The Rom-Commers

“Real life was allowed to be disappointing. Heck, real life was guaranteed to be disappointing. Living alone in a tiny apartment with my sick father? Teaching community college freshman English so we could have health insurance? Denying my own dreams so my overindulged but lovable baby sister could live all of hers struggle-free? All fine. I didn’t get to make the rules for reality. But stories had a better option.”

Though Emma does not try to change her life at all in the early chapters, knowing it is her duty to do all of the above, she does recognize how much her role as a caregiver is holding her back and how she struggles with Balancing Caregiving and Self-Care. This passage also emphasizes Emma’s interest in storytelling, which she uses as a form of escapism. Her deep connection to stories highlights just why she later refuses to do work that is not meaningful to her.

“How did he do it? How did he stand beside a personal Grand Canyon of suffering and manage to feel…grateful? And how on earth would I cope out in the heartless world without him? Who even was I on my own?”

Emma characterizes her father as almost irrationally optimistic, yet she still is in awe of him. This positivity is her father’s defining characteristic, and it shapes the way Emma views her own grief compared to his. The end of this quote also points out just how much Emma’s life is entangled with his.

“How long had it been since anyone had taken care of me in any situation? The last person to do it must have been my mom. Nowadays, it was me taking care of everyone else. When I got sick or hurt now, I just managed it on my own. Which I was fully capable of doing. But I’d forgotten what it felt like to be looked after. I guess I must have missed that feeling a lot—because tears kept rising to my eyes, and I kept blinking them away.”

Emma thinks this after she faints when she is too nervous and busy to eat for two days, and Charlie takes care of her. This passage highlights just how much of herself Emma gives to her family and how it draws all her focus away from herself. It also shows Charlie and Emma switching places, foreshadowing their mutually beneficial relationship at the end of the novel.

“‘The job of a rom-com […] is to give you a simulated feeling of falling in love.’ Here Charlie blinked, and I found myself wondering if this might be news to him. I went on. ‘A rom-com should give you a swoony, hopeful, delicious, rising feeling of anticipation as you look forward to the moment when the two leads, who are clearly mad for each other, finally overcome all their obstacles, both internal and external, and get together.’”

Emma provides a long defense of the rom-com while she berates Charlie’s screenplay. Though Emma is speaking of films, her description also applies to books in the rom-com genre, foreshadowing the remainder of this novel. That “rising feeling of anticipation” reflects Center’s view that rom-coms are built on positively balanced anticipation.

“All genres have a promise. […] The soldiers will win the final battle. The sleuth will solve the mystery. […] I can’t believe I have to say this to you, but the same is true for romantic comedies. The two leads will wind up together. That’s what the audience showed up for. The joy of it all. If you don’t give it to them, it’s beyond unsatisfying—it’s a violation of trust.”

A common criticism of rom-coms is that all works in the genre have the same plot, something Emma brings up in her speech. Here, Emma shows how this is true of all genres, surprising Charlie. This passage also shows just how much Emma is committed to the genre as she feels like, as a writer, she has a promise she must fulfill for her audience.

“Fiction really kind of was all I had in the romance department. But that wasn’t a weakness. That was a strength. I had a theory that we gravitate toward the stories we need in life. Whatever we’re longing for—adventure, excitement, emotion, connection—we turn to stories that help us find it. Whatever questions we’re struggling with—sometimes questions so deep, we don’t even really know we’re asking them—we look for answers in stories.”

Emma has a deep fascination with stories and how much they have had an impact on her life. Here, she also explains another common criticism about romance readers, offhandedly telling her audience about the strengths of reading romance stories and fiction more broadly.

“When Charlie Yates is scared of something, he pretends it doesn’t matter.”

Emma has this epiphany about Charlie early in their relationship when she notices that he often goes from scared to aloof in certain situations. Emma uses Charlie’s “tell” to understand him throughout the novel, though it often leads to her overanalyzing situations. Additionally, though Emma recognizes this characteristic, she does not recognize that Charlie pretends he doesn’t care about their relationship.

“It felt good to amaze him. It felt good to do something that was so appreciated. My dad and Sylvie appreciated me, of course, and we all agreed that I could cook. But they were too used to me by now. The thrill was gone.”

Emma sees herself as a caregiver, and she has normalized this role within her family. Charlie’s appreciation of her cooking is something refreshing for her, showing how their relationship is giving her new feelings of self-worth. Charlie puts her first in this situation, something Emma has trouble doing for herself.

