How romance authors celebrate life and love with a disability

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When Mimi Matthews’s bone fusion for a previous neck injury snapped over a decade ago, it reshaped her world. Her planned career in law? Out of reach. Her passion for riding horses? Out of the question. With a neck flare-up always on the horizon, Matthews was navigating an uncertain future, with limitations she’d never anticipated.

But the traumatic injury did give her something: a love for writing, which she has since turned into a successful career as a best-selling historical romance novelist. “This injury is 100 percent what brought me back to writing,” Matthews says. “I have written every book that I have written from bed.”

For Matthews, writing romance is a way to process the complicated emotions that come from living with a disability. Reading the genre “just reaffirms your belief that everything’s going to work out, and that it all means something … the things you’re going through. I feel that romance is incredibly valuable in that way,” she says.

Matthews isn’t alone in finding comfort within the genre and its happy endings. Our media landscape isn’t known for its positive depictions of disabled people. But within romance novels, characters with disabilities are frequently shown as they are – worthy of love and intimacy. They have meet-cutes, epic love stories and good sex. And as the romance genre continues to diversify, more nuanced depictions of disability are making their way onto shelves.

Now before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s worth noting that romance hasn’t always done the best job with disability representation. For decades, the genre reliably portrayed physical disability as a barrier to love – particularly for scarred war heroes within historical romance novels. According to Sarah Wendell, co-founder of the site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, that trope was frequently used within the narrative as a shortcut to emotional growth for the hero.

Wendell says disability was often seen as a character’s defining trait, which could be a little heavy-handed. It was used “to create sympathy for an otherwise abominably behaved character. And … that in itself is kind of ableist, because it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re only sympathetic because you are missing a piece of your body,’ or ‘you are having emotional difficulties.’” But things have changed in recent years. “I think we’ve moved away from ‘your disability as part of the conflict’ and moved to ‘any disability is actually just part of the character,’” Wendell says.

That’s the case in Erica Ridley’s upcoming regency caper, “Hot Earl Summer.” The book follows Elizabeth Wynchester, an axe-wielding heroine with debilitating chronic pain who’s determined to defend a castle against a power-hungry aristocrat. Ridley says she approaches writing about disability like she approaches any type of diversity. “I wanted to write about queer characters, where the angst wasn’t that they were queer,” she says. “I feel kind of the same way about the disability. … It’s a part of who you are, just like any other aspect of your culture, religion or anything else.”

Ridley also notes that traditional publishing wasn’t always open to romances about disability: “I definitely felt [writing about] rich, White, able-bodied aristocracy was the only way I was going to get published.” So, what changed? According to Ridley, industry conversation only shifted when the self-publishing boom proved there was a market for diverse romances.

And as the market has grown, so have the types of disabilities we see on the page. “In the last, I would say, 10 years or so, we’re seeing a lot more about neurodivergence,” says Jayashree Kamblé, a professor of English who focuses on mass-market romance novels.

Best-selling romance author Helen Hoang didn’t think much of making Stella, the protagonist of her first romance novel, “The Kiss Quotient,” autistic. She was stunned to see people felt otherwise. “It was shocking to me to think that it was extraordinary to write an autistic woman who wanted to have a life like everybody else,” Hoang says. While crafting the story, she drew on her own life experiences as a woman with autism. “I didn’t feel like I was being so, so outrageous and brave when I wrote the character, because she was coming from somewhere very familiar,” she says.

Nevertheless, for Hoang, writing Stella was an act of self-love. “It was very healthy for me at the time to write a female character with autism … portraying it empathetically, and not as, kind of, an infantilized character that you need to feel bad for.”

Romance readers connected with that. Some had spent years hungry for positive portrayals of disability and neurodivergence within the books they love. But sometimes that hunger translates into pressure to only depict differences in a positive light. Matthews says she’s felt that pressure. “I think in trying to be a zealous advocate for disability rep, sometimes an able-bodied person … is trying so hard to advocate for a certain level of acceptance that they do not allow for these lived experiences of people who have had a traumatic injury and [are] like, ‘I’m unhappy. I have lost something.’”

While the genre has taken strides toward more nuanced disability representation, romances between two disabled characters are still rare. Author Hannah Bonam-Young was looking for that kind of story when she drafted “Out on a Limb,” which follows Win, a woman with a limb difference, and Bo, a man – and total dreamboat – with an amputated leg.

Bonam-Young says it was important for her to write two disabled characters that had vastly different life experiences. “I wanted to point out that the disabled experience is varying,” she says. “I think, unfortunately, even with the best intentions, in some romances where only one of the leads is disabled and accommodations are necessary, it can become a bit preachy or it can become a bit like a how-to guide of how to love someone with a disability.”

Ultimately, Bonam-Young wants to see more romances where disability is normalized. “I really hope we can kind of continue to move in this wave of more subtlety and more nuance, and less … perfectionism,” she says. “We’re just messy people who are in disabled bodies and making mistakes and, you know, falling in love.”

In a society where disabled people are rarely protagonists, there’s power in making their love stories visible. Wendell concurs: “The message of romance is that you are lovable … that you don’t have to conform to some external standard to become lovable. You are lovable exactly as you are.”

If you are interested in reading a romance featuring a character with a disability:

– Mimi Matthews recommends “The Arrangement,” by Mary Balogh

– Erica Ridley recommends “Can’t Escape Love,” by Alyssa Cole

– Hannah Bonam-Young recommends “Act Your Age, Eve Brown,” by Talia Hibbert

– Helen Hoang recommends anything by Chloe Liese

– Jayashree Kamblé recommends “The Spymaster’s Lady,” by Joanna Bourne

– Kalyani Saxena recommends “The Winter Companion,” by Mimi Matthews

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Kalyani Saxena is a journalist and writer covering romance and fantasy. She’s a voracious reader in perpetual search of the perfect execution of the enemies-to-lovers trope.