51 pages • 1 hour read
Ashley PostonThe Dead Romantics
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Self-Growth Through Romantic Love
While the structure of romance depends on the protagonists falling in love, modern romances incorporate a journey of self-growth and self-realization, one that the protagonists embark on through their developing relationship. More than simply giving the lovers a happy ending, romance resolves personal issues and heals past wounds. The Dead Romantics adheres to this pattern as growing trust and companionship heal both Florence and Ben from their past betrayals and convince them to trust their hearts to another person once more.
Florence begins the novel feeling jaded about love. After her painful breakup with Lee Marlowe, she doesn’t have faith that the possibility of love exists for her, and wonders whether grand passion exists at all for most people. She’s decided: “Love was putting up with someone for fifty years so you’d have someone to bury you when you died” (8). Only very few exceptions—like the love story of her parents—stand apart from the rule that love disappoints and betrays. Her disillusionment reflects in her inability to write fictionalized romance, though her career depends on it.
When she meets Benji and is immediately attracted to him, Florence steers away, telling herself he’s off limits as her editor and that romance is dead. This is the truth she insists upon until they spend the night together before her father’s funeral, leading her to hope that romance is possible for her. Rather than being a grand passion that exists for all time, Florence comes to a new realization that love grows from a certain moment. It’s not some outside force that controls people but a connection built together.
Florence’s faith in love is restored partly by seeing her mother’s relationship with her father and other examples of how love and fidelity between partners endures, even after death. However, her real epiphany comes when Ben shows her that it wasn’t something fundamental about Florence, or a problem with love, that made Lee not love her. The problem, Ben insists, was Lee being a “dead-eyed narcissistic asshole” (205). Because of Lee and the string of breakups that came before him, Florence has become convinced that she’s easy to leave. Ben changes her mind: “Ben […] saw me for all my chaotic flaws and my stubbornness and still wanted to stay” (284). Ben’s companionship and attraction teach Florence that she is loveable after all, making her believe love is possible for her.
Florence also reaches a deeper understanding of the nature of love through coming to terms with the sudden and wrenching loss of her father. His model of love proves a guide. At his funeral, Florence realizes that love “is loyal, and stubborn, and hopeful” (286). It exists not in the grand gesture of romance narrative but the small connections of daily life: “It was life, wild and finite” (286), she concludes. With that realization, Ben in ghost form departs from her life; she’s accomplished what he came to do, which was to help her believe in love again. Following the trope of the romance novel’s happy ending, Ben reappears in human form so that Florence is able to have a fully dimensional relationship with him.
Though the novel is not from his point of view, Ben undergoes his own growth in the time he spends with Florence. He believed he was at fault for his fiancée’s betrayal, and has cheated himself out of love by working too much. He wants passion but has deferred his search for a relationship in pursuit of his career. Florence makes Ben see that he is worthy of love, too, and that he is not responsible for his ex’s betrayal. Ben also has had people he loves leave him; he lost his parents and his grandmother, and he has no other family. He is drawn strongly enough to Florence that he is willing to risk being hurt again.
In the final move toward reconciliation and the completion of the romance arc, Florence must acknowledge that love is possible for her. She has a weak moment when she leaves the hospital without seeing Ben; his ex is in the room and Florence fears that this is not her love story. But when she believes that he could know and truly love her, she opens herself up to romance. When Ben recognizes that his time with Florence was not a dream after all, he opens to the same possibility. With both the leads ready to accept love and commit to one another, their past wounds heal and their faith in love is restored. The romance concludes with its happy-ever-after and the reveal that, because Ben can see ghosts now, too, Florence is no longer alone in her experience.
The Impact of Death, Loss, and Grief
Interwoven with the love story of The Dead Romantics is the heavy theme of grief, centered on Florence’s experience of losing her father. Florence and her father were close, which deepens her sense of loss. While her father’s death is the inciting event that draws Florence back to Mairmont and returns her to her family, the grief theme provides contrast with Florence’s developing romance with Ben. The theme of grief and loss is amplified by Florence’s heartbreak over her breakup with Lee, which is still haunting her at the beginning of the novel. While Florence’s romantic journey entails that she reclaim her belief in love and romance, her character growth advances through understanding that love is made sweeter by the transience of life and the imminence of loss.
Death has always been a fact of life for Florence, growing up as she did in a funeral home. There is nothing particularly morbid or fearful about it for her. Her father regarded death as a stage in a life journey and taught her that spirits can exist after death, their voices heard in the singing of the wind. Florence was a child when she began to see ghosts. These were never terrifying experiences for her; instead, they were opportunities to help a spirit transition to whatever comes next, which Florence doesn’t have any developed ideas about. To deal with the daily experience of death and interacting with grieving families, Florence’s dad kept an attitude of celebration. Florence remembers him playing music when he would straighten the parlor after a funeral, and he has a playlist of happy songs he calls the “good goodbyes.”
