48 pages • 1 hour read
The Rom-Commers
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Chapters 9-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
After waking up in a panic about her father, Emma meets Charlie in the kitchen on her way to the airport. Charlie makes small talk with her and learns about her father’s situation. Emma is shocked when he asks her not to go to the airport and instead stay and help him rewrite the screenplay because he realized she is right about it being terrible. Charlie reveals that he stayed up half the night reading her writing, and he liked it despite hating rom-coms. Charlie explains how the project is essentially fake, as it is being made solely for a movie executive’s lover to star in. However, Emma just wants to go home, so she says no. When she says she wants to work on a project she feels proud of, Charlie gives in and agrees to write a real script with her rather than just a passably good one for the production company. He admits that when he was reading Emma’s writing, he actually wanted to work with her, so he agrees to any terms she proposes.
Chapter 10 Summary
Emma’s dad and sister Facetime her, and she is relieved to see they are well, just as they are relieved that she seems okay. Logan arrives and learns that Charlie and Emma are working together, though both are still hesitant about forgiving him. Logan takes them to brunch to work out a contract, and Emma sees several A-list celebrities at the restaurant. They also run into T.J., who bickers with Emma, and Charlie defends her before T.J. leaves. Emma learns the secret that Charlie had gotten sick with soft-tissue-sarcoma a few years ago and hasn’t done any writing since, and Logan tells Emma that Charlie has “the yips.” In four years, the only thing Charlie has written is the rom-com.
Chapter 11 Summary
Emma feels impostor syndrome and not knowing what to do, she heads to the bathroom where both men had gone a moment before. In the bathroom, Emma recognizes that the men’s and women’s rooms are connected, and she overhears Charlie and Logan talking about her. Charlie loves her writing, but he thinks it is way too cheesy, and he doesn’t want to ruin his career by writing a cheesy movie that actually gets produced. Charlie tells Logan that he doesn’t plan to make the screenplay good, just passable, unlike what he agreed with Emma, who realizes that she has to quit after all.
Chapter 12 Summary
Emma tells the reader about a secret she’s been keeping from them and how she must finally reveal it to explain what happens next in the story. Emma describes a camping trip that her whole family took to celebrate her high school graduation and new writing scholarship. Her mother was climbing the side of a rock while her father was holding the belay, and a rockfall occurred. Her father was hit in the head by a large rock, leading to his paralysis. When he was hit, he dropped the belay, and Emma’s mother fell several stories, dying on impact. Emma ran as fast as possible to the trailhead to get help, telling Sylvie to be brave and keep talking to her parents but not to go and see them. As a helicopter came to get their father, Emma and Sylvie had to go with him, leaving their mother’s body to be collected. Afterward, Emma felt she needed to be a mother figure to Sylvie and always put her ahead of herself. In the meantime, Emma had fantasized about her future but had hesitated to make it anything more than a fantasy.
Chapter 13 Summary
When they return to Charlie’s mansion, Emma is still intent on quitting and refuses to sit down with Charlie. Walking around and exploring his home, Emma finds a drawer full of Oscars and other awards. Emma asks why Charlie treats his awards like garbage, and he says it doesn’t matter. Even more angry with him than she was at the restaurant, Emma goes outside to cool off and sees Charlie’s large pool with a diving board. Emma goes swimming every day and wants to go in, but Charlie had a near-drowning accident when he was young and refuses to swim, so he tells Emma she can’t go in. Emma doesn’t appreciate being told what to do, especially by Charlie, so she begins to climb the diving board as he almost begs her not to. However, Charlie’s mood suddenly changes, and he acts aloof, leading Emma to realize that when he is afraid of something, he pretends it doesn’t matter, not unlike many of the characters he has written. Emma decides to test this theory and asks why his ex-wife left him. Trying to push past his nonchalance, Emma refuses to come down from the diving board until Charlie tells her what happened, and he admits that his wife left him on the day he found out he had cancer.
Chapter 14 Summary
After discovering Charlie’s tell, Emma thinks there is something deeper beyond his indifference to the rom-com. She plans to stay and figure out what it is as they rewrite the screenplay. They draw up a standard contract with Logan, which requires that Emma doesn’t leave, get fired, or leave the screenplay uncompleted. Emma wakes up early the next morning thinking they are having an earthquake, but Charlie tells her she must have dreamed it. Emma is surprised when she sees a guinea pig in the kitchen. Charlie tells her his name is Cuthbert, and he shares custody of him with his ex-wife. When Emma returns to her room, she still feels the shaking, and she realizes it is just herself. She goes down to find Charlie and makes him put his hand on her heart because she feels like she is having a heart attack. She asks Charlie to Google the symptoms of it, and he tells her she seems to be having an anxiety attack. Emma thinks that is ridiculous, but Charlie knows about anxiety from his illness, and he helps her calm down a bit.
Chapter 15 Summary
A few hours after Emma goes back to bed, she wakes up in another panic, thinking something must be wrong with her father. Sylvie calls her just to chat, scaring Emma, but everything is fine. On Facetime, Emma sees that Sylvie’s boyfriend Salvador is staying with them, making her nervous that Sylvie will be distracted from taking care of their father. Emma fills Sylvie in on everything that has happened since she arrived in LA and tells her she is a bit homesick. Sylvie tells Emma she needs to be confident and act like she’s in charge as she tries to work with Charlie. An hour later, she wakes Charlie up to go to the pool, making him sit with her as she goes swimming.
