The Golden Age of Smut |
As a kid, I’d always peer over the shoulder of my older sister, Serena, to see what she was reading—and then I’d follow suit. When she read Twilight, so did I. Like practically every other teen in the 2000s, I was obsessed with that book. I saw myself in the main character, Bella, an angsty outsider, and it showed me how fun it was to escape into a fictional world. However subconsciously, reading Twilight also helped me confront questions I had about love and boundaries for the first time.
Once I got to university, reading for pleasure took a backseat to my midwifery studies. Helping new mothers bring their babies into the world was meaningful but all-consuming; I sometimes worked for 24 hours straight (with the odd moment to sit, if luck was on my side). Serena and I joked on our extra-bad days that we should just quit our jobs and open a bookstore—one with the dark-academia aesthetic you see on Pinterest boards. By the spring of 2024, I was regularly crashing out and crying to my therapist about resigning from my job. When she said she didn’t believe I’d really do it, I took it as a challenge. That same week, I called Serena and, knowing barely anything about retail or publishing, we decided to make our bookish fantasy a reality.
It took us six weeks to plot out a detailed business plan: I’d reduce my clinic hours to part-time, and Serena would keep her municipal-government job in Marathon, Ontario, east of Thunder Bay, and manage the online store, finances and emails remotely. Instead of leaning on a loan, we each threw in $15,000 of our personal savings to rent a shipping container in Toronto’s Stackt market as a six-month experiment. Then, we settled on a unifying concept (romance novels, because........