A Merry Little Meet Cute

Nolan is the male romantic lead of the novel and is the second protagonist and first-person narrator. As the romance interest, Nolan is a likeable and sympathetic character who supports Bee’s character arc. Nolan’s interactions with Bee provide a means to explore Bee’s sense of self in relation to others and to enable her character’s growth in self-esteem. He is a rounded character, however, with his own similar secrets and concerns. His experiences provide interest and comparison to Bee’s, especially in relation to social expectations for men and women.

Nolan is 31 years old and lives in Kansas City with his mother, who lives with bipolar disorder, and his 17-year-old sister, Maddie. The novel first introduces Nolan as “a famously irresponsible, washed-up pop star” (25). Nolan has identified as bisexual since high school. After success in a high school musical drama, Nolan and his friend Kallum auditioned for a reality show called Boy Band Bootcamp, launching their boyband career with INK.

The novel emphasizes that celebrity forced Nolan to cultivate a specific image as a charming but rebellious bad boy who is sexually promiscuous and often in trouble. Nolan is attractive and knows it, reflecting, “[M]y hair was usually a solid fifty percent of what people liked about me. The remaining fifty percent was split among my voice, my eyes, and my general air of barely giving a shit, which people found charming for some reason” (36). By the novel’s opening, Nolan has fallen on harder times, following the fraudulent behavior of his former manager and a false scandal created by the press. Since then, he has worked for the community theater in Kansas City, trying to earn enough to support his sister and mother, who isn’t well enough to engage in steady work.

These challenges, and Nolan’s family-minded responses to them, enrich his character and provide a premise for his role in Duke the Halls. As Nolan says, “I wasn’t that same Nolan anymore. I’d changed; I’d learned that the world was bigger than the next party, the next bed to tumble into” (238), indicating that he is a credible love interest for Bee. His old reputation pursues him, however, and part of his character arc in the novel involves coming to terms with his past and being honest with himself. This arc mirrors that of Bee. Part of his growth as a character is to fall in love for the first time as he gets to know her. His decision that love and relationships are more important than his career marks the final step in Nolan’s evolution, earning him a happy ending with Bee.

Gretchen is a secondary character who serves several roles in the novel. Although she is not an antagonist, her primary role is to provide a source of conflict as the director of Duke the Halls, someone who has the power to decide if Bee and Nolan can keep their roles, along with the money and the opportunities involved. The novel creates a sense of threat through this power and Gretchen’s possible reaction to the truth, especially Bee’s work as Bianca von Honey. This is resolved, however, when she is shown to have progressive attitudes about sex work and women’s sexuality after Bee’s secrets are exposed. Gretchen is a driven, determined woman, but she is also compassionate and kind.

Like Bee and Nolan, Gretchen has lived a celebrity life and has a past persona. She was “the ultimate it girl” of Bee’s teen years (80), with a career in Disney movies, young adult book adaptations, and then indie films that Bee admired. That she survived fame as a young adult and has gone on to create a stable career makes her a foil to Nolan and Bee since Gretchen can be public about her roles and Bee cannot. Gretchen is a steady, intelligent, self-possessed woman; Bee thinks, “Gretchen always presented herself as in control, even when she wasn’t […] She was like the one friend who always volunteered to be the designated driver” (111). Gretchen therefore juxtaposes Bee in her character or persona, as well as by fitting the stereotypical physical ideal for women, which Bee does not.

Gretchen and Pearl’s romantic relationship, managing the demands of celebrity and the film-making lifestyle, provides a model for Bee and Nolan’s developing relationship as they, too, learn to balance their priorities together.