Who of us, at least those with a love for watching films about people falling in love, hasn’t wished they could step into the frames of their favourite romantic comedy?
They are usually so perfectly put together, so wonderfully alive with romantic possibility and eventually, after many twists and turns, meet-cutes and pulling aparts and love realised, we simply want to dive right in and live the fairytale right alongside the characters we love.
But alas, rom-coms are rom-coms and real life is … NOT.
Well, usually; in the giddily confected delights of Nobody Puts Romcom in the Corner by Kathryn Freeman, not only are rom-coms loved and adored with considerable affection by one of the lead characters, Sally, but they become the vehicle that she uses to power herself to social media viral fame courtesy of the reenactments (#EpicRomcomReenactmentFailure) she undertakes with her newly-installed roommate Harry (yes, Harry with the names of these two unexpected cohabitants just the first of a buzzy list of rom-com favourite references that pepper this charmingly fun novel).
At first, recreating the lift scene from Sally’s epically favourite rom-com Dirty Dancing is just a bit of harmless fun, making use of the fact that gruff, romance-averse Harry, fresh from a recent break-up courtesy of his girlfriend’s infidelity, has the build and strength, courtesy of running his own building company, to make the moments come alive.
Did he not want to kiss her again? ‘We don’t have to do any of them,’ she said quickly, pushing her disappointment way, way down where she couldn’t analyse it. ‘We could do a rain scene that doesn’t involve kissing, I mean, there’s Singin’ in the Rain, though it’s not really a romcom.’
But then the recreations strike a chord with Sally’s fellow TikTok users and one impromptu homage becomes a slew of them, all of them building in views and sponsorship, not the kind that will make them mega rich by any stretch, but which may allow coffee shop-owner Sally, who has money issues courtesy of debt accrued by her wayward sister Amy, and Harry with some pressing financial issues of his own, the chance to make a little extra money.
That’s all it is at first – business; Harry is adamantly clear about that, and Sally, convinced that Harry, burnt by a loveless childhood and some bad relationship experiences, not least with his ex Isabelle, is incapable of going any further than fun flirtation, assuming he’s in the mood, doesn’t even begin to believe it could go any further than a viral partnership.
But then, a blizzard of recreations follow courtesy of films like When Harry Met Sally (naturally, and yes, it is that scene which makes the cut), The Notebook, Never Been Kissed and An Officer and a Gentleman to name just four of the many rom-coms referenced in what amounts as an effervescently vivacious love letter to the genre, and while they will not admit it, both Harry and Sally find themselves getting more emotionally involved than either intended.
Their fans notice it too, and the digital cry goes out for them to take it further with every recreation, not hard when they are rather enjoying their proximity and the legitimate excuse they have to express, by proxy, the feelings building up for both of them.
Ah, but that’s where Nobody Puts Romcom in the Corner starts to invest some weighty emotionalism into its story.
Sally isn’t prepared to settle for anything short of her lifelong PERFECT romantic dream, and Harry, who’s decent, kind and lovely but who is also convinced by his parents’ coldly indifferent union that real love simply isn’t a thing, and certainly not something he will ever attain so why bother.
And so, while the emotions and the chemistry are there and obvious to Harry’s loved-up friend Mike, and Sally childhood besties, artist Kitty, who’s fiercely protective of her friend, and gay band member Vince (he’s gay not so much the band) that love is very much in the air, if not in short, punchy TikTok reenactments, neither Sally nor Harry can bring themselves to give themselves over to what they’re feeling.
It’s a classic rom-com dilemma, and while it’s par for the course for the genre, Freeman, who infuses Nobody Puts Romcom in the Corner with sparkling, witty dialogue (the kind that would be very much at home in a Nora Ephron classic of the genre) and vibrantly three-dimensional characters, does her own compellingly meaningful things with it, using Harry and Sally’s emotional blockage to explore how trauma can render otherwise wonderfully loving people incapable of doing anything more than skirting around the edges of attraction.
Thanks to this focus on the fact that real people, even ones falling in love, can be so broken they can make do anything with the best thing to ever happen to them, Nobody Puts Romcom in the Corner feels like it occupies a rarefied place where all the headily frothy trappings of rom-coms are gorgeously, humorously and touchingly in place, but a lot of real life emotion too.
‘Oh dear, you’ve got it bad, girl.’ Vince’s expression was full of sympathy as he caught the direction of her stare.
She tried to play the innocent. “What do you mean?’
He simply sighed. “You think I don’t know you, Sally Thornton? You’re imagining your name next to Hazza’s on a card in our window. I’m not sure what date you’ve got in mind for the wedding, but let’s go with summer next year. Only you forgot the small part about him not ever wanting to get married.’
Far from weighing down Nobody Puts Romcom in the Corner with a tad too much emotional reality, being honest about how the brokenness of the past can come close to derailing the romantic possibility of the present and future – we say “close” because we all know that love cannot be denied in a rom-com and most definitely won’t be stymied here – adds some unique substance to this delightfully heartwarming and funny tale.
The novel is also an evocation of why rom-coms are so beloved.
It touches with heart and real passion on why we’re happy to lose ourselves in confected tales of love, why it’s so important to us to imagine how perfect life and love can be, even if we have the real thing ourselves, because even the best of realities can feel tarnished and a little less than fit for purpose.
Rom-coms, of course, are eminently ready to deliver on all our fantasies and dreams, and the joy of Nobody Puts Romcom in the Corner is that it both explores why we love them with happiness-inducing verve and thoughtful empathy, and serves up a perfectly, wonderfully wrought story of love against the odds and with all the fairytale touches that we crave.
Love is a wondrously good and lovely thing and it comes deliciously alive in Nobody Puts Romcom in the Corner, a novel full of vivaciously fun, viral moments that come romping into real life with vigorous reluctance (that’ll make sense when you read it, and you should) and convinces us by sheer dint of its enthusiasm for romantic possibility and actuality that maybe, against all the traumatic odds, that we can find and embrace love, in all its heart-holding splendour, after all.