The Rom-Commers

Charlie Yates is a highly acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter and Emma’s love interest in The Rom-Commers. Charlie has a complicated relationship with love and doubts The Existence of Love at the beginning of the novel. He is highly cynical about rom-coms because of this, not seeing their value and thinking the genre is unnecessary until Emma explains to him how meaningful love stories can be. Like Emma, Charlie has learned not to trust others to take care of him, which furthers his cynicism. However, at the story’s end, it is revealed that Charlie is merely scared of falling in love and being disappointed.

Five years before the novel begins, Charlie was diagnosed with soft-tissue-sarcoma. Though he went through treatment and is about to be officially declared cancer-free at the time of the novel, his diagnosis and journey with cancer influenced him greatly. Since his diagnosis, Charlie has had “the yips” and has been unable to write anything new on his own. On the day he was diagnosed, his wife Margaux also told him she wanted a divorce, further upending his life. Margaux’s abandonment of Charlie mirrored an earlier influential incident in his life when his mother left him when he was in the hospital recovering from a near-fatal drowning that left him terrified of water. It is partially because of these two incidents that Charlie does not put faith in others and does not believe in love.

Unlike Emma, Charlie always puts himself first, believing it is the only way to take care of himself. Yet Charlie is also a dynamic character, and, like Emma, their romance causes him to learn more about himself and become a better person. When he believes his cancer has returned, Charlie knows he must end his relationship with Emma as he fears she would give up her life to take care of him as she has done with her father. His relationship with Emma changes Charlie for the better, making him learn to be grateful for everything he has and to believe in the existence of love.

Sylvie is Emma’s younger sister and closest friend. At the beginning of the novel, she has just graduated college with top honors and plans to go into the medical profession. She has earned a prestigious internship that Emma insists she takes. Though Sylvie isn’t aware of how much Emma has done to care for her family over the past decade, she knows that Emma treats herself unfairly, so she decides to give up the internship when she hears of Emma’s once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with Charlie Yates. Though Emma doubts her abilities to take care of their father, Sylvie proves to be a competent caregiver and frequently updates Emma on their father’s progress as well as helps her older sister gain confidence in herself.

Though Emma fears Sylvie thinks too much of herself to help their father, Sylvie shows Emma how to do better at Balancing Caregiving and Self-Care. Sylvie is attentive to her father but doesn’t let this get in the way of taking time for herself. She has a career and a boyfriend, and rather than keeping them separate from her father, she implements both to help him. Sylvie and Emma’s relationship is nearly ruined when both sisters say the cruelest things they can think of after their father is hospitalized, yet their connection is so strong that they are able to rebuild their relationship. When Sylvie marries her boyfriend Salvador in their father’s hospital room, she asks Emma to be her maid of honor. In many ways, Sylvie seems to be the antithesis of Emma, yet she serves as a good example for her older sister throughout the novel.