48 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine CenterThe Rom-Commers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Screenwriter Emma Wheeler prepares dinner with her father, whom she cares for because he was partially paralyzed in a camping accident 10 years earlier. Her sister Sylvie is coming to their home in Texas tonight, having just graduated college. Sylvie will be starting a prestigious internship, even though their initial plan was for her to take care of their father after graduation. Emma receives a call from her ex-boyfriend Logan Scott, a famous Hollywood manager who feels guilty about how they broke up in high school, so he sends her screenwriting work. Logan tells Emma he has a job for her to work with her favorite screenwriter, Charlie Yates. Though Charlie has written screenplays in various genres to great acclaim, he has signed a deal with a studio to write a mafia screenplay he is passionate about, but only if he also writes a romantic comedy.
Emma is surprised to learn that Charlie has been Logan’s client for three years. Logan says that Charlie’s rom-com draft is terrible. Emma’s favorite writing genre is rom-com, while Charlie prefers every other one. Logan wants Emma to do a full rewrite of Charlie’s screenplay. It will be uncredited but will offer decent pay to someone whose writing has never been produced. Emma immediately accepts the job, although she backtracks when Logan tells her she will need to move from Texas to Los Angeles for about six weeks, leaving her father alone. Logan suggests that Emma should let Sylvie have a turn at taking care of their father, but Emma doesn’t want to crush Sylvie’s dreams about her internship.
Chapter 2 Summary
Emma doesn’t tell Sylvie about the job offer during their dinner, which is meant to celebrate Sylvie’s graduation. Emma and her dad were not able to travel to Sylvie’s graduation. Emma explains how her father has trouble with his mobility because of a camping accident, though, as narrator, she notes that she leaves out the most important parts of that story. Emma is determined not to take the job Logan offered her until she reads the screenplay and realizes it is worse than terrible. Once Emma finally tells Sylvie about the screenplay, Sylvie automatically withdraws from her internship, knowing how big an opportunity this is for Emma. Though Emma argues this, both Sylvie and her father know it is too big an opportunity to pass up.
Chapter 3 Summary
A week later, as she prepares to leave for LA, Emma worries about her father and Sylvie’s ability to take care of him without her. Emma lectures Sylvie about monitoring their father’s sodium intake and his “drop-attacks”—events where he suddenly feels like he is pushed over and falls—which often lead to emergency room visits. Emma feels irresponsible on the plane ride as it is the first time she has left her dad in nearly 10 years.
Chapter 4 Summary
Logan meets Emma at the airport, and on the way to Charlie’s house, Logan receives a call from T.J., a client who makes fun of Emma on speakerphone. Just before arriving, Logan tells Emma that she will be staying with Charlie. Emma is stunned, but Logan tells her just to go with it. He also warns her not to sleep with Charlie, shocking Emma further.
Chapter 5 Summary
Emma thinks about her small crush on Charlie and her fascination with his writing as they arrive at his house. Charlie cracks the door for Logan to come in, and he leaves it slightly open so Emma overhears their conversation. Logan reveals to Charlie that he brought a writer to help with his screenplay, completely surprising him. Charlie refuses to accept Emma’s help, and Logan lies to him about Emma loving the screenplay. Emma overhears that Logan has sent Charlie a video, and having Logan’s phone in hand, Emma walks away to view the video. In Logan’s messages to Charlie, Emma sees a video from when they were in high school with a pre-teen Sylvie, a healthy father, and her mother. Emma is stunned and stricken with grief, particularly as she had never seen this video, yet Logan felt like he could send it to a stranger. When Logan comes over and sees her crying Emma berates him about the lies he has told her and tells him she is going home.
Chapter 6 Summary
Emma walks away for about 15 minutes before Logan drives up next to her and tells her that Charlie has accepted his plan. Emma is determined to get back home on her own, and Logan drives off. As she starts to panic about her dying phone battery and not knowing where she is, Emma hears another car approaching, but it is Charlie, not Logan. Charlie convinces her to come home with him, but when Emma mentions the rewrite, Charlie laughs at her. While Charlie had agreed to let her stay the night in his guestroom, Logan had lied again about the job. Charlie and Emma discuss how he has never worked with anyone, and he mentions that he had attempted to work with T.J., but it went miserably. Charlie tells Emma she doesn’t take her work seriously and talks about her failed career and why she doesn’t take chances. Charlie thinks that someone who cares about writing should always put their career first, regardless of any other circumstances, but Emma knows that is not true. Emma plans to get the first plane ticket out of LA, but as soon as she gets out of Charlie’s car, she faints.
