Five years ago, Alison Cochrun was a high school English teacher so consumed with grading student essays about Frankenstein that she barely had time to date, much less figure out that she was gay.

Today, the 37-year-old is a full-time author of queer romance novels, wife to a wife, and mom to an infant. Her third book, Here We Go Again, which she shorthands as a “sapphic road-trip rom-com about death,” is out April 2, and she’s already sold a fourth.

Her authorial origin story is a romance plot in its own right. It began, as these things do, with an idle thought on an unremarkable day. It was June 2019. Students were gone for the summer and Cochrun was putzing about her classroom in Vancouver, Washington, across town from the high school she once attended. She’d been watching The Bachelorette, and as she cleared out file cabinets, her mind found the seed of a story. What if, she wondered, someone like me went on that show?

One week later—yes, one week later—she had finished a manuscript (that she would spend the rest of the summer revising). The Charm Offensive, published by Simon & Schuster imprint Atria in 2021, follows an anxious tech millionaire named Charlie who, having been ousted from his own company after a panic attack, tries to rehab his image by going on a Bachelor-esque show. On set, he falls in love not with any of the lovely women presented for his benefit but with a male producer, Dev, a hopeless (though avoidant) romantic who shatters all of his defenses.

“It’s the reason I was able to come out,” Cochrun says of writing The Charm Offensive. “Charlie is a lot like me, but I was like, Oh, if he’s a man with abs, no one will know this is me working through my own stuff.” Safe behind the façade of a well-muscled male protagonist, her feverish drafting was, she says, “super cathartic.”

Catharsis is key to romance. The genre honors big feelings, the power of a sloppy sob, and unabashedly earnest declarations of love. Any true romance plot promises a happily ever after, and that safety net frees authors and readers to chew on such topics as grief, illness, and family trauma in the run-up. At one point during the writing of The Charm Offensive, Cochrun’s sister asked if Charlie and Dev were kissing yet. “No,” she replied. “Right now they’re just talking about their mental health.”

Cochrun’s second novel, 2022’s Kiss Her Once for Me, is a Portland-set holiday romance featuring a Powell’s meet-cute, a first kiss on the Burnside Bridge, and a romping few chapters at a Mount Hood ski chalet. Like her first book, it’s raw yet gentle, and quite funny (the boozy grandmas alone are worth the price of admission).

It also hit closer to home. Writing a female couple—Ellie, adrift and afraid of failure, and Jack, a butch baker who lives in an Airstream trailer—was “scary as hell,” Cochrun says. She’d just made a Hinge profile and was for the first time going on dates with women. “Here I was, writing this book about a character who once again is very much like me,” she says. “I was asserting, Here is this messy person, and she is worthy of love.”

By the time Kiss Her Once for Me dropped, Cochrun had signed a deal for her third and fourth books and quit her teaching job. She’s now sold more than 100,000 books across all formats, and she’s part of a powerful industry: as book sales decline overall, romance reliably brings in $1 billion a year. The last couple years have seen a singular surge, in part because, as Cochrun’s books evidence, queer romance is finally getting its due. “We couldn’t keep Kiss Her Once for Me in stock over the holidays,” says Katherine Morgan, who oversees the romance section at Powell’s City of Books and is set this summer to open her own romance bookshop, Grand Gesture Books, which will be Portland’s first. (Morgan will also host Cochrun at a book release event on Tuesday, April 2.)

In Here We Go Again, Cochrun takes up the enemies-to-lovers trope. Rosemary and Logan, childhood BFFs torn asunder by a confusing teenage kiss, are now high school English teachers in their hometown (sound familiar?). They’ve kept their distance as adults but are brought together by their former teacher, who’s served as a queer mentor to them both. He’s dying, and his last wish is for the two of them to drive him across the country to Maine. Detours, hijinks, and some very tender sex scenes ensue.

“I love steamy romance, but I don’t have that gift,” Cochrun says. While it’s important to her to put sex on the page—to write characters who are, she says, “claiming ownership of their sexual desire”—she’s less interested in titillating the reader than in hitting them in the feels, in illustrating the power of sex to heal. (She also shouldn’t sell herself short: she slays a slow burn.)

As for book number four, Cochrun says to expect a mid-30s coming-out story examining compulsory heterosexuality. Art imitating life? To an extent, she says, just with a few romance tropes—practice dates, sex lessons—along the way.