“Perhaps we will be rehabilitated in a century” – L’Express

A little reminder of the facts for those who may have remained stuck in the New Novel. New Romance has nothing to do with the formalists at Minuit. It is a brand that was registered in 2014 by Hugues de Saint Vincent, founder of Hugo Publishing. JC Lattès Editions were the first on the scene, having translated Fifty Shades of grey by EL James in 2012, but it was Saint Vincent who, with flair, really imposed this trend on us. From 2013, he released Beautiful Bastard from the duo Christina Lauren. A year later, he created the New Romance label and published Anna Todd (After) and Colleen Hoover. When he died in 2018, his son Arthur de Saint Vincent took over with the same success.

We meet Morgane Moncomble in the Paris offices of Hugo Publishing the Monday following the New Romance Festival. She is visibly exhausted by the dedications, but over the moon: “It was incredible! Thousands of people, all very passionate, very fans, very involved. It’s a community like I don’t know anywhere else in the world. the world of publishing. There are mainly girls, but there are more and more boys, including authors, such as Kentin Jarno, one of my best friends. Readers confide a lot. People write us letters, they knit us things, they give us gifts – I even get some for my dog! The New Romance Festival is a collective hug, a bubble that allows you to escape from everyday life. Taboos and judgments stay at the door. It’s cozy, cool, we all love each other, it’s very Care Bears.”

Trying to understand the New Romance phenomenon requires putting one’s prejudices aside and imagining an alternative publishing sphere where Hugo Publishing is the holy grail and where Gallimard does not exist. Born in 1996 in Argenteuil, Morgane Moncomble is not a child of the ball: her mother is a training assistant and her father, who has “never read a book in his life”, a works supervisor on construction sites. Young Morgane’s childhood and adolescence took place in Val-d’Oise, where she still lives, in Enghien-les-Bains. She discovered literature the year she was 11: “A friend gave me a children’s novel with a bit of fantasy, Spells and purses by Sarah Mlynowski. That was the trigger. It was the period Twilight, with vampires and werewolves. I also devoured Harry Potter. I’ve always loved imaginary worlds to take refuge in.”

Very early on, Morgane Moncomble dreamed of being a novelist. Her family tries to reason with her, telling her that writing can only remain a “hobby”. Taking her difficulties patiently, she thought for a time of becoming a journalist then, studying literature at the Sorbonne, worked as a reader at the XO editions where, by her own admission, she did not learn much. She then had a model, VE Schwab (Shades of Magic): “In her interviews, she said that it hadn’t worked for a long time, that she had struggled. It was only after her eighth novel that she had enormous success – she now sells million pounds. I told myself that we had to persevere, and that one day it might work.”

In the 19th century, his novels were published in serial form; in the 21st century, we offer our texts chapter after chapter on the Wattpad platform. This is where Morgane Moncomble begins and discovers the closeness with her readers, which will only grow – we will come back to this. In 2016, one of her friends sent Come, we love each other unknowingly to Hugo Publishing: “Hugo, that was the ultimate goal, I didn’t dare send my text to them – I had imposter syndrome, which never really disappears… The editor who received my manuscript contacted me, then Hugues de Saint Vincent invited me to the first New Romance Festival, which was held in Bandol. That was the start of the adventure.” Come, we love each other was released in 2017 and sold 9,000 copies in large format, then 50,000 in paperback. The beginning of a success which has grown, with a peak in 2021 for The Ace of Hearts (80,000 copies in large format, 160,000 in paperback).

First volume of a series of four novels, An autumn to forgive you is already the eighth book by Morgane Moncomble. Set in Scotland, the story is a sort of game of Cluedo mixing investigation into the assassination of a student and a love triangle (or even rectangle). The suspense works well and there are nods to Oscar Wilde, one of the novelist’s idols, who tells us “we adore her sarcastic intelligence”. Although recognized in her field, Morgane Moncomble remains snubbed by the literary world and traditional media, which does not seem to bother her more than that: “There is an undeniable condescension. People don’t talk about us, and when This is the case, it’s to say bad things about it, like with Sarah Rivens recently. Our readers are considered as midinettes, or women who read behind their husband’s backs – that’s where we are! Because we’re talking of love we would make sub-literature? It’s unfair. I love Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë and especially Jane Austen. She was very criticized and discredited during her lifetime, she is now a classic. Perhaps we will -rehabilitated us in a century or two!”

Absent from the pages of World of Books and of Telerama, Morgane Moncomble is her own community manager: she organizes her own promotion on social networks, and in particular on TikTok, where she is followed by more than 100,000 subscribers. A modern version of Amélie Nothomb who spends several hours each morning responding to her fans’ mail by letter, Morgane Moncomble devotes a large part of her time to communicating with her family on her phone. When we ask her about the last school year, she tells us to remember Next time you bite the dust by Panayotis Pascot, which evokes his homosexuality and his melancholic depression. Claiming to be bisexual, she is interested in the same themes as him (the difficulty of strictly defining oneself, mental health). In this they find an echo among today’s youth, to whom they seem to bring a form of comfort. A sign of the times, in September, Hugues Jallon, the boss of the very elitist Editions du Seuil, announced the creation of a “space dedicated to mainstream genre literature”, including romance. At the same time, Editis set up Chatterley, a house specializing in this same field. Other collections will follow here and there. Will this finally legitimize Morgane Moncomble and her ilk? “Yes, probably, although it’s a shame we needed that…”

An autumn to forgive you, by Morgane Moncomble. Hugo Publishing, 424 p., €17.