In her own words: E.L. Rae writes “romance that lives inside the panic, the silence, and the moments love feels terrifying.” She says she writes “romance for the anxious, the broken, and the people who fall in love anyway.”
This Won’t Hurt is a love letter from author to survivor. Like a mother to her babe, Rae coos, You’re going to be okay, as This Won’t Hurt wraps its love story around a broken-bodied boy clawing his way to somewhere else.
Damian made his way through hell, only to fall into another circle of it. Swords criss-cross his mind, there’s no way out, only down.
But he’s not alone. His Beatrice is Kira. If only we were all so lucky to have a Kira. So patient, so kind, so understanding and loving. She loves him when he can’t love himself. He becomes as she loves, because she loves.
This Won’t Hurt isn’t a romance. Not a traditional one ticking off tropes as it skips along its beat sheet. No, This Won’t Hurt is a spiral, it’s a spiky double-helix.
It’s a red rose tossed onto a smashed piano.
A story about accepting comfort inside the echoes of trauma.
It’s about the weeks, months, and years after the awful. How later every beautiful and benign moment is indelibly stained with that awful.
This Won’t Hurt is a long panic attack, it’s the steam wafting off of a scalding cup of coffee, it’s a freefall over the edge. This Won’t Hurt is the call of the void. It teases, asks, how bad would it be to jump? Why not?
Am I speaking about death or love?
“Everytime I tried to stand, the weight of it pushed me back down. I’ve fought to rewrite a story written in scars and silence, to rearrange the fragmented pieces of men who never learned to be whole. Pieces that never quite fit, never formed anything remotely close to a well-rounded, finished product. I am that product. The boy who came from two incomplete, broken men, who has yet to fully change the cycle.”
This Won’t Hurt is a story about survival, about what it means to have been hurt—really hurt—and the courage it takes to love anyway.
Rae’s structure, her pacing, her internal gaze is refreshing. This Won’t Hurt is soft and quiet, tender, even, as it sweats out its backstory and hurls you into the sun. There is no avoiding the burn. There is no getting out unscathed, not for any of us. This Won’t Hurt is a lot. It’s for people who know a lot. For anyone whose life’s beauty rubs right up against their pain.
E.L. Rae’s a member of The Republic of Letters, and her debut novel, This Won’t Hurt, is in our Local Author Directory!
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E.L. Rae is a writer from a small farm town in northern Illinois. When she’s not writing, she is spending time with her family, chickens, rabbits, and three legged cat.
Cathy Borders writes experimental novels and creative nonfiction. Her latest, Robin Williams Is My Uncle: And Other Stories We Possess is a work of autotheory on alienation and inherited trauma told through the lens of fairy tales, feminism, Robin Williams’s films, and the death of her beloved cat.