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ok so this story gets its name from a fictional novel that John Robins reads over the holidays. It’s called “Turnabout” and it became suddenly wildly popular at the end of 2018 after Neil Gaiman casually mentioned it in an interview. It was on everybody’s holiday book list and John, bored out of his skull, picked it up.

The writing is a bit pedestrian, John thinks, but it’s engaging. The romance subplot is about two men, and part of him notes that there’s something refreshing about the fact that he didn't know that before starting to read it. It wasn’t sold as a “gay” novel. That’s good, isn't it? Not to mention that now he feels virtuous about reading something that’s not heteronormative.

So he enjoys the book until he gets to a scene in the book where the main character kisses the man he’s been in love with since the start. He reads two pages of the characters getting physical with each other and John thinks: this is wrong. It’s - it’s incorrect. There’s something even-tempered about the prose and what it’s describing, something unconcerned... John would even go so far as to call it placid. And that’s not right.

All of a sudden the narration in “Turnabout” is about whose hand is on which shoulder, about the exact location of each kiss, like the purpose of the book is to teach the choreography of each character, rather than describe what it feels like to be them. And, John decides, that would be acceptable, were the choreography something the reader could identify with. But these characters appear to have changed personalities as soon as they began to kiss, all of a sudden acting smooth and serene despite the fact that the entire romantic subplot was been based on their being emotionally incompetent.

John thinks, it isn’t that this author is describing something they’ve never done. André Aciman wrote “Call Me By Your Name” without ever having so much as kissed a man, let alone had a relationship with one, and look how that turned out. No, this author has no excuse. And the editor! What can they have been thinking?

John’s never kissed someone for whom he’s been pining for that long, but imagining it and then describing it realistically can’t be that hard, can it? There’s no excuse for this author. It’s not - take this paragraph:

[insert excerpt with wooden characterization here]

You see? It would never happen that way. When you’ve pined for someone for a long time, holding them in your arms, let alone kissing them, must be... what’s a stronger word for “overwhelming?” It must feel - John grasps for the right word - it would be unreal. It would be thrilling and terrifying and - no that’s not it. “Thrilling and terrifying” sounds an amusement park’s description of their roller coaster. It wouldn’t be like that it would be like - John opens his thesaurus app - shattering.

And there he is, fixated on this popular fiction, no, on the inexcusable flaw in this work of popular fiction, when it happens. It’s never happened before, he’s pretty sure, but now it’s happening, in fact it’s been happening for minutes now and he just didn’t notice. He’s thinking about what it would be like to kiss Elis.

He’s thinking about it as carefully as he can and as attentively as he can. He’s thinking about it so that he can imagine it and describe it because he knows, he knows that it would never, ever be like the kiss in this book. It would be -

(…Uh anyway that’s my idea for a britcom story called “Turnabout.” Sorry gotta run, I'm teaching in *checks* YIKES four minutes.)