Nothing Like the Movies
Nothing Like the Movies
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Lynn Painter on Nothing Like the Movies
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The sequel she swore she’d never writeBefore a single page of the sequel existed, she had been on record against sequels as a category. The position was not a pose; it came from how she reads and watches.
No, I hate sequels. As a reader and as a viewer, I’ve never seen any of the other ones, because I’m like, ‘They ended up together. Why would I want to see a part two?’
Reader messages and a push from her publisher started to erode that position, but what finally broke it open was a structural reframe: not a story about a relationship fraying from the inside, but about the world making love situationally impossible.
The reframe arrived through a question about external conflict, the kind that doesn’t implicate the couple’s feelings but simply blocks them. Once she found that question, the resistance dissolved fast.
It started me thinking about external conflicts — things that happen in your life that are not [about] your relationship falling apart from the inside, but the world throwing things at you that make it impossible. Once I started thinking through that, a little idea took on a life of its own. And then I was like, I have to write this. But no, I never wanted to write a sequel. I’m so glad I didn’t listen to myself.
A pre-order incentive for a different book accidentally became the first draft of a reason to return. She had written a dual-POV road trip scene featuring Wes and Liz, and writing from inside Wes’s perspective did something she hadn’t planned on.
I just fell in love with being in Wes’s head. I could write his own books; it was my favorite place.
She traces the specific pleasure to something about writing male characters from the inside: the chance to write them the way she, as a woman, wants them to be thinking. That pull was strong enough to override five years of stated indifference to sequels.
How she wrote it
Grand gestures, designed to failThe first book, Better Than the Movies, lets rom-com tropes do their intended work. Painter built the sequel on a single inversion: what if the same tropes, deployed by someone who believes in them completely, fail every time they are tried.
The big overarching theme I wanted for the sequel, especially when I came up with the title Nothing Like the Movies, is I wanted it to be Wes thinking, ‘I know Liz better than anyone in the world, and she loves romance, so I’m going to do these big sweeping gestures to win her back.’ And then having every one of them go wrong.
Reversing the tropes meant reversing the characters. In the first book, Liz is the starry-eyed romantic and Wes plays the cynic. The sequel swaps those positions, and the swap let Painter show a side of Wes that the first book kept hidden behind confidence.
I really enjoyed seeing Wes be a lot more vulnerable than he was in Better Than the Movies. He was just cocky and obnoxious and adorable, and I liked exposing Wes’s little hurts.
Grief enters both books in the series, and she had not anticipated writing it once, let alone twice. She was deliberate about keeping the two experiences distinct: Wes carries guilt from an argument with his father that was never resolved, while Liz’s loss is older and has settled into something quieter.
I feel like his grief is a lot more raw and affects him in a traumatic way on a daily basis, and hers was more of like that constant ache that you can’t get rid of.
She names Nora Ephron as the writer who showed her what kind of material she wanted to make. Ephron’s films, especially When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail, modeled a specific technique at the sentence level: the micro-exchange that does characterization in real time.
The late great Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail) was a huge influence on me, on showing me the type of material I wanted to write. She was such a master at tiny banter, the micro back-and-forth exchanges between characters that serve as incredible vehicles for characterization.
Asked to account for how the book moved from its initial concept to its final form, she offers no clean answer. The gap between the structural idea and the finished draft resists the kind of retrospective logic writers usually apply to their own processes.
Honestly, sometimes I look back at the writing process as like a fever dream where I’m like, I don’t know how it got from that to the other thing, but it did.
The personal thread
Finding home in a genre, then returning to itBefore landing on YA rom-com, she had spent years writing books set in places she had never been, Texas ranches and Tuscan landscapes that required her to imagine rather than draw from life. The shift to a genre and a voice that fit her was immediate and physical.
Writing was suddenly fun and comfortable and downright electric, crackling like I was creating something that I was supposed to create.
Liz and Wes are her first published characters, and she has been writing them across bonus chapters and now a sequel since 2019. The attachment is not sentimental shorthand; it is the record of a working relationship across half a decade.
Liz and Wes are my favorites, but they are, of course, my firstborns. Not only did they give me my first published book, but between bonus chapters that I’ve written and now the sequel, it feels like I’ve been writing something that includes those characters since 2019!
What she wants us to sit with
Grief that doesn’t finish, and love that can’t be scriptedThe grief thread in both books circles a specific social expectation: that mourning has a timeline, and that reaching the end of it means being finished. She pushes back on that assumption most directly when she talks about young loss and the accumulation of milestones where an absence becomes loudest.
Sometimes I think when you lose somebody, after a certain amount of time, there’s the assumption that you’re over it. I feel like a lot of times it’s never gone, especially when you’re young and all of these monumental moments, whether it be your wedding day or your prom, or the first day of school, there’s that absence where that person used to be or should have been if they didn’t make it that far.
The escapism she builds into her books is not accidental or incidental to the grief. She talks about comfort reading and rewatching as a personal practice, and her ambition for her own work is calibrated to that exact use.
I am the type of person who treasures my comfort reads and comfort watches. I re-read my favorite books and rewatch my favorite shows ALL THE TIME because I love the escapism, so it is my dream for the books I write to serve that purpose for someone else. The idea of someone turning to something I’ve written as a respite from a long day is just mind-boggling dopamine for me!
The title Nothing Like the Movies is a promise and a warning at once. Grand gestures fail. The person you love has changed in ways your script didn’t account for. What she’s after is a book that delivers the comfort of a rom-com while being honest about what movies leave out.