Former New York Times Romance Columnist Olivia Waite on Her Firing

On Oct. 30, novelist and New York Times romance columnist Olivia Waite logged onto BlueSky and saw a post by independent journalist Marisa Kabas. She read it, hit repost on a comment, and went about the rest of her day.

Later that evening, Waite received an email with a blank subject line. Her editor at the Times, Tina Jordan, wrote that the paper would not be continuing her freelance contract as the New York Times Book Review’s romance columnist.

The post Waite shared included an email exchange with New York Times editor Patrick Healy, where Kabas questioned the paper’s Oct. 26 article covering a new report released by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. The report called for an independent special counsel to investigate President Donald Trump’s ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and it included new details of rape allegations against President Trump by Beatrice Keul.

Kabas pointed out that the Times article made no mention of these new details and omitted use of the word “rape” entirely. Waite’s reposted a comment that called Healy’s response “unacceptable.”

“On Friday the Times declined to continue my contract as a fiction columnist, via a one-paragraph email praising the quality of my work but citing my presumably negative feelings about the NYT as inferred from my Bluesky posts, which they admitted they have been monitoring,” Waite wrote in a statement to Smart Bitches Trashy Books, who first reported the news of Waite’s columnist status on Nov. 3.

“I’m not interested in being a main character or going viral. I just wanted the romance people to know that this had happened,” Waite said in a video call this week.

Waite’s contract with the Times links to the paper’s guidelines on ethical journalism for “outside experts,” she said. In six years of writing the column, she said there have never been any issues with financial disclosures or conflicts of interest.

“I have never, to my knowledge, articulated my own critique against the Times on social media. That felt like a bridge too far, to me,” she said. “But pointing out that other people had valid critiques felt like—where else are they going to hear it?”

Waite shared her thoughts on the freelance nature of her contract, the romance genre’s relationship to issues of consent and rape, and where the state of romance books coverage stands now. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Zachary Fletcher: You mentioned working on your “Best Romance of 2026” column for The New York Times. Tell me about your column and that piece in particular. Are there still plans for it to run?

Olivia Waite: I feel like the authors deserve it. It’s not about me. This column has always been a relief for me because, as a writer, you spend so much time with your own work and then you have to go out and talk more about your own work to promote it. And it starts to feel really boring. I can love my books as much as I want, but I want to talk about something else at some point. And the column was about other people’s stuff. It was a chance to talk about what people are trying and to present it to an audience that might not have the reach to see where some of these debuts or marginalized voices were coming from.

I really like showing the breadth of what romance is capable of, rather than showing the five books you already know about. The “Best Of” list was a really important part of that. And there’s something really pleasing about going out on a best-of list—which is something that only happened because I insisted on it. That was something I deliberately did. It was not initially part of the gig. And now it’s part of the institution, and I feel like that’s a very small kind of legacy.

When I see someone in power who’s been accused of sexual assault—specifically coming from a government investigation that’s recommending a special prosecutor—I think that’s germane to what I tend to talk about and what I write about.

ZF: We’re now a few days out from your repost and when you received word of the contract termination. This also happened just before the 2026 elections. How are you thinking about the timing of these new Trump rape allegations and this current moment as a romance reader and writer?

OW: Sexual assault and rape, both in society and in history, is something I consider part of the romance beat. Because romance history itself is so tied up with questions of sexual assault. You go back to the early bodice rippers, and the one that people kind of cite as the first modern romance novel is The Flame and the Flower [by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss]. It famously opens with the hero raping the heroine. They used to call it forced seduction or dubious consent or a whole realm of terms for fictional instances of rape in a specific romance context.

And nowadays, with things like romantasy and dark romance and serial killer romance and stalker romance, the whole thing—plus backlash to the MeToo movement—you have this incredible genre-wide conversation on how do you negotiate consent between people whose social power is uneven? How does desire change that? Does it? Does desire excuse things? And again, this has been a genre-wide theme for longer than I’ve been alive, much less a working critic. And so when I see someone in power who’s been accused of sexual assault—specifically coming from a government investigation that’s recommending a special prosecutor—I think that’s germane to what I tend to talk about and what I write about. And so it did not occur to me that this would be a problem.

ZF: In your statement, you write about the distinction between feelings and critique when it comes to issues of rape. How do you think about the difference between what’s happening in a novel and in the real world?