Chapter 7 Summary
Charlie takes care of Emma as she recovers from her fainting spell, and she realizes she fainted because she hadn’t eaten anything in the last two days because she felt nervous and guilty about leaving her father. She panics again as Charlie carries her inside and continues to care for her tenderly. Emma had forgotten what it felt like to be cared for, as she is always the one taking care of others. Charlie orders dinner for them and asks Emma what she doesn’t like about his screenplay. Emma refuses to tell him since he hasn’t hired her, but she explains how many painstaking hours she put into editing his screenplay. Charlie offers to hire her for a few hours of consulting, and Emma barters for the highest fee she can get from him.
Chapter 8 Summary
Emma asks Charlie if he can handle her honest criticism and he says yes, though Emma doubts it. She tells him all the things wrong with the screenplay, and she does not feel bad about hurting Charlie’s feelings due to how he treated her earlier. To Emma’s surprise, Charlie listens and takes notes, seeming surprised himself about the good comments Emma makes. This critique goes on for hours, making Emma feel proud of herself.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
In the early chapters of The Rom-Commers, Center breaks down the tropes and conventions of romantic comedy novels just as Emma does for Charlie regarding rom-com films. Emma’s thoughts about rom-com stories in general are enumerated in these chapters as she describes how “stories had a better option” than many real-life experiences (17), thus giving her hope. When she initially reads Charlie’s first draft of the script, she feels crushed by his incomprehensible misunderstanding of the genre and its importance. In Chapter 8, Emma’s diatribe about the genre serves as foreshadowing for the novel to come. Emma argues that “all genres have a promise” (60), and a rom-com promises to simulate falling in love and have the main characters get together at the end. Though Emma’s disappointing first meeting with Charlie doesn’t make her fall for him, it mirrors the early animosity between the two characters in the screenplay they are writing, following the common rom-com trope of enemies-to-lovers.
The genre in both its film and novel forms plays a big role in The Rom-Commers, influencing the ways Emma and Charlie see the world as well as the tropes of the novel. Later, when Emma and Charlie begin performing research for their screenplay, both reenact several common plot elements of rom-coms. Yet the conventions of the novel at large also fall in line with the most common conventions of both rom-com books and movies. Many rom-coms are based on misunderstandings or miscommunications, not unlike Logan’s lies to get Charlie and Emma to work together. The workplace romance is a common subgenre of rom-coms, which often involves the characters being forced to be near one another despite their conflicting feelings. As with other rom-coms, Center also establishes the primary differences between the two main characters yet hints at an attraction between them, at least on one side.
Another main element of the novel that is emphasized in this first set of chapters is Emma’s role as a caregiver and how much it has held her back in life. Charlie doesn’t think Emma takes her career as a writer seriously because she doesn’t attend events and turns down a prestigious internship. However, what Charlie doesn’t know in this scene is that Emma put her writing on the back burner while she took care of her father. Emma feels entirely responsible for her father’s care, as evidenced by her fears about abandoning him to go to LA. She fights with her father and Sylvie about it, and when she begs Sylvie not to give up her plans to take a big opportunity, Sylvie says, “You hear yourself, right?” (18). Due to her role as a caregiver, Emma doesn’t feel like her life is worth much beyond her duty to her father, so her trip to LA is the first time she leaves him in nearly 10 years. A major theme in the novel is Balancing Caregiving and Self-Care, something Emma seriously weighs as she decides to take the job. However, it is more that her family decides for her because Sylvie cancels her internship when Emma tells her not to. Emma feels so guilty she doesn’t eat for two days, showing how little she takes care of herself despite how much she takes care of others. A pivotal moment comes when Emma faints and Charlie takes care of her, showing a reversal of her usual role as she thinks, “I’d forgotten what it felt like to be looked after” (54).
The motif of storytelling also plays a major role in the novel, beginning with the stories Emma tells about herself in these first few chapters. When describing her father’s condition, Emma speaks directly to the reader, saying:
I will give you the same vaguely cheery, deeply oversimplified answer that we always gave everyone: Just under ten years ago, my father had ‘a camping accident.’ [...] That’s the long story short. I’m leaving out a lot here. I’m leaving out the worst part, in fact. But that’s enough for now (15).
As a first-person narrator, Emma is often very conscious of her readers and how much she tells them. When she admits that she is not telling the full story, she builds anticipation but also highlights the importance of how a story is told rather than just its details. Emma also holds back her story from Charlie, even when he criticizes her for not being serious about screenwriting. The idea of what and how much to share continues to come up in the novel and introduces the theme of Selective Truth Telling. Throughout the novel, Emma must figure out how much to tell others about her family’s circumstances and how to tell them, incorporating this into her narration but also attaching it to her understanding of guilt and grief.
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By Katherine Center
