The Grand Gesture

Generally speaking, I’m more of a grovel kind of girl. In fact, I coined the phrase “cold storage” for when a character in a romance (who am I kidding, this is almost always a man) has wronged another one so deeply that I couldn’t trust the author to make him suffer enough for my liking. So what I’d do was wait for the moment when his suffering was the most pronounced—think Jimmy after throwing Lena out, or Sophie flouncing out of Scottie’s trailer, or Lothaire cutting out his own fucking heart and sending it to Ellie— and then I’d just put the book down for a few hours…effectively leaving him hanging there, like Wile E. Coyote over the edge of the cliff, staring into the abyss and desperately wishing for forgiveness (and gravity) to bring him back to Earth.

That man was going to have to suffer until EYE was ready to forgive him. Why yes, I spent 1st grade all the way through college in Catholic institutions. How could you tell? All joking aside, my belief in the redemptive power of suffering is something we’ll have to unpack later. Because this newsletter is about another kind of ending, the Grand Gesture. Here, a character screws up and needs to prove to their love through some combination of words and action. A classic example would be something like “public declaration of love from an emotionally reserved character.”

These often don’t work for me. They can feel underwhelming, silly, or even creepy. The worst is when the grand gesture is cringeworthy rather than romantic, and “embarrassment contact high” is not the feelings profile I want at the end of a romance novel. To be honest, this just wasn’t a thing I spent too much time thinking about until I read Fiasco by Constance Fay. When the grand gesture happened, I sat straight up in my bed like Johnny Cammareri’s dying mother in Moonstruck and I GASPED. It was perfect! Let’s look at how and why it works. Spoilers ahead.

In Fiasco, Cyn Khaw is a bounty hunter (she’ll be our Grand Gesture do-er) for a decade and has lived through the regular injuries of the job. However, Cyn had a truly traumatizing experience, one so harrowing she fears she will never recover from it. She was spaced, which means some bad guys tried to kill her by throwing her into the void of space without a suit. 100% of the time, this means instant death. I won’t spoil how or why she survived, but I will tell you that this experience was so unbearable that the minute she falls asleep, she relives it in her nightmares:

She wakes up from these nightmares screaming. But not regular screaming, this sound is so primal that they terrify her and anyone else who hears them. She avoids sleep at all costs.

While on a mission to find a deadly kidnapper, Cyn falls in love with medic Micah Arora. For romance reasons, a powerful man named Carmichael Pierce is blackmailing Cyn. Pierce demands that Cyn turn Micah over to him, but she’s in love with Micah! Eventually she decides she cannot turn Micah over to Pierce, but she also doesn’t tell Micah the truth about it.

Of course, Pierce gets his hands on Micah and just as Cyn arrives to save Micah, Pierce thrusts the helmetless Micah through a plasma doorway and out into space. And Cyn, who has spent years trying to outrun the terrifying memories of being spaced hurls herself right out the doorway after him.

Now that, my friends, in a grand gesture. And thinking about the perfection of this moment helped me realize why other grand gestures fell short.

1. The gesture itself is not the moment, instead it is born of the moment. Often grand gestures fail because they feel contrived and manufactured. Cyn doesn’t stop to think, plot, or plan. The moment itself tells her what she must do. It is simply unbearable to her that Micah will suffer and die in this way.

2. The gesture comes at a very high cost. This is her literal worst nightmare. Not a single person reading this book would have blamed Cyn for just collapsing to the floor and giving up. She’s the only person who has survived being spaced, yes, but she doesn’t know for certain that she can survive it again. So the physical danger is real, and that’s not even taking her terror into account.

3. The gesture is not meant to manipulate or force the other person to feel or respond a certain way. Cyn’s actions are not engineered to elicit a certain outcome. In fact, she truly doesn’t expect Micah to forgive her, she just can’t conceive of the universe without him.

4. Even so, the receiver understands the cost, meaning, or importance of the gesture. And in most cases, they never would have asked or expected the gesture of the do-er. And it’s this fact that proves to the receiver that the gesture was sincere. Micah knows what happened to Cyn, and he never in a million years would have expected her to space herself to save him.

5. The grand gesture echoes the struggles and themes of the text. The problem with so many grand gestures is that they comes out of nowhere. Who cares if you get on the Jumbotron and propose or buy all the girl scout cookies from the local troop. The best grand gestures are highly specific to these characters in this world as this time. Lift it up and put it in another book and it won’t make sense.

Great authors can seed a story with all the sleeve buckles and plasma doors they want, but that doesn’t mean readers know how it will end up. At the end of the day, the best grand gestures have to surprise and delight us as readers— it might seem inevitable in retrospect, but we didn’t anticipate it until we arrive at that moment with the characters.

Surely no one could have expected Cyn to jump into space for that man! No one tell Wile E. Coyote. He thought it was gravity that was the strongest force in the universe, but it was love all along.