Romance Road Trip: Meet Cute in La Mesa, CA
By Sara Shahein
Edited by Caelin Sullivan
Get your sunnies off and your reading glasses on. We've made it to our next destination! We are keeping it classic with Meet Cute’s owner Becca as we chat about all things historical romance, bookstores as a third space, and the must-see collection of romance books important to the genre’s history.
The Meet Cute
Sara: Hi! Thanks for joining me today! Let’s start with telling me a bit about Meet Cute, how long have you been open, and where are you located?
Becca: Hi! Thanks for having me! We are a bookstore focusing on genre romance, with a section of books we consider romance-adjacent and some clear fiction and nonfiction. We are in San Diego, California. Meet Cute opened our brick and mortar in 2022. We were the third romance bookstore in the country at the time. We had moved from our original location to a larger space and our permanent home is on a cute main street in a small town in San Diego called La Mesa.
Sara: I love a main street in a small town, that is the perfect location for a cute bookstore. I must ask, why romance? What made you want to open up a store that was dedicated to the romance genre specifically?
Becca: There were a couple things. I'm a lifelong reader of the genre, so I have a lot of knowledge about it. I'm pretty well placed to run the store, give recommendations, figure out stock, just as a starting point. At the time we opened the store there was a hole in the market for independent bookstores selling genre fiction generally and particularly genre romance. It's not something that a lot of indie bookstores stock very much of or know very much about or even value very highly. That has changed in the last couple years, but it remains the case that a lot of non-specialized indies do not really know or appreciate the genres.
Sara: There has always been a large population of romance readers so it’s nice to see appreciation for the genre growing now, especially in general indie shops. A bookstore tells its patrons a lot with just a name so, why “Meet Cute”?
Becca: I was trying to think of a name that would give both a sense of ‘this is a store that focuses on genre romance’ and also the point of having a physical bookstore. When I was first opening a lot of people questioned me. They said people could just get books online, why would anyone go buy books in person? I think it’s the idea of having a third space, the way coffee shops can be a place that is not your house and not your office. It’s a spot where you can spend time in public with other people, make friends, and talk about common interests.
Sara: I'm obsessed with the idea of the third space. I think we desperately need that, especially outside of the realm of social media. Many people may view their online communities as a third place and that’s an interesting concept to me.
Becca: The internet is really important for so many people, and also, I think, can be really harmful if that's the main place that you're able to socialize for long periods of time. And when we first started getting Meet Cute together in the spring of 2021, it was when we were getting our first round of vaccines. People had been in their houses for more than a year. I think the idea of being able to go to a third space felt especially important and the effects of the lockdown experience remain, so I think third spaces are really important to have.
Sara: I appreciate you having this mission in mind. We definitely need more third spaces.
I want to talk about how the store is organized. Do you have different sections based on subgenre? And how do you determine what to buy for the shop?
Becca: We’re organized by subgenre, so contemporary, historical, paranormal, and fantasy. Paranormal is a genre romance term, fantasy is a general genre term, and of course, now we've sort of created the portmanteau of romantasy, which also goes there. Science fiction also lives in fantasy because drawing the line sometimes between fantasy and science fiction can be very tricky.
Outside of the romance genre space, it's mashed together as science fiction/fantasy, so we put those all together. We have a dark romance section which can include books that are contemporary, historical, or fantasy. We think the overriding vibe of them is dark and people who are looking for them want to be able to find them, whereas people in fantasy would be surprised to accidentally pick up a book that’s dark romance, so we do keep those separate. We have a young adult section, and then we have our romance-adjacent section with mystery and romantic suspense.Then we have our queer fiction, nonfiction, and a very small new middle grade section because we’ve been asked pretty frequently for romance books for people who are between the ages of 10 and 12.
Sara: It’s pretty cool that you guys have that middle grade section.
Becca: There's not a ton available right now that is technically a genre romance for that age, which I think makes a lot of sense because a lot of the focus for kids that age is on friendship or school, but there are some and we do make a point to have those in the store.
The Climax
Sara: I want to shift from the shop to your experience running and owning a bookstore. What has that been like and what is your favorite part?
Becca: It's definitely the community. We have so many great regular customers and then the people in the industry, the authors we get to work with and my booksellers are all such great people. The other bookstore owners that we collaborate with on things like the book call,it’s a great support network when we have questions about how things work. I have bookstore friends all over the country. It has been a wonderful result of owning the bookstore.
Sara: It’s a mini community within a community, which is so fun. And I'm finding that so many of the bookstore owners I’ve interviewed know each other. It's been fun getting to hear what a wonderful support system you all have.
Hopefully I will be able to visit Meet Cute soon, and when I do, what is one thing I should check out while there?
Becca: I think one of my little favorite pet things that we have is our reading room upstairs. It’s a nice little sunny space where you can sit and read, but we decorated the walls with a bunch of romances that were important in the history of the genre. For example, the first Harlequin book by a Black author or the first book with a queer relationship, or the use of a condom on page. We have them all in little shadow boxes and they are fun to look at.
Sara: That is really cool. How did you come about acquiring those?
Becca: The internet. eBay mostly.
Sara: That's really sick. I can’t wait to come in and see them in person one day.
We briefly mentioned that romance has a growing appreciation in general indie bookstores, so in a world where some folks may still undermine romance, what do you do to combat this and show up for your community?
