56 pages • 1 hour read
Elissa SussmanFunny You Should Ask
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Celebrity-Falls-for-Normal-Person Trope
A literary trope is a situation or pattern that readers are drawn to and enjoy in endless iterations. One trope that proves particularly fruitful for the romance genre is the celebrity who falls for a regular person. Very often the celebrity is a powerful male—actor, musician, sports figure, etc.—who is drawn to someone who is not a celebrity but has a special quality he admires. Royal romances are one variation of this trope, where one person in the romance has royal stature and falls for a commoner. Some examples include: The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan or books in the Reluctant Royal series by Alyssa Cole.
Very often, conflict in the celebrity/“normal” trope revolves around whether the leads can reconcile their very different lifestyles and/or the “normal” person can learn to deal with the scrutiny of fame. Classics of the celebrity/“normal” romance include Natural Born Charmer, a New York Times Bestseller by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, which features a star quarterback who falls for an artist; Waiting for Tom Hanks by Kerry Winfrey, which features an actor falling in love with an aspiring screenwriter; and the Spoiler Alert series by Olivia Dade.
