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This piece is from the CU Independent’s opinion section. Any opinions or views do not represent the CU Independent.
“You can probably pick this up,” Tara Tai tells me. “I’m quite an uptight person.”
I had not picked it up. Speaking to me from an empty room in their Boston apartment, Tai has a serious, but warm and generous demeanor. Tai, who is 36, is a Google product manager by day and has multiple degrees from Harvard University. They live with their wife, Audrey, and their dog, Gingko. Tai’s life recently took a turn when they became a published romance novelist.
“All my friends are shocked,” says Tai. “Because I am not a very romantic person in real life. I’m very pragmatic.”
Tai’s first novel, “Single Player,” publishes this month. It’s a queer romantic comedy that tells the story of two game developers who clash while writing romance storylines for a fictional video game studio in Boulder. Its two main characters reflect that contradiction in Tai’s personality. “Single Player” switches between the perspectives of its diametric love interests: Andi is driven and matter-of-fact, while Cat is softhearted, chatty, punny and bumbling. She blurts out things she regrets.
“I have a little bit of both, I think,” says Tai.
Though they seem like an Andi on the outside, they are just as much Cat – in all her nerdiness and judginess – on the inside.
Tai, who grew up in Yardley, Pennsylvania, dreamt of being a writer at a young age, but didn’t pursue it seriously for many years. In their undergraduate years at Harvard, they studied neurobiology and health policy. After graduating in 2010, they moved to Beijing to write a historical fiction novel and track down branches of their family that got separated around the time of the Chinese Communist Revolution.
“I went back to China to seek them out and to understand their stories and try to tell them,” explains Tai. They ultimately shelved the manuscript. “It’s in a drawer. I think I was too young to write it because it grapples with hard topics.”
Tai wouldn’t pick up creative writing again until 2019, when they got married and their wife encouraged them to resume following their passion. By that time, they had gone back to Harvard for a business degree and were working as a product manager for a Google sister company.
In “Single Player,” sentimental Cat convinces jaded, jilted Andi that telling love stories is worthwhile. In real life, it took a global lockdown for Tai to open their mind to romance novels. For most of their adult life, they had been an avid reader of literary fiction authors, like Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov and Toni Morrison. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Tai, a newlywed, started picking up romance novels.
“I pivoted to more consumable, accessible fiction,” Tai says. “Where you kind of knew how it was going to end, and it was more about how you got there.”
Tai enjoys writers like Allison Cochrun, who writes queer romances with raw, funny characters.
“I think they’re like the perfect amount of unhinged for me,” Tai says.
Soon, Tai found themself writing “Single Player.”
“I have trouble writing literary fiction, because I feel like every single sentence has to drip with beautiful prose and have really important insights about the state of humanity,” they say. “Leaning into the funny, especially for something like rom-com – I think there is an accessibility that is important to the genre – allowed me to just sit back and be like, ‘No, I’m going to let these characters just be human.’”
“Single Player” succeeds in being both enchantingly funny and authentically human. In one scene, Andi and Cat, unable to directly express their complicated feelings for one another, pass time together by playing Fantasy DILF, Tai’s fictional take on the real-life dating simulator game Dream Daddy. In another moment that is equally silly and touching, Cat pouts when she thinks dungeon master Andi killed off Cat’s Dungeons and Dragons character for personal reasons. Our real-life romantic relationships are often full of awkwardness and absurdity. Why shouldn’t our love stories be?
With a remote tech job but no home office, Tai worked their 9 to 5 in the living room, then stayed there on evenings and weekends to write “Single Player.”
“A lot of being a product manager is thinking about the relationships between people and what is not being said,” Tai says. It’s a lot like writing a novel, Tai points out, “except all those people are in your head. So when I sign off from work after a long day, it is sometimes really challenging for me to be like, ‘Okay, well, I’m still sitting at my desk. It’s the same desk. I just have to tab over to a different tab and do very similar things with imaginary people, as opposed to real people.”