Becca: We exist, we're just talking about romance all the time because that's what we deal with. We talk about it in a serious way and in a fun way, we don't try to over intellectualize it when it's not necessary. It's not always meant for that, the books are also meant to be fun. We have made spaces where people can meet other romance readers and talk about books at book clubs or author events. We try to create these spaces in the store and also in our online presence.
Sara: Thank you, I’m glad you mentioned that online presence, I have had wonderful conversations about books online and this series wouldn’t be possible without them.
What would you tell someone that wanted to open a genre-specific bookstore?
Becca: I think it's maybe just the advice for really any kind of bookstore, there's a tendency to think about certain small businesses as really cute and therefore not as business. It happens a lot to other businesses as well. A romance novel loves to romanticize running a flower shop, which actually seems like a very hard business to run. You are dealing with people in situations of high emotion when they need flowers, but also, flowers die. Your inventory doesn’t last very long, so being a florist seems very hard to me. Bookstores are sort of similar where many people think they are a cute idea. And sure, it can be cute, but also running a small business is famously one of the harder things to do in the United States right now.
Sara: I think that's great advice for people that have this dream, it keeps them grounded.
I do see that Meet Cute ran a podcast at one point. Could you tell me how that came to be?
Becca: Sure, we don't have the podcast anymore, but the episodes are available. We did two seasons and it was just me. Like a bookstore, there is a lot that goes into a podcast. It was a very fun pet project because I love being able to dive deep with authors, artists, publicists, and editors about their work. The episodes are pretty evergreen, but it was a really wild schedule of me reading the books, prepping the interview, doing the interview, editing, and publishing the episode every week for like six months at a time. So that probably won’t be coming back anytime soon.
Sara: No, that is so fair. I co-host and edit a podcast for work and there is definitely so much that goes into it behind the seasons. I can understand how intense all that can be while you are also running Meet Cute.
Becca: It was really so fun, those conversations were absolutely a delight and it was such a great way to connect with people.
The Epilogue
Sara: Speaking of reading! What are some of your favorite tropes and subgenres, and then if you could just choose one of them to dive a little bit deeper into why you love it.
Becca: I don’t really read by trope as much as a lot of people do, and that’s a totally fair and valid way to do it, it’s just not for me. I look into more of the execution and the rest of the story and I do think tropes are mainly used for marketing now. Sometimes, and this is not an all the time thing, but occasionally the trope can substitute the plot, like the plot is not fake dating, we are fake dating because of the plot is more what I am looking for.
All this to say, I don’t really have a favorite trope, but I want to speak in defense of historical romance. I know it is not a popular subgenre right now but I think it should be. People have decided that it’s not fun because you have to learn something as a start, you absolutely don’t. Not all historical romances are written in a way that’s historically accurate. Although I would argue that some of them really are and the things you learn are very interesting details that are not the types of things you learn about in a history class. It’s not going to be the dates of battles, it’s things about the way people lived which I think is so interesting. The authors who have done that research put it into their books in a very natural way.
I also feel the stakes in historicals are so much higher than in most contemporaries and a lot of people love that. Both romantasy and dark romance, two very popular subgenres, tend to have really high stakes. I think historical romance has that because you’re putting your book in a setting where it was not very easy to communicate over distance, or in a society where once you’re married you can’t get divorced. The stakes of everything are so much higher. I also think people fear that historical romance is only white and straight. While a lot of it is, a lot of it isn’t, and those are my favorites. I am thinking about how people of color for sure existed in the Regency era and how they navigated that world is very interesting and important. In a similar vein, queer people have always existed and have found ways to navigate a world that wasn’t necessarily designed for them. It is important to think about today in terms of being able to find joy.
Sara: You make excellent points and your whole answer is making me want to go pick up a historical romance right now. So if I feel that way, I'm hoping that everyone else that reads this feels that way too!
Becca: For sure. I would recommend Liana de la Rosa, Adriana Herrera, and Beverly Jenkins, the queen who's been writing Black historical romance since 1994. My first book of hers that I read was Indigo, which is absolutely incredible and is one of those books where I feel like it had the energy and the fun of a genre romance and I learned so much. She does her research, as do Adriana and Liana. I would recommend Cat Sebastian, who writes queer historicals, and KJ Charles. Then Alexander Vasti, who writes both straight and queer historicals. And then, of course, I think one of the giants of the contemporary world of historicals is Sarah McLean. So pick up one of those. There are so many incredible writers working in historical romance.
Sara: Thank you for that list. Jumping off of that, what are you reading right now?
Becca: I've been on a weird little nonfiction kick actually. But in terms of romance, I just finished Daddy Issues by Kate Goldbeck, which I really love. In the world of contemporary romance she's somebody who's really spending time making her characters really specific people in really particular situations, which I like because a lot of the way I read romance is because I love to know things about other people, like I love gossip. To me a Kate Goldbeck book allows me to be inside these really specific peoples’ relationships which I never have the opportunity to do.
Sara: I also finished that and love the way Kate writes characters.
Becca:You feel like you know them.
Sara: Yes!
Before I let you go, I have to ask about an upcoming event you will be hosting at Meet Cute.
Becca: We will be celebrating the release of Embrace by Bal Khabra with Susan Lee on Friday, August 7th, and both authors will be signing books.
All Aboard!
Hop in readers, we are keeping it mobile with our next shop! We’ll be yapping with Christina, the founder of Sugar and Spice Book Co. about owning a mobile bookshop and hosting events for the fangirls. Have your sweet and spicy treats at the ready, Tennessee here we come!