Lynn Painter’s 2021 YA debut Better Than the Movies can be spotted in any bookstore’s #BookTok display, and the rom-com writer returns to Wes and Liz’s love story in this season’s Nothing Like the Movies. In the sequel, Liz Buxbaum’s life has taken a turn: she’s living her best intern life at UCLA, and she’s as anti-romance as one can be after her devastating breakup with Wes. When Wes transfers to UCLA to join the baseball team, with hopes of wooing Liz with the classic rom-com antics he knows she loves, the two are forced to reconcile how life has changed them both and if a second chance romance is in the cards. In a conversation with PW, Painter shared how she came to write a sequel despite generally disliking them, the impact of TikTok on her career, and how she has evolved alongside her first characters.
You’re an author of several adult and YA romances and rom-coms. What do you enjoy about writing for teens?
I feel like YA is a lot more difficult for me to write initially. It taxes me more, and I feel like it’s because I put more emotion into it. But I find it more rewarding. With my young adult novels, I’m probably more proud of the finished product. Not that I don’t love my adult novels. There are things I love about each, so it’s fantastic that I don’t have to choose.
Fans of this series, particularly on BookTok, have shown such an outpouring of support. What has your experience been like as the author of a BookTok favorite?
With Better Than the Movies, it has been such a strange process. I feel like it was a blessing, because it’s been such a long-game book, as it came out in May 2021, and it did fine. It sold, but it wasn’t this major thing. It was not until a year later, when it was just hitting paperback, that Haley Pham, who is on BookTok and a huge YouTuber, said it was her favorite book. And I was like, “No way.” And then I noticed sales going up. And then somebody pointed it out to me [saying], maybe I should get on this thing called TikTok. The first time I found multiple edits about my book, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” It’s been this amazing gift, because here I am, just a daydreamer who imagines these stories. And now, I get to see what I created because of somebody else; it’s mind-boggling. I am blown away every day.
Was the plan always to return to the story of Wes and Liz?
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?” So I never had any interest in writing a sequel. And then I got some messages from readers, and then my publisher was like, “Are you sure, Lynn?” 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, because I’m really excited about the sequel.
In the first book, we only have one perspective. Why did you choose to write in dual perspectives for this book?
As a pre-order incentive for my next book, I wrote some little bonus chapters that were free, [about] Wes and Liz going off to college, and their road trip. I wrote it [with a] dual point of view, and I just fell in love with being in Wes’s head. I could write his own books; it was my favorite place. I think it goes back to the whole [idea] of a woman writing a man, [and] how delightful it is to write them the way we want them to be thinking. I don’t know if I’m ever going to write a book that’s not dual POV now, because I like it so much.
This book places Wes in opposition to the Wes we see in Better Than the Movies. How did you want to approach Wes’s idea of romance?
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. I wanted it to be the antithesis of the first one, which is very rom-com in that they end up together after all of this cringe. That was my goal. But then Wes had some heavier stuff later [in the process]. It took on a life of its own. 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.
And I really liked making Wes a lot like Liz used to be, a wide-eyed optimist, because he’s got a second chance. And here is this opportunity that he thought was dead forever, and now he’s going to win Liz back, and he just needs to do it this romantic way. I liked flipping them and making Wes more that way. Wes has his emotional baggage now, from what he went through, and his dad wasn’t always necessarily the most emotionally available kind of person for him in his life. So 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.
It’s interesting to watch Liz, who was in the first book, a “little love lover.” What does it mean for Liz to have evolved into this person who no longer trusts love? What was it like for you to let go of certain core aspects of her character?
It was easy for me, in a way, because of her career aspirations. She’s still so tied into music and movies that I feel like her soul is still romantic and starry-eyed, even though her brain has shut it off.
Why does Liz want to create distance from the persona of “Little Liz”? Why is she so desperate to get away from her childhood? What does it represent for her?
It is the evolution of all of us. As you grow older, you look back to your younger self and kind of roll your eyes. So I feel like part of it was just natural. But I also feel like it’s very true to Liz’s character to have her decide she’s not romantic anymore, to have her be like, “That’s ridiculous. I’m not that little Liz anymore!” And that’s so Little Liz in my head, scheming to be like, “I’m not that person anymore. I’m this person.” I felt like it was a fun way to have her be the opposite of what she always was, but in the same right being the same person she always was. I also feel like the way she sees Little Liz is very tied into the neighborhood she grew up in, which was tied into her next-door neighbor Wes who destroyed her, so she wants to run far away from the hurt that’s left over from that.
Liz and Wes are navigating experiences of grief in this series. How did you draw parallels and differences between their experiences?
They’re very different, and it’s interesting, because I never would have thought that I would write one book about somebody dealing with grief, much less two. When we meet Liz in the first book, she’s had a while to deal with her grief. It’s been years since she lost her mother, where, in Wes’s story, his grief is pretty fresh. And he also didn’t have the close, warm, fuzzy relationship with his father that Liz had with her mother. He also has some guilt tied to the person he lost. They dealt with it completely differently. 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.
What are you most proud of so far in your career?
It seems trite to say Better Than the Movies when it was my first book, but it has let me connect with so many readers and see personal connections to characters. The hardest thing about writing a sequel is that Wes and Liz aren’t mine anymore. Every person who reads the book, if they like it, it’s their Wes Bennett now. I wanted to be true to what [the readers] like, because it’s been surreal, especially as somebody who had a really long journey to getting published. And so Better Than the Movies has just been this incredible experience. Wes and Liz, I think they’ll always be my first love. Like my firstborn.
What’s next for you?
I’ve got four books coming out next year. I published an adult rom-com called Accidentally Amy. It was a serial I wrote for newsletter subscribers, and then I self-published it. Just because some people were like, “Can we have it all in book form?” And Berkley is releasing that in January, with new content. And in May, my first middle grade novel is coming out, which is called The Wish Switch. And then in June, I have an adult rom-com coming out from Berkley [that hasn’t been announced]. It’s kind of like Pretty Woman meets While You Were Sleeping. And then in the fall, I have a young adult hockey book coming out, and I don’t think we’ve announced that title yet either.
Nothing Like the Movies by Lynn Painter. S&S, Oct. 1 $19.99; ISBN 978-1-66594-713-8
