55 pages • 1 hour read
The Bodyguard
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Background
Authorial Context: Katherine Center
Katherine Center is a best-selling author known for her contemporary romance novels. She wrote her first novel in the sixth grade, and after nearly a decade of rejections, she published The Bright Side of Disaster in 2006 and followed it with many others. Two of her books—The Lost Husband and Happiness for Beginners—have been made into movies, and The Bodyguard is her ninth novel. Center has been called “the reigning queen of comfort reads” by BookPage, and she refers to her books as “bittersweet comic novels,” often writing stories about heroines who face struggles in their lives but are still able to find happiness (Center, Katherine. “About.” KatherineCenter.com). Center’s novels focus on joy as much as sorrow. Firmly believing that reading and writing should be fun, she has written an essay on this idea and has also delivered accompanying talks called “Read for Joy,” which focus on the idea that the stories we read have intrinsic value in our lives.
Center wrote The Bodyguard during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which she struggled to find joy. In the author’s note of the novel, she writes that “It’s a story I wrote when my real life, like most people’s, was full of worry, and stress, and uncertainty, and fear, and isolation” (489). Center was also inspired by a place in which she felt joy while writing The Bodyguard: her grandparents’ cattle ranch outside of Houston, Texas, which is her own hometown as well as that of her main characters. Center not only based the primary setting of the novel on this ranch, but she also claims that “the Stapletons’ house is my grandparents’ place [...] and it was such a bittersweet joy to be there” (490).
Literary Context: Contemporary Romance
Most of Center’s novels, including The Bodyguard, fall into the genre of contemporary romance and the subgenre of romantic comedy. Although The Bodyguard deals with darker subjects such as grief, loss, and guilt, it is underscored by lighthearted and comedic moments that often shift the tone away from the more serious subject matter. Contemporary romances are categorized by their happy endings and familiar plotlines but often focus on the main characters’ personal growth and the obstacles they must overcome to achieve their happy ending. As in The Bodyguard, most contemporary romance heroines and heroes are flawed but often help each other to overcome the barriers that prevent them from being able to become romantically involved.
Just as contemporary romance novels rely on familiar plot patterns, they also often involve well-worn tropes, archetypes, and situations such as enemies-to-lovers relationships, marriage-of-convenience plotlines, and small-town settings. The Bodyguard uses many tropes typical of contemporary romance novels, such as the office-romance storyline, in which people who work with one another fall in love despite the rules that forbid it. Forced proximity, or the “only-one-bed” trope, is another common plot device used in The Bodyguard, as it forces characters like Jack and Hannah to be physically close despite their desire to avoid becoming romantically involved. Relationships between bodyguards and their clients are also not uncommon in contemporary romance novels and can be found in other books like Ana Huang’s Twisted Games or Sarah Adams’ Practice Makes Perfect, along with popular films and television series in this genre such as the identically named 1992 film, The Bodyguard, which starred Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in the respective roles of client and bodyguard. Like many romance authors of the 21st century, however, Center significantly inverts the typical relationship of a male bodyguard and female client, making Hannah the one in charge of protecting Jack’s life and the stronger character of the two.
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