One of my female friends maintains that you can't understand women without reading romance novels, just as you can't understand men without watching porn.

Romance novels, she says, embody the hopes, dreams, and fantasies of many -- though not all -- women, just as porn embodies the hopes, dreams, and fantasies of many -- though not all -- men. (Right, all men; what was she thinking?)

But then my friend told me that, in contemporary romantic fiction, oral sex and even a smidgen of good-natured lesbianism are increasingly common. It seems porn and romance novels are converging.

That got my attention.

So I signed up for the Put Your Heart in a Book Conference, sponsored by the New Jersey Romance Writers Organization. The gothic castle on the rain-swept moor in Scotland was booked that weekend, so they held it at a hotel in central New Jersey.

Though the spiking popularity of oral sex in contemporary romance fiction was never far from my thoughts here, I was most interested in finding out precisely what was going on in this enormous (400 women--and a few men--attended the gathering) but largely invisible sector of the literary cosmos.

Ridiculed by serious fiction writers and shunned by critics, the romance-novel genre occupies a shadowy niche in American culture: ubiquitous but ignored, massively lucrative but sneered at, in part because it tends to encourage writing like, "The eerie call of a loon beckoned the morning sun." But it sells: to the tune of about $1.41 billion worth in 2003.

Until my friend opened my eyes to the potential for girl-on-girl action, I believed that most contemporary romance novels were bodice rippers with names like My Heart Is in the Highlands; My Brain Could Be Just about Anywhere.