So as you know, we started hot and bothered because we thought that there weren't enough places taking romance culture seriously.

Their pervading narrative seemed to be that romance novels are silly, for silly women, and only worth thinking about as something that is at best frothy escapism and at worst corrupting.

I knew that for me, romance novels were doing something

different and really profoundly important. They were helping me live in a broken world by

encouraging me to use my imagination to imagine happy endings. But romance novels, it might surprise you,

are not the only genre literature that people turn to for comfort.

They aren't even the only genre literature that I turn to for comfort.

I know that a lot of people read mystery and that mystery novels play the same role, including for me,

I probably read three or four mystery novels a year, absolutely with the same

instinct. And so as a special bonus today, I wanted to call up one of my mentors, Dr. Stephanie

Paul Sell, to explore with me what we make of mystery novels and what the genre has to offer.

Stephanie is not a romance reader, but she is a voracious reader of mysteries. And it just

really feels like there's more that we have in common in those attractions than are different

in those attractions. Stephanie is a professor at Harvard Divinity School, and her work focuses

on religion and literature

and the spiritually formative dimensions of the practices of reading and writing.

Let's get Stephanie on the phone.

Hi, Stephanie.

Hey, Vanessa.

I'm so excited to have you here today.

So first, I just want to start off.

What is your relationship to the genre of mystery?

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