At the beginning of “Single Player,” Cat, an accountant, goes out on a limb and applies to be a game writer, her real dream job. She is tasked with writing dual-point-of-view romances in a video game because she loves the authentic complexity that comes with telling love stories. Tai laughs when I suggest “Single Player” is an exaggerated way to play out their own fantasies.
“I have had fantasies of being a game dev,” they tell me. “And from my real-life point of view, I find rom-com as a genre can be a little bit – I mean this in the most loving way – over the top and hyperbolic. And I think I’ve leaned into that, or I try to lean into that a little bit.”
Tai’s writing feels semi-escapist, semi-true-to-life. I’ve always been curious about the real romantic lives of romance authors and consumers, so I asked Tai about theirs. Are those who are obsessed with reading and writing love stories great romantics in their real lives? Or do we tell each other stories about awkward dates and miscommunications that turn into sudden ‘I love yous’ because our real love lives are too complicated and depressing?
Tai’s own real-life romance with their now-wife, Audrey, began on OkCupid. Tai’s first thought about Audrey: she’s too tall. But they agreed to go on a boba date with her anyway. Tai had recently moved back to Boston from China, where they hadn’t been on a date for a year.
“The queer scene in China is very, very underground. And there’s also cultural barriers,” they explained.
Tai was eager to date again.
“I was 40 minutes late because I had to ask my roommate to let me into our apartment,” they remember. “I was dressed business casual for work, and I didn’t want to show up to my first date wearing, like, Ann Taylor realness, and I had locked myself out of my apartment.”
The date went well, and Tai knew something was up when, after only having been on one date, Audrey brought them back a souvenir from her trip to Iceland. Six years later, Tai proposed at the Met Cloisters.
I have to confess that I, like Tai once did, tend to read more “serious” literature and dismiss the rom-com genre as trite. But reading “Single Player,” I was struck by the humanity in all of it. Even though I’m not queer, or a game developer, or even a gamer, I found myself rooting heartily for the two characters to just stop arguing and fall in love already. The genre’s plain old accessibility makes a special kind of space for any reader to relate to any character.
This might be one reason why queer romances have seen a boom in sales the last several years.
“I’ve written other manuscripts with cis and straight protagonists, but they were not rom-coms. When I got the idea for “Single Player,” it was always non-negotiable for me that it was going to be sapphic,” Tai says. “There’s a good amount of sapphic rom-coms now, but there’s still very few featuring even one person of color protagonist, let alone two.”
Chels Upton, the nonbinary critic behind the romance criticism newsletter “The Loose Cravat,” writes that society’s ideas about the function of romance novels limited the genre to a certain type of heteronormativity for too long.
“Well-meaning romance readers tout the genre as didactic, instructing young men and women about consent and communication,” they write.
That kind of thinking leaves little room for queer characters, let alone kinky, lurid or morally ambiguous ones.
Both Cat and Andi are queer, Asian-American, complicated and entirely themselves. Tai’s writing doesn’t feel like it’s making a statement about being Asian-American or being queer, only that you can be both those things, as many people are, and fall in love.
Both Cat and Andi are out and supported by their parents. This is semi-true to Tai’s real experience with their parents, which didn’t go well when they first came out as a lesbian in high school. Today, having changed their pronouns to she/they, Tai isn’t sure whether they identify as a lesbian or not. But Tai’s parents did eventually come around to support them.
“It’s really important to tell stories that don’t center that pain, because romances are sort of fantasy,” Tai reflects.
Now, Tai is working on two more novels: One romance, one literary fiction.
Readers looking for a romance novel about two queer Asian-Americans will enjoy “Single Player.” But so will any reader who enjoys the genre, especially if they are a fan of writers like Ali Hazelwood and TJ Alexander. Like its author, “Single Player” happens to be joyfully and casually queer, just as it happens to be deliciously nerdy and funny. As Tai puts it, “I think those stories are important because they’re true.”
“Single Player” is now available for purchase, and Tai will be doing a reading and Q&A at Trident Booksellers and Café on Jan. 21 at 6:30 p.m. to promote the book.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Abby O’Brien at Abby.OBrien@colorado.edu.
