April is IBS Awareness Month in the UK, and while it's a common condition, affecting up to 10% of the UK population, it's often overlooked or brushed off as "not that serious."

But it can cause debilitating pain, affecting quality of life in serious ways. And the following 2 romance novels handle IBS representation with the care, attention, and respect it deserves. Read these books to feel seen, heard, and to be reminded that you are not the only person whose digestive system doesn't always play ball.

The Worst Guy by Kate Canterbury

This contemporary romance is a one-two punch for representation, showing a character recovering from an eating disorder and living with the long-term digestive issues resulting from her ED. It's also steamy as heck, chockful of the kind of tension that has you clutching your Kindle in anticipation, and has possibly the best, most memorable first line in history (after Pride and Prejudice, of course): "My dick was languishing."

Capitally Engaged by Rachel Holm

This book opens with the heroine having an IBS flare, and I love that the flare is used as the set-up that brings the main characters together. The story is banter-filled, heart-warming, and impossible to put down.

Reading this list, you might be wondering why there aren't more books on it. Is it even a list, if it's only two items, or is it just a pair?

And more importantly, if IBS is so common, shouldn't it show up more in romance, a genre that has, in the last few years, made great strides to represent more of its readers' lived experiences, including living with chronic conditions like IBS?

Granted, there are a few honourable mentions on this list for books that don't specifically state that the character lives with IBS, but that show the character experiencing symptoms very closely aligned with the condition, like Match Me If You Can by Michelle Willingham and The Price of Scandal by Lucy Score. But still, that's only 4 books. 4 books in a genre of . . . squillions.

Part of the issue is that writing about IBS necessitates discussion of the bathroom, a room that usually only exists in romance for the purposes of 1. shower sex 2. bathtub sex 3. sensual hair washing and 4. peeing after sex. Other uses of the bathroom for, say scatological purposes, is rarely mentioned.

Or at least, it used to be rarely mentioned. This is changing thanks to the excellent pooping-in-a-bush scene in Chloe Liese's With You Forever, a novel featuring a heroine living with ulcerative colitis who wisely always travels with extra loo roll, and Evie Mitchell's exceptional Love Flushed, about a heroine living with Chrohn's disease who runs a toilet paper company. But it's still verboten for a lot of readers; they don't want to read about tummy issues with their smut, even though they're reading about humans, and humans do have bodily functions they can only ignore for so long.

Still, the fact that books like With You Forever and Love Flushed exist, and are popular, gives me hope that in the future, we'll have more romance novels that explore IBS.

Because at the end of the day, writing about IBS isn't really writing about the digestion issues (or poop). It's about the effect those issues have on characters' lives, the ways it changes them in good ways and bad.

How much detail you go into about the bloating, pain, discomfort, and need for emergency loo roll is up to you as an author, though if you do want to show the visceral experiences of these symptoms, you've got plenty of representation in the books above, as well as those that explore other conditions that cause abdominal bloating, pain, and discomfort like endometriosis, interstitial cystitis, and fibromyalgia (check out Finding Gene Kelly by Torie Jean, Kiss Me Kosher by Jean Meltzer, and Hunter by L.A. Witt, respectively).

So if you're out there, living and loving with IBS and aching to write a story that shows characters doing the same, do so. Your book will join the ranks of other inclusive, representative books out there, ones that remind romance readers that they deserve love, happy gut or no.

And until next blog post, happy reading and writing.