The Things We Leave Unfinished

With two protagonists who are romance writers, the novel plays with perceptions about the romance genre while still faithfully adhering to its tropes, conventions, and structure, thus looking at the theme of romance from several angles.

One of the first assumptions the novel plays with is the suggestion that romantic love depicted in fiction is incongruent with real life. Noah accuses romances of being unrealistic, and Georgia initially agrees that happy endings belong to the fantasy of romance novels while real life tends to offer less in the way of satisfactory resolutions. In this, she has Scarlett’s loss of Jameson, then Brian; Ava’s several husbands; and Georgia’s own divorce with Damian as evidence. Noah’s tragic love stories are shelved in the general fiction section because of this presumed verisimilitude to life. His reputation is the reason Georgia says she picked him to finish Scarlett’s story. While Noah acknowledges the importance that the happy ending will play for readers of the genre, Georgia insists that Scarlett’s story take its model from life and have the more poignant ending. The happy ending of romance stories, the definitive aspect of the genre, is thus portrayed as an imaginative element belonging to the world of fiction.