In Spite Of You: This Gorgeous Queer Rom-Com Will Both Read You To Filth & Heal Your Heart

Patrick Lenton is hands down one of my favourite writers in the country. Smart and nuanced, he has a way with words that is truly unique; a spiky yet soft, beautifully weird lyricism. Lenton and I worked for competing youth media outlets back in the 2010s, and I’ve been a fan ever since, and have loved every book of his I’ve read. I tell you this as a means of disclosure — it’s obviously hard not to be somewhat biased when it’s an author whose work you adore and respect, but I did my absolute darndest to go in as a blank slate. But spoiler alert: this is a very positive review — but that is solely because In Spite of You is just truly fucking excellent.

Let me open by saying: hooooly fuck, do we all get absolutely read for queer filth with In Spite of You. Lenton has created something spectacularly tender, yet gloriously messy here: a rom-com that understands us — queer grudges and emotional scars, queer joy and beauty, queer failure and queer triumph. Just… everything. All of it. This book is a beautiful mess of queerness that feels as though it is buzzing off the page.

Here’s the setup: Jeremy, our self-deprecating narrator, is a pop-culture journo who’s broke, single, anxiety-ridden, and about to attend the 10-year reunion of his prestigious writing course. The reunion’s guest of honour: his toxic cheating ex-boyfriend. Naturally, Jeremy makes the call to do what all well-adjusted people would: create a revenge plan straight out of a noughties teen flick. He plans to transform completely into someone hot, rich, and deliriously happy, and swagger into that reunion arm-in-arm with a gorgeous stallion of a boyfriend. Enter Sam: infuriatingly perfect and phenomenally hot, who agrees to help Jeremy with his revenge plan. Will Jeremy choose happiness or revenge?

This is a gay heel turn on a classic revenge plan we’ve seen in plenty of hyper-hetero 80s, 90s and 2000s (hell, all eras really) flicks before, and it could easily have been done hellishly badly. But in Lenton’s hands, Jeremy’s spite-driven ‘makeover montage’ of a story spirals into something really elegant and honest: messy lust, emotional growth, kinship, and what we all risk by letting love in, by taking leaps to find out who we really are. It might be a time-honoured trope, but this ended up a truly stunning queer love story dripping with authentic self-hatred and hope. 

What hits me, especially reading this as a millennial queer with a cornucopia of mental health diagnoses (AND who worked as a pop culture writer, yowza), is how genuinely seen I feel. The frantic yet droning stress of adulthood, the itch of professional imposter syndrome, dating someone just to validate yourself in some way — all of that is writ with razor wit and heart. Jeremy’s internal monologue has me stumbling through my own head, and it’s like I’m reading my own worst day — and yet, laughing like all hell about it.

“Think Fleabag meets Boyfriend Material, but set in a new media office,” said Pantera publisher Lex Hirst — and I couldn’t have thought up a better comparison if I tried. There are one-liners I could tweet all week, and plenty of whimsy and fun — but we also see real nuance in emotion and feeling. It’s very real: one’s emotional growth rarely moves forward in straight lines, and we experience plenty of rather spectacular failures before we can ever grow as human beings. 

Also, seeing queer badness and fuckups being represented completely fucking rules. Human beings grow as people often because of shitty decisions, but we don’t often get to this kind of nuance or growth when we see LGBTQIA+ people in modern books or on TV. But In Spite of You, we get to see our fellow community members make plenty of shitty decisions. Seeing queer characters make choices that are ridiculous, or vapid, or cruel, or downright bonkers — is a balm for the soul. It’s real, and in this house we support queer rights AND queer wrongs.

But all in all, this is a perfectly tender love story that understands how queerness is survival, performance, hiding, building walls around your heart, lying, hiding again — and then eventually evolving to be a kinder, warm-hearted person as you start to realise that maybe, just maybe, you’re actually worthy of someone truly loving you. This is the queerness of everyday life, as jagged and tender and ridiculous as the rest of it.

So if you’re a chronically anxious queer who’s a secret romantic under all those walls you’ve built up over the years, In Spite of You is gonna get ya good. 

If you’ve lusted for a rom-com that’s tender but not saccharine, that’s gorgeously, smartly written, and is packed with spite-fuelled schemes, reckless gay abandon, and a narrator with anxiety so vivid it’s practically a side character — you’ve found it.