“Maybe writing was our shared love language. […] We liked the process. We liked the words. We liked playing around and trying things. We liked syllables and consonants and syncopation. We liked deciding between em dashes and commas. We liked figuring out where the story needed to go and then helping it get there. It wasn’t easy, exactly—but it was fun. It was work that felt like play.”

Emma and Charlie both care about their craft, and they bond over it. Though neither has written with a partner before, the writing process goes smoothly for Charlie and Emma because of their mutual love of what they do.

“Are you really this cynical? […] Do you really think that love doesn’t exist? Or are you just saying dialogue that sounds good? Because if you really think love is something Hallmark made up to sell greeting cards, then we should just burn this screenplay right now.”

Emma challenges Charlie one of the many times he questions The Existence of Love and the impact of rom-com stories. She shows how much she cares about the stories she tells by threatening to stop writing the screenplay if it is not meaningful. Yet, she also questions whether Charlie really doesn’t care about the screenplay or, as his tell would suggest, he actually is just scared to write it and be open to the idea of love.

“You’re on easy street—and you have been from the very beginning. […] Nobody has it that easy! You’re a damned unicorn. We don’t play by the same set of rules. […] Nothing has ever been easy for me. I have to hustle. I have to wrench something out of every opportunity.”

At the beginning of the novel, Charlie criticizes Emma for not taking the opportunities that were given to her. Yet throughout the novel, Emma shows him the critical differences between them and how it is actually he who does not put as much work into his career. Though Emma is mostly alluding to her circumstances as a caregiver, she is also pointing out the double standards for men and women in Hollywood.

“Charlie had rejected me—and that was a fact. Nothing could change that. But how I responded to it? That was my choice. I could let it totally destroy me—sit across the table all day, staring forlornly at Charlie with tears dripping off my face. Or I could pretend it wasn’t a big deal. It was a big deal. To me, anyway.”

This quote again shows just how much Emma cares about screenwriting, as she puts it before her feelings when Charlie rejects her. However, this is also another example of Emma choosing not to put herself first, throwing herself into her job rather than taking time to unpack her emotions and care for her broken heart.

“It felt good to defy him. And upset him. And worry him. Was this what all the parenting books I’d read while raising Sylvie had meant by ‘attention-getting behaviors’? I never understood it until now. It did feel good to have someone’s full attention—good or bad. Especially someone who already had yours.”

In a parallel to the earlier quote in which Emma says, “It felt good to amaze him” (117). These emotions are all new to Emma, whose life had been fairly stagnant for the last 10 years until she met Charlie. This is also one of the few instances where Emma feels she should put herself first and let Charlie deal with the consequences.

“Everything that you say is not romantic is romantic. You said it’s not romantic for people to fall on each other, but then you fell on me and it was. You said line dancing isn’t romantic, but then we went there and you ogled that Italian guy and I thought I was going to lose my mind. And here you are telling me to strip you down naked with my eyes closed, like if I can’t see you it’ll be PG-13.”

Charlie has rejected Emma, but he is not doing a great job of concealing his feelings. While listing their attempts to prove that his screenplay moments were not really romantic, he admits that he found them romantic, proving that the right chemistry and underlying feelings can make something meaningful. This adds to the comedic element of the rom-com, as Center elevates tropes.

“You can’t go to the beach when you’re Dad’s caregiver! You can’t go anywhere! Why do you think I haven’t had any fun in ten years? Do you think I just have a bad personality? That I don’t like fun?”

On a phone call with Sylvie after learning why their father is in the hospital, Emma emphasizes all of the things she cannot do as her father’s caregiver. This is one of the first times she complains about her responsibilities in front of Sylvie. The call is a major turning point in the novel, as it shows when Emma finally begins to realize the toll caregiving has taken on her life, and she voices it to Sylvie, the person she tried to hide this from.

“Did you think what I’ve been doing all these years was easy? Did you think I just hadn’t been creative enough in my approach? Did you think I didn’t go to the beach because I didn’t want to? […] I would’ve given anything to go to the beach! But I didn’t! Because I knew that I—I alone—was the only thing standing between the only parent we’ve got left and this exact situation! […] I killed myself to give you everything you ever wanted and I guess I taught you that’s how life is. But I was lying the whole time. That’s the opposite of how life is. You don’t get everything you want! You get a few tiny, broken pieces of what you thought you wanted and you tell yourself over and over it’s more than enough!”

On the call with Sylvie, Emma not only shows her regrets about caregiving for her father but also how her life has changed by trying to act like Sylvie’s mother. The Wheeler family structure is built on Emma’s role as a caregiver to both surviving members of her family, and this quote shows how much it has impacted the lives of all the Wheelers.

