Humour became prominent in romance fiction starting in the 1980s when American authors started incorporating elements of Hollywood romantic comedy to create romcom novels. This essay examines one such example, Here We Go Again (1986), by Joyce McGill. Published under a line of teen romances by Silhouette, the novel has many of the romcom’s components. McGill also creates metanarrative comedy, using a romance writer character to puncture the pretensions of romance’s critics. Lastly, she includes a second-chance romance plot that is resolved after other comic chaos. The novel is also worth adding to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) romance history—because it is an example of the genre’s whitewashed past. In the 1980s, many publishers asked BIPOC authors to write white characters and then marketed those novels as written by white authors. This is the case with Here We Go Again, since McGill was a penname for African American author Chassie West. Understanding the romcom genre, whether in film or novel form, can only be accurately done by studying such a text and its immediate political context in the 1980s US. Further, as a close reading of the novel shows, McGill questions white middle class mores even within the given constraints.
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