Scout (hearts) Dill

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird made me a Romance Junkie

There, I've admitted it, I was a weird child and possessed by To Kill a Mocking Bird.

I faded the ink of that book, reading it over and over again.  I’d read to the end, flick back to the beginning and start all over again. I was caught in a time loop without end, so convinced was I that if I just read the story hard and often enough, I could make it happen: Scout would get off with Dill.

I was aged 11, maybe younger. My concept of what it meant to be adult was zero. In my mind Scout and Dill weren’t bound by age, I didn’t care that Scout was a child, she and Dill belonged together, forever, damn it! And to this day, the lack of closure, the absence of a HEA torments me.

I didn’t picked up on the racism, I did on the injustice. And Boo Radley scared the shit out of me. Atticus Finch was the father I wanted as my own and Jem would have been okay for a brother, I suppose. But I wanted Scout and Dill to fall in love and marry. They never did.

……and that’s how my affair with the romance genre started. I was scarred by disappointment, felt cheated, and I distinctly remember making the vow that if I were ever to become a writer, damn straight my books would have a happy-ever-after.

By the way, I also believed passionately that Peter Pan fell for the wrong woman—Wendy was such a prissy-priss—and Tinkerbell got a bum deal!