“ I watched you these six months becoming a whole different person,” he tells Louisa, “ someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities. Louisa, for her part, helps Will overcome his self-centeredness, his bitterness, and even his depression. He introduces her to opera (very Pretty Woman), travel, and her own potential. Over the course of the book, Will broadens Louisa’s horizons. Will, before his accident, was, in his own words, a self-centered “ arse” and a callous womanizer after his accident, he is consumed with bitterness. Louisa, at the start of the novel, is a lower-middle-class woman afraid to dream beyond her small English town and bland, exercise-crazed boyfriend. As with most heroes in romance novels, Will is wealthy, powerful, controlling, and emotionally distant. Even beyond the damaged hero, though, Me Before You functions as a romance because it’s about two people falling in love, and becoming more complete, and more themselves, while doing so. And yet, putting the ending aside, Me Before You has almost all the characteristics of a romance novel. Not the upbeat love-and-marriage ending you expect from a romance. At the book’s conclusion, he goes to Dignitas, the assisted dying organization in Switzerland, and ends his life.

Will, paralyzed from the neck down, is miserable, and even Louisa’s love can’t reconcile him to the limitations of his wheelchair. The two do fall in love, but they don’t live happily ever after. The novel is about the relationship between Will Traynor–a former high-powered executive put in a wheelchair by a motorcycle accident–and his caregiver, Louisa Clark. If happy endings define crappy romance for critics, the Jojo Moyes’ now-a-major-motion-picture best-seller Me Before You poses an interesting case. As a skeptical Harper’s article puts it, “ Bad Romance: One genre and a billion happy endings.”

Happiness is a frivolous dream reality is harsh and serious, like a Dickensian novel. But no major literary critic has ever treated romance as a serious genre. Having grown up reading romance novels, I used to believe love was the most important thing. They live happily ever after, or in the genre shorthand, HEA.

The hero and heroine kiss and/or marry and/or ride into the sunset.

After you by jojo moyes