OW: There’s a lot of very complicated conversations about rape in romance. In terms of literary theory, there are essays saying rape is different in romance than in real life. And you hear readers say over and over again: I enjoy reading rape fantasy, but I don’t want it to happen in real life, those are different things to me. A lot of survivors cope with the emotional fallout by reading very violent scenes of sexual assault. You see this in fanfic all the time. But it’s very delicate. How do you make a romance around somebody who’s had such a violating experience? And it’s this very delicate, nuanced thing, and there are a lot of people, myself included, who find the kind of stories where people are careful about consent much more soothing and escapist. So you have to, in these discussions, allow room for opinions that differ very widely from yours that are equally passionate.

And all that goes completely out the window when you’re discussing an actual real-life crime.

We do not have to allow for “well, maybe there was a reason this person raped.” That’s how you get the Cornell stuff happening. It’s one of the pillars of rape culture, the idea that, for a man to pursue sex is healthy and normal, even if he has to use violence or manipulation to get it. And so you can’t have the same level of detachment that you can when you’re discussing somebody who really enjoys non-consensual fantasies in fiction and finds them very empowering and soothing. Romance probably talks about rape more than any other genre out there. Especially and specifically from the perspective of the victim.

ZF:  The number of full-time working book critics is shrinking, and freelancers make up the majority of the market. Can you talk a little bit more about what it means for the Times to potentially lose this column?

OW: It really is a bummer to lose any books coverage. We have so little. It’s really hard to think that there’s not going to be any place to talk about romance on this level. And the column was so valuable for that, and part of why I took it so seriously. Jaime Green was doing it really well for many years, but her column was much more intermittent. She did it around 2-3 times a year. And when I came on board, they made it every other month, then monthly. It’s way more fun to do monthly and there are so many books. Like, too many books.

It’s really sad to lose any space for talking about romance, especially one we’ve held so briefly. Romance authors aren’t used to chasing prestige because we don’t get offered prestige. The LA Times Book Prize: 13 categories right now; none of them are romance. It’s still very much like the redheaded stepchild of the literary world.

ZF: You’ve written dozens of columns for the Times. Are there any books that stick out to you in your years of writing about romance?

OW: I think the book that encapsulates both this era at the Times and the era in which we’re living in is After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian. This is one of my all-time top romances now. The thing that got me about this book is it feels like somebody from the past is reaching out to shake your hand about the rough things you’re going through in the moment. There are political protests, queer civil liberties being suppressed. There’s feminism and immigrant questions and racism and economic woes, government fuckery and everything. It feels like somebody says: oh, I know just how you feel. And it also does so in this wonderful, warm, kind, thoughtful way. Nobody’s writing about grief in romance like Cat Sebastian these days. It feels like it’s offering space for sadness and solace in very equal measure. And it has a historical perspective, so it feels like it breaks you out of this modern sense of despair.

ZF: In addition to book critics shrinking, the outlets that cover romance books (and other genres in general) are also diminishing. Where do you recommend readers go now for romance coverage?

OW: There’s a ton of podcasts and author newsletters. Until I find a new home for the writing about books, I’m just going to start writing about them in my newsletter. Smart Bitches does things, but I think one of the best places is to find a romance book club either online or from your local bookstore. Find other romance readers, ask for recommendations. BlueSky’s great for this kind of thing. There are entire starter packs of romance writers and queer romance writers and romance writers of color on BlueSky. Find an author you like, follow them on social, see who they talk to, see who they recommend, branch out. It’s really hard. You have to build it from scratch right now.

ZF: To end at the beginning, how did you end up starting to write for the Times?

OW: So it actually began pretty much the exact way it ended. I was writing at the time for the Seattle Review of Books. It was March of 2020. Getting to write for Paul Constant was an absolute dream. It was great, but the pandemic was really hard. Everybody’s day job was demanding, and so the site had to close down. And so the day after I announced my last column, I got an email in my inbox from Tina saying that Jaime Green is leaving and asking me: Do you want to come review for us? And I’m like: you are fucking kidding me.

ZF: They sought you out! They headhunted you!

OW: The reason why the New York Times knew who I was is that the first time they tried to cover romance, they gave it to Robert Gottlieb. And he cooked it up so phenomenally that everybody made fun of it for a week. And I wrote a piece [published in the Seattle Review of Books in 2017] that was saying how Robert Gottlieb doesn’t realize he’s exhibiting the early stages of romance fandom. That piece got retweeted by, I think Ron Charles? Somebody at the Washington Post. So I’m pretty sure that’s how East Coast editorial knew about me in the first place. There is a sense in which the column came to me and departed in the same way—with a random email from Tina based on me critiquing Times coverage. It’s very symmetrically pleasing, which I like as somebody who really likes structure in her literature. That’s lovely, that’s a narrative.