The end of the 1980s marks the time of numerous changes bringing forth the economic and political crisis in Croatian society during the last decade of the socialist period. The influence of Western popular culture encompassed all aspects of everyday life and became society's modus operandi. Some forms of capitalist consumer culture were already heavily integrated into the society of the period, thus insinuating the collapse of the socialist society. This paper studies the emergence of a romance novel in Croatian literature and culture in the period of socialism, i.e. the 1980s, which was, due to the above-mentioned reasons, a turning point in social, economic and cultural sense. Selected works of the Croatian writer Ana Žube will be used for analysis and will be viewed primarily through the lens of popular culture in relation to high culture. Furthermore, this paper will search for the elements of the female genre and seek to answer the question of why exactly are romantic novels deemed female and so-called trivial genre. In order to show how the works belonging to the so-called trivial literature can be the source of complex social and cultural meanings, this paper will single out some of the topics covered in Žube's works and determine how relevant they were to the society of that time (albeit some may be relevant even today).