BookTok Star Kennedy Ryan Wants to Keep Romance Real

Before Kennedy Ryan was a New York Times bestselling romance author, she was an eighth grader in a rural North Carolina town hiding harlequin romances wherever she could fit them in her room. “It was the age of the cliche covers. You know, the kissing couple on the front,” Ryan tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. “I loved it so much, and my mom objected so strongly I would smuggle romance novels into the house. I had 300 romance novels hidden in my closet behind boxes. Every night I would move the boxes out of the way and get a book and lock my door. It was literally like contraband.” 

While it might not seem surprising that an early aficionado of romance books eventually found a successful career penning them, Ryan represents more than just a new addition to the world of happily ever after. Romance has always been a popular genre, but is often stigmatized for the same reason hordes of people seek it out: its set rules. It doesn’t matter if your romance is of the werewolf variety, a mystery, or focused on two everyday work enemies that eventually fall in love: the two love interests have to end the book together. This requirement means whatever challenges authors bring up, including those that could keep the protagonists apart, have to be resolved by the time readers turn the last page. 

For modern romance —which has seen a drastic growth in both interest and physical book sales because of TikTok’s grassroots book community #BookTok — some of the biggest books are celebrated for their escapist bent and focus on tropes rather than specific details. Many of these tomes remove the conflict, fighting, even hard city settings for magical lands or cozy coffee shops to give readers a sense of peace and general understanding of how the journey will play out. But the popularity of sanding down the tension and defining characteristics out of romances has also inadvertently sanded down much of  the character diversity. Because while the generic version of a small town is just another small town, the generic version of your average female main character always ends up being a young, nondescript white woman. That’s where Ryan steps in. In a romance industry practically dominated by white female protagonists — and their equally white female authors — Ryan has managed to build an audience by purposefully leaning into the messy, and often politicized environment that people are actually living in. And for the author, depicting black women falling in love isn’t just important to her — she considers it a bonafide act of resistance. 

“I think of romance as a Trojan horse,” Ryan says. “Romance is, by and large, such a palatable, digestible genre. So I think it’s the perfect genre landscape to have difficult conversations, to talk about our hurts and how we heal and to talk about things that are uncomfortable. ‘Oh, we’re swooning. We’re having a great time. And, wait, were we just talking about voter suppression?’ When you read my books, you see women being loved outrageously. It’s not like it’s always hard. But I see my specific space that I’m carving out as this intersection of swoon and social commentary.” 

Each of Ryan’s books specifically use romance to hit on real life political issues. Her main female characters — and their worlds — vary, from her indigenous rights focused novel The Kingmaker, to the Harlem Renaissance inspired Reel to the domestic abuse-tackling Long Shot. But what remains constant is her insistence that all of her books include racially diverse characters — and a lot of Black women falling in love. 

“So often Black women are not seen as the standard of beauty. We’re not seen as people who deserve joy, who deserve softness, who deserve to be spoiled,” Ryan says. “And even if they don’t say that explicitly, when you look at how we are treated in health care, how our pain is treated, so many things are constantly saying you don’t deserve joy. And in the context of romance, it says [Black women] aren’t the ones who deserve happily ever after.  I want to write about them being celebrated. And that’s why I talk about Black romance as an act of resistance, because it’s resisting that idea that Black women can’t be beautiful and love interests.” 

Much of Ryan’s interest in tackling tension head on instead of shying away from it is because of the time she spent before becoming a published author. Ryan graduated from UNC Chapel Hill and worked for several years in journalism. After her college years, during which she freelanced and ran an organization for special needs parents, Ryan says she was so focused that she didn’t even have time to pick up the romance books she used to love so much. But when she started to read again for pleasure in her 30s, she realized her own perspective might be just what she was looking for. 

“Romance is my first love as far as genre is concerned,” she says. “But I’m glad that I didn’t try writing it until later in life. Because I think my experiences and how I’ve matured really shaped my brand of romance and who I wanted to center.” 

Ryan’s biggest work so far, the Skyland Series, finally comes to a close Tuesday with the release of her latest book Can’t Get Enough. The Skyland Series, which includes 2022’s Before I Let Go (in development as a television series with Peacock) and 2024’s This Could Be Us, follow Atlanta-based friends Yasmen, Soledad, and Hendrix through each of the women’s romantic journeys. Mom Yasmen must deal with a budding spark between herself and her co-parent/ex-husband Josiah, while planner Soledad has to rebuild her life after a devastating betrayal. In Can’t Get Enough, Hendrix, who has been a supportive fixture during Yasmen and Soledad’s books finally gets a taste of her own quick-witted medicine, when the one person she has sparks with, tech-mogul Maverick Bell, is the one person she really can’t be with. Hendrix is also child-free, something Ryan says she wanted to write into a romance with the express purpose of having her fall in love — and still not change her mind about kids. 

“When you’re reading like the Skyland series, these are 40-year-old women. And that’s very deliberate, because culture tries to erase us very early. I Can’t Get Enough is a very exciting, nuanced, and modern profile because we still haven’t really normalized women, saying, I’m just not going to have kids. Hendrix is very clear,” Ryan says. “And for the entire series, it was important for me that these three women existed together with very lives and reproductive choices and that they respect that about each other. This is a story that esteems the love of sisterhood and the centering of friendship and platonic love almost as much as it does romantic love.  I don’t know why people think that romance should be agnostic. If you want purely escapist romance, go read that.That’s not who I am as a writer and I’m going to be true to that.”