The novel’s stance toward death is lightly satirical, reflected in the chapter titles and funny moments like the poisonous plants distinguishing the different rooms of the B&B or the crows that follow Ben. However, the attitude toward grief is more sober, as Florence grapples with the various stages. There’s the shock when she first learns of her father’s heart attack and has the unreal sense that “the world spun on, and on, and on, without my dad in it” (64). Florence feels that continued sense of unreality in trying to adjust to loss and the strangeness of the outside world continuing while her inner world is devastated. She arrives in Mairmont and the knowledge that her dad is dead accompanies every step—on the plane, getting the Uber, standing on the steps of the funeral home. Even watching the sunset, she thinks—“it still bled reds and oranges into the horizon like a watercolor painting, and my dad was dead” (66).
With the loss comes bitterness. The moments she shared with her dad are “gone—all those moments are gone” (103). Being back in Mairmont, however, reconciles Florence to the other losses, for instance, her disillusionment with the town when she became an object of gossip, suspicion, and ridicule after solving Harry O’Neal’s murder. She feels the presence of her childhood self, the girl who buried her smutty fan fiction beneath the floorboards of the funeral parlor. She recalls her love of stories, which helps her write her dad’s obituary, an important step in reconciling herself to his loss. At the funeral, at her father’s request, Florence reads his final letter to the family. Her father invests her with this task because she is the writer among them, and he is proud of her gift. Recalling his faith, love, and belief in her helps Florence say goodbye, knowing that part of her father will always remain with her.
Near the end of the novel, Florence thinks that her week in Mairmont didn’t allow her to learn much about Ben because she was grieving and it “was hard to make space with a sorrow that full” (309). However, her ability to fall in love with Ben even at this low point in her life shows Florence that love and death, and life and loss, are inescapably intertwined. When she is able to hear her father from beyond the grave, speaking to her in the letter he left with her secret stash, Florence feels reaffirmed in all her abilities, including her ability to communicate with ghosts and the fancy she shares with her father, that the dead are singing in the wind. This connection with her father and the sense that love continues even after death allow Florence to deal in a healthy way with her grief.
The Importance of Following One’s Dreams
Rose’s backstory of showing up in New York City with a duffel bag and money stuffed into her shoes hints at the importance of following one’s dreams, whether these are dreams of a career, a relationship, or simply an experience of life. Poston explores this theme through the arcs of the protagonists, Florence and Ben, along with the arcs of the secondary characters.
Florence always loved writing, as evidenced by the fanfiction she wrote as a girl. While she hid the stories, she pursued her dream in New York City and eventually got an agent and a publisher for her manuscript—a dream come true for many writers. When her novel didn’t sell well and her publisher and agent dumped her, Florence reassessed but didn’t abandon her dream. She consoled herself by writing, which is how the ghost of Ann Nichols found her and offered her a job.
As a ghostwriter, Florence gets to follow her dream and see her books, under Ann Nichols’s name, shelved next to the superstars of the romance genre, like Nora Roberts and Julia Quinn. When her contract ends, Florence accepts an offer of representation from Ann’s agent to write books under her own name. She’s inspired to pursue this dream by revisiting her early stories stowed under the floorboards and remembering how much she loves writing.
Ben is portrayed as an ideal match for Florence, as they share a similar love for storytelling. He tells Florence he’s an editor because he is chasing the feeling he had when he read his first romance novel, which was written by his grandmother. He shares with Florence how he likes the dreamscape that romance paints—the Technicolor world where things seem more vivid, emotions are heightened, and things work out happily in the end. Ben’s appreciation for Florence’s first novel validates her dream, and his appreciation for the manuscript she submits puts their career goals and dreams in harmony.
The importance of following one’s dreams is underlined by the unfinished business that Florence says the ghosts that visit her have. Usually, she says, they simply want to tell their stories. Being a ghost suggests they have something on earth to resolve, a message to share or, in Ben’s case, an experience they still wish to have.
Through Florence’s family, the novel also explores the importance of following one’s dreams, and the joy and beauty this brings. Florence’s brother Carver has a career in the tech industry but in his spare time pursues his hobby of woodworking. In the novel, he makes a cage to hold the crows that their dad wants for his funeral, and Florence thinks it is a beautiful piece of work. Alice’s dream is to take over the funeral business. She is the one who prepares their father’s body and worries over whether his makeup and clothing are right. Their father’s will requests that the Days Gone Funeral Home go to Alice when their mother is ready to hand it over, and Florence congratulates Alice, knowing that taking over the family business is Alice’s ambition, too.
The novel also shows that dreams can change, as suggested by secondary characters. Dana, who is at the B&B when Florence first arrives, tells Florence they never expected to stay in Mairmont, but that “life takes you unexpected places” (93). Similarly, Florence wonders if her mother “ever regretted marrying Dad, and moving to a small nowhere town with nowhere people, but she never gave the slightest hint she did” (87). Instead, her mother made the best of her circumstances, taking “unloved things” and turning them “into wonders.” Ann Nichols lingers after death, not only to ensure that Florence will take care of her legacy as a writer, but because she also wants Ben to find love.
The goals that different characters hold, and the paths that characters chart for their lives, speak to the importance of following one’s dreams, as well as the importance of remaining flexible to surprises. The novel suggests that following dreams and passions is a fulfilling path, promising happiness in the end.
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By Ashley Poston