Chapter 16 Summary
Emma and Charlie start a routine of going swimming in the morning before working with one another with Cuthbert on the table. Though neither is used to writing with another person, they work well together, and Charlie often concedes to Emma’s changes and suggestions. Every morning, Sylvie and Salvador Facetime Emma to update her about their father’s progress, and every evening, Emma cooks dinner for her and Charlie. Meanwhile, Charlie attempts to feed Cuthbert, who rarely eats due to the grief of losing his brother.
One night, Charlie’s ex-wife Margaux arrives unexpectedly, and Charlie makes Emma hide with him in the pantry. After she leaves, they both fall out of the pantry and onto one another. Simultaneously, they both realize how romantic the situation is, and Emma’s heart starts thumping again. They discover that Margaux is still in the house when she finds them on top of one another. Margaux reveals that she and Charlie were supposed to have dinner together after she picked up Cuthbert. Charlie suddenly acts like Emma isn’t living there and cooking dinner for them and offers Emma his car to leave. Emma forgets her purse on the way out, and when she returns to the house, she hears Charlie and Margaux talking about her. Margaux insists that Charlie likes Emma, yet he tries to act like he doesn’t care about Emma and insults her writing to cover up his feelings. Emma hopes that this is just Charlie’s tell again, but she eventually believes that he doesn’t actually care about her.
Chapters 9-16 Analysis
Throughout The Rom-Commers, Emma deals with impostor syndrome, or the belief that she is not qualified for the position she has. This self-doubt mostly applies to how she feels about her writing, especially once she takes the job with Charlie, a highly acclaimed and award-winning screenwriter. When at brunch, Emma says she “felt a rising surge of impostor syndrome” (80), which is only cured a few moments later when she hears Charlie call her funny. Emma feels like she has not earned this job, and people like T.J. and initially even Charlie tell her this, reinforcing her self-doubt. Sylvie tries to instill confidence in her sister, but Emma finds it hard to believe in herself.
Emma is also entirely new to the world of Hollywood and the film industry and can’t believe she is able to be in the same spaces as many of the celebrities and industry members she encounters. However, this is not only true of her writing but also of her relationship with Charlie. At times, Emma feels like he is beginning to like her as more than just a writing partner, but then she doubts herself, wondering if it's just their forced proximity or their time spent together that is making Charlie like her. Once they establish a writing routine together, Emma thinks that it’s the routine that makes her relationship with Charlie feel normal, all while believing Charlie doesn’t actually care for her for anything other than her writing. Emma’s beliefs are further complicated when Margaux catches her and Charlie together, and she learns Charlie still sees his ex-wife regularly. Emma’s feelings about being a fraudulent writer and a meaningless acquaintance to Charlie shift back and forth throughout the novel, highlighting Emma’s inability to believe in herself.
Emma’s impostor syndrome is also informed by her anxiety, something that is constantly in the background of her mind and influencing her thoughts and feelings. Though she believes she is in one of the least stressful moments of her life, telling Charlie, “This is the least anxious I’ve been in ten years” (104), Emma constantly worries about her family in Texas, her ability to finish the screenplay, and her relationship with Charlie. When Emma learns that Sylvie’s boyfriend is moving in with her, she says, “I didn’t want to feel alarmed [...]. But boyfriends sleeping over at our apartment was not part of the plan” (108). Even things Emma knows shouldn’t be a problem—like Salvador moving in—cause her anxiety to skyrocket. Yet Emma also feels anxiety despite the specific circumstances surrounding her, often waking up in the middle of the night to a sense of panic and dread. Charlie mentions his struggles with anxiety throughout his illness and shares some calming techniques that worked for him. Yet Emma’s anxiety also impacts her on a larger scale because it holds her back from taking chances, as she is afraid of what would happen if she didn’t take care of her father above all else. Emma struggles throughout the novel, though being with Charlie often helps her to calm her anxiety.
Charlie often criticizes Emma for taking opportunities for granted when it comes to her writing career, insisting that if she really wanted to be a screenwriter, she would not pass up any opportunity. However, Emma feels like Charlie also takes things for granted. When she finds his drawer full of awards in Chapter 13, Emma can’t believe he would treat things that people work their entire lives for so carelessly. She sees Charlie as the opposite of someone like her father, who lost everything but still somehow manages to be grateful for his life and not take anything for granted. Emma is especially offended by how Charlie takes his career for granted because she doesn’t have the same ability to take chances as he can. In a later repetition of their argument about the awards drawer, Emma tells Charlie, “We don’t play by the same set of rules. [...] Nothing has ever been easy for me. I have to hustle. I have to wrench something out of every opportunity” (171), highlighting the differences between how they view their lives and careers.
This section further develops the theme of Selective Truth Telling. Charlie withholds certain facts from Emma, who often discovers the truth by accident or by pushing Charlie in conversation. When she overhears Logan and Charlie in the men’s restroom, she learns that Charlie doesn’t want to create a well-written rom-com screenplay, a truth that makes her decide to quit. However, at the pool, Emma learns Charlie’s tale—that when he’s afraid, he pretends not to care—which is a form of selective truth telling through omission. Realizing this, she decides to stay to figure out why he hates rom-coms, so her desire to learn Charlie’s full truth becomes a key plot driver. In this section, Emma, who has been selective about sharing the details of the camping accident, tells the reader exactly what happened—her father was badly injured and her mother died—and how it led to her fantasizing about the future instead of pursuing one. In the plot, however, the selectivity remains, as she has not yet told Charlie the full story of her parents’ accident.
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