Who says only beautiful blonde boyband members clad in pink lambswool sweaters clutching golden retriever puppies deserve blind adulation? Hail the middle-aged equivalent of the boyband crush: the literary crush.
How to start your literary crush
Pick your favourite writer. Or a writer you always wanted to read. Or a writer everybody tells you is so great. Like Tolstoy. (Shortcut for the impatient: Pick your favourite Substack writer.) Don’t just read the most famous book they wrote, read all of them. Follow how one person reasons, struggles, resolves one conflict, only to be caught in the next one. Like real life, I hear you say? Indeed.
How to maintain your literary crush
Real life is engaging with a person, their books, not reading the Cliff Notes. You are allowed to hurl a book at the wall, stop reading in mid-fury, write them an angry letter, ask them questions. You may even get a response. You may not like the response. Keep reading, keep digging: What is it that you like about your literary crush? What does this say about you? Is this an area of your life you might want to give more attention to? If you want to divorce your literary crush after book 3 (Substack post 3 for the impatient): what is it that triggers you? Are there parallels to this in your non-reading life?
How to shamelessly benefit from your literary crush
Here are 11 benefits of literary crushes:
1. Having a literary crush makes you look far more unique than a crush on Brad Pitt.
2. They’re cheap: no need for expensive luxury dinners to impress them, they’re yours to take home to bed for anywhere between 50 cents and 20 bucks.
3. No need to limit yourself: your literary crush can be male or female. You can also have several at the same time.
4. Your literary crush will always be there for you and never talk back: patiently awaiting you on your couch table/ bookshelf/ kindle. If you put dog ears or highlight the page, you can even skip straight to the good bits without foreplay.
5. Your literary crush will make it easy to escape the clutches of middle-aged bores who think they’re the world’s greatest gift to women at small talk events: don’t let them talk about themselves, their Rolex, their Porsche: hijack the conversation by giving them a lengthy summary of your crush’s latest work. If that doesn’t work, tell them how you cried when you read the crush’s latest book and how you write fan letters to your crush every day.
6. Stalking your literary crush online to find out where their next reading is will teach you how to improve your AI prompts and you never know where your knowledge about bookshops in Tasmania or Honolulu might come in handy.
7. You’ll never be short of a travel destination again: Your family will thank you for getting to visit so many bookshops in weird places they would have never discovered otherwise.
8. No need for a messy divorce if you go off them: dump them quickly and move on immediately to your next crush without repercussions from friends and family and minimal disruption in your daily life.
9. Improve your leadership skills: dumping your literary crush teaches you to be decisive even if you struggle to decide between two different types of cornflakes for breakfast.
10. Learn real-life relationship skills: if you ever meet your literary crush in real life, they may amuse, bore or disgust you. That’s ok, you don’t need to love everything about them to have a crush on their writing. Stay focused on your goal of having a literary crush on them, show up consistently, keep being obsessed and you are bound to succeed.
11. Ok seriously: having a literary crush can help you create little oases in your daily life which help you reduce stress (if your crush is not a horror writer) and immerse yourself in another person’s world. This helps you feel connected also to people you may think you have nothing in common with.
So broaden my mind: Tell me who is your literary crush and why in the comments.
For those of you more into fine art or music, I’d happily broaden my horizons there, too, for what is writing, but painting an image with melody and rhythm?
(Image courtesy of Microsoft Copilot)