My Brain is Not a Soap Opera: On Reading, Writing, and Refusing the Cheap Consolation Prize.

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It’s hard to decide what to read today. People tell you, “It’s excellent, you’ll love it,” and you end up with a sour aftertaste and the feeling you’ve wasted your time. In the world of BookTok and Bookstagram, recommendations are everywhere, but they have less and less to do with me. I see those books at friends’ houses—hollow romances, predictable fantasies—and I feel a deep disconnect. I bought the famous dragons' trilogy because of a glowing recommendation and couldn’t get past the halfway point. It’s not just that it wasn’t for me; it’s that I found it… dumb.

 Entertaining, maybe, but empty. And me, God, I crave the opposite: books that leave me shaking, with an urgent need to reread them, to underline passages, to silently thank an author for having the courage to write something so magnificent and devastating.

I know it sounds elitist. I sound like the mother I am, with a life I’ve worked hard for and little time to waste, saying, “Back in my day, books had substance.” And it’s true. My refuge is in the old stuff: the moral integrity of Little Women, the decadent experiment of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the vengeful epic of The Count of Monte Cristo, the abyssal journey of The Divine Comedy. In the visionary poetry of Blake and the philosophy that cracked my reality open—Nietzsche, above all, with his Ecce Homo and Zarathustra, a hammer for idols and a fierce “yes” to complex life.

But this isn’t a nostalgic lament. It’s not just that “everything was better in the old days.” It’s a diagnosis.

I’ve come to believe that the best books, the ones that matter, are hiding today not in bookstores, but behind the deafening noise of genres like “romantasy,” which leaves those of us looking for something more with a bitter taste and a persistent question: why doesn’t this fill me up? Why does this fantasy of love and power, so popular, seem like a cheap consolation prize and, worse, a dangerous lie?

And here I have to confess something: I almost became part of the problem myself.

I wrote three hundred pages of a novel that was “going well.” It followed the codes, it promised to entertain. But one day I reread it and didn’t hear my voice; only the echo of what I thought the market wanted. I killed it. I abandoned it in a digital folder. And in the silence after that act of betrayal against myself, everything made sense.

My disillusionment as a reader and my surrender as a writer are two sides of the same coin. It’s not fatigue. It’s clarity. “Romantasy” isn’t the enemy; it’s the symptom. It’s the literary opium for a hyper-connected, exhausted generation, fleeing into fantasies of simplicity precisely because reality is too complex, painful, and precarious. They sell us the fantasy of predestined love because real love is a minefield of apps and mismatches. They offer us magical power because real power—economic, political—feels unattainable.

But I, from my life experience deciphering other people’s social manuals, see it differently. I see the masking. I see that these genres aren’t an escape; they’re the bureaucratization of desire. Everything is coded: the courtship dance, the magic rule, the clear enemy, the guaranteed happy ending. It’s the perfect world for someone tired of deciphering uncertainties. But it’s a gilded prison.

True literature, the kind that saved me and for which I killed my own novel, does the opposite: it doesn’t build prisons, but broken mirrors. Bret Easton Ellis didn’t comfort me; he showed me the glamorous void of Patrick Bateman and made me recognize in him the choreography of human disconnection. I read it and thought: ‘He’s following a script, too. His script is about success, consumption, and cruelty.’ But broken mirrors don’t just show the void of the present; they also reflect the eternal cracks in the human condition.

The classics I keep like dog-eared bibles on my shelf are just that: splintered mirrors of an uncomfortable truth. The Picture of Dorian Gray isn’t a fable about vanity; it’s an X-ray of a soul that externalizes its rot and believes, until the end, it can be saved by aesthetics. I read it and didn’t see a dandy; I saw a pre-digital influencer, trading his humanity for likes on immortality. The Count of Monte Cristo isn’t a simple tale of revenge; it’s a manual on how pain, when fermented into hatred, can build a prison more sophisticated than any dungeon. I read it and understood that the most perfect poetic justice leaves a taste of ashes, not triumph. And Nietzsche, my philosopher-hammer, in Ecce Homo and Zarathustra, didn’t give me answers; he blew up the soft questions. I read him and knew that freedom isn’t about choosing between paths, but having the courage to walk where there are none, in a world that offers you “romantasy” maps with the destination already marked.

Today, those broken mirrors have new names, just as sharp. Sally Rooney doesn’t write romances; she writes field reports on the emotional disaster of a generation that theorizes love but is incapable of feeling it without self-destructing. Ocean Vuong, in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, doesn’t sugarcoat memory; he tears it open with the most beautiful, devastating prose to show how trauma and desire are braided into the same lifeline. Mariana Enríquez uses supernatural horror not to scare, but to point at the real monsters that inhabit our history and our streets. They don’t offer scripts for redemption. Ellis shows the corpse of someone who follows a script to the end. Rooney shows the patient in therapy, still breathing but full of scars. Vuong shows the open wound, swarming and beautiful. “Romantasy” gives you a manual to finish the game. True literature puts you in front of the abyss that there is no manual, and that the game is your only life, messy, painful, and incomplete. Which of the two is more honest about the world we’ve created, and the one we have to live in?

That’s why my call isn’t to return to the past. It’s to steal fire from the present.

I’m not proposing to abolish fantasy or romance. I’m proposing to sabotage them from within.

Where is the fantasy about the “unchosen ones”? Where is the romance that explores the terror of surrendering your autonomy to a superior being, instead of glorifying it? What I long for, and what I believe many of my contemporaries feel a silent hunger for, is a literature that uses genres not to escape, but to confront. A dangerous literature. An uncomfortable one. One that doesn’t hug you at the end, but grabs you by the shoulders and forces you to look.

I wrote three hundred pages of what I thought was expected of me.

Now I write these, with the sharp tongue I was always told to blunt.

It’s for the hungry reader I was, for the writer I refuse to stop being, and for everyone who, after closing a bestselling book, feels the void has grown larger and more silent, instead of being filled.