“If my trip to the beach kills our father, […] we’ll be even. Because your trip to the mountains killed our mom.”

Sylvie tells this to Emma before ending their phone call. Later, both women admit that this is the cruelest thing Sylvie could say to Emma, and Sylvie tells her that she only said it because it was mean, not because it was true. This comment gets to the bottom of all of Emma’s guilt and the emotions that have shaped her the past 10 years, almost ruining the sisters’ relationship forever.

“But all around that one solitary horror was a cacophony of other losses: I was bruised where I’d hit the pool water, I was hungover, I was still wearing Charlie’s sweatshirt. I was alone in a feedlot of soulless travelers with a broken bag and no chance to make my flight. I’d broken my contract with Charlie, and given up all the money I’d worked so hard for, not to mention any chance I had of reaching my potential. My baby sister whom I’d sacrificed everything for had just said the meanest thing anyone had ever said to me, besides myself, and I was so incandescently angry that I couldn’t imagine ever feeling anything but anger again. And I was still cringing in shame at the memory of begging my writing hero and desperate crush to take me to bed…and receiving the hardest of hard passes.”

Waiting in line at the airport, Emma realizes she is likely about to miss her flight and never see her father again. Though this thought is what’s in focus, she is surrounded by all the other terrible things that have happened to her in the past few days. Yet she cannot find just one place to put her anger, so at the end of the quote, she turns it inward into shame, and she begins to regret all the chances she took that led her to this moment.

“‘But don’t you—need someone right now?’

‘Of course! Obviously! Anyone—and everyone! Just not you.’

Charlie frowned, like that made no sense. ‘Why isn’t someone better than no one?’

I sighed. Did I really have to explain this, too? Apparently so. ‘I really liked you,’ I said. ‘And you hard-core rejected me. So seeing you doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel worse.’”

Charlie and Emma talk when he comes to Texas to comfort her after her father’s hospitalization. Charlie cares for Emma and knows she wouldn’t voluntarily ask for help. However, he also doesn’t realize how much his presence hurts her after his rejection, so Emma is forced to explain it to him.

“This was the thought that woke me in the night. If I hadn’t been selfish—if I’d just given my mom what she wanted instead of being all about me—she’d have been on a striped beach towel with a book at the shore a thousand miles away on the day that rockfall happened. She’d have been nowhere even close. Our lives would’ve continued blithely on. Everything would’ve been different. She wanted to go to the beach.”

Though Emma admits to this feeling of guilt earlier in the book, she only gets into the intricacies of it once her father is hospitalized. This feeling shows why Emma became so focused on caring for her family rather than herself after her mother’s death. Feeling selfish for one choice, she prevented herself from putting herself first for nearly 10 years.

“There is absolutely no way to predict the infinite random forces in the world any of our choices will expose us to. How paralyzing would it be to even try?”

Emma’s father tells this to her when they are in the hospital after she confesses her feelings of guilt about her mother’s death. Her father does not blame her, but his optimism and his logic finally convince Emma that she is not to blame. His word choice also shows just how “paralyzing” Emma’s life has been for nearly 10 years, highlighting exactly why Emma hasn’t taken any chances since then.

“I don’t know how I let myself get so cynical […] All I can figure is this: it hurts to be disappointed. It hurts so much, we’d rather never get our hopes up. And it’s humiliating, too—right? How foolish are you to hope for the best? […] But the argument Emma’s been making this whole time—and I’m paraphrasing here—is this: If those are the only stories we tell about ourselves, then those are the only stories we have.”

This quote comes from Charlie’s speech at the end of the novel when he finally begins to believe in love. Here, Charlie admits to his “tell” and shows that he was scared of love, and that’s why he couldn’t let himself believe in it.

“Poor happy endings. They’re so aggressively misunderstood. We act like ‘and they lived happily ever after’ is trying to con us into thinking that nothing bad ever happened to anyone ever again. But that’s never the way I read those words. I read them as ‘and they built a life together, and looked after each other, and made the absolute best of their lives.’ That’s possible, right? That’s not ridiculous.”

Emma says this near the end of the novel, shortly before listing a few of the tragedies that have happened to her and her family since her “happily ever after” with Charlie began. Not only does this continue to challenge the criticisms about romance stories as Emma did at the beginning of the novel, but this also depicts a more nuanced and realistic outlook on the genre of rom-coms more broadly. Emma’s question, “That’s possible, right?” also functions as Center’s view on romance as she shows how Charlie and Emma struggle through their problems but are still happy with one another years on.