at what drew you in. Was it the hero who saw the heroine completely and didn’t flinch? The moment she stopped apologizing? The world where she could exist without performing?
Here’s the question: where in your actual life are you hungry for this same thing?
During my cave year, I kept choosing books that turned out to be about grief, about complicated mother-daughter relationships, even when the synopsis mentioned neither. The story got me through the cover with a trope, but the medicine was hidden between the lines. It was like an invisible hand kept beckoning me toward exactly what I needed to process but hadn’t consciously named.
Your reading preferences aren’t random.
They’re your psyche’s prescription, showing you what you need right now.
The trope you can’t stop reaching for? It’s a mirror. It’s showing you what your inner life is working on, whether you asked it to or not.
Level 3 — Why now?
Zoom out.
You’re not the only one reading this book, this trope, this genre. Thousands, maybe millions of women are reaching for the same stories.
Why?
Why is dark romance surging right now, at the same moment women’s autonomy is under siege?
Why are monster romances, where the hero stays monstrous, doesn’t transform into a handsome prince; suddenly everywhere?
No amount of good marketing explains it if the story doesn’t hit an archetypal nerve. And when a book is everywhere, something about it is touching a collective experience.
You don’t need to have the answer. Just asking the question changes how you read. It lifts you out of “guilty pleasure” and into something larger: I am part of a collective dream, and my reading is participating in it.
If you try the three questions tonight, come back and share what you found. I'm genuinely curious what your bookshelf reveals. And if you know a woman whose reading life is smarter than she's been told — send her this post.
Try This Tonight
Pick up whatever you’re reading or the last book that really marked you.
Ask:
Reaction. What’s my surface response to this book? Did I love it, like it, feel meh? What grabbed me and what didn’t?
Mirror. What is this story touching in my own life right now? What am I hungry for that this book is feeding?
Why now. Why are so many women reaching for this kind of story at this moment? What’s being practiced, rehearsed, metabolized through these pages?
Write down what comes up. Or just sit with it. And notice what happens to your relationship with that book, and your bookshelf, once you’ve asked.
Your reading life is not a guilty pleasure.
It’s a grimoire.
It’s been trying to show you something.
These three questions are how you start to read what it knows.
Forbidden Doors: Where Your Reading Life Becomes Your Map
If this practice sparked something in you — if even one of those questions made you go oh — I want you to know there’s a space for going deeper.
Forbidden Doors is a six-week experience for women who sense that their romance reading is doing more than entertaining them. Six Saturday mornings, May 16 through June 27, in a small circle on Zoom.
We explore the Five Forbidden Doors: five aspects of the self that culture teaches women to hide, and that romance novels are helping us reopen: body, rage, pleasure, instinct, and sovereignty.
You don’t need to be reading a specific book. You bring your whole reading life, what you’ve been gravitating toward, what’s been sitting on your shelf calling to you, what sparks your curiosity or even your embarrassment.
I bring the framework, the lens, and the mythic context.
Together we discover that the greatest romance isn’t on the page — it’s the one between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming.
This is the founding cohort — small, intimate, and genuinely co-creative. Your insights shape how this work enters the world.
Questions? Just reply to this email. I’d love to hear what came up when you tried the three questions.
