‘try-error-try-it’: Love, Loss, and the Subversion(?) of the Heteronormative Romance Story in Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“and that’s how you find it . . . you know, it” (268). Romances stories are often about finding happiness and true love, about finding it. In these novels happiness is both privileged and equated with love, and more often than not these love stories are about heterosexual happiness. Sara Ahmed, in The Promise of Happiness, describes the necessity of queer love stories when she explains “there are of course good reasons for telling stories about queer happiness, in response to and as a response to the very presumption that a queer life is necessarily and inevitably an unhappy life” (p. 94). My article explores this presumption by examining John Green and David Levithan’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010), specifically the way the novel encourages empathy for the queer characters by playing with the readers’ generic and social expectations of the romance story. Will Grayson, Will Grayson follows two teenage boys named Will Grayson, whose paths cross serendipitously. The chapters of this novel present simultaneous love stories by alternating between straight Will (who ends up in stable monogamous heterosexual relationship, and therefore has a normatively happy ending) and gay Will (whose future is not so certain). This paper contrasts the hetero- and homosexual love stories and analyses how the interplay of these stories engenders empathy in the reader. I argue that in this way, Will Grayson, Will Grayson challenges heteronormative expectations of the romance story.