39 pages • 1 hour read
Lynn PainterBetter Than the Movies
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The True Meaning of Happily Ever After
When watching romantic comedies growing up, Liz learned the value of a “happily ever after” from her screenwriter mother as they watched the girl get the guy and ride off into the sunset. Rom-coms are central to Liz’s life and cement her connection to her late mother. Liz aspires to live out the cliché rom-com happy ending as both a tribute to her mother and as a comfort to herself.
After what she considers their “meet-cute” in the school hallway, Liz believes she and Michael should have a movie-worthy romance. He represents her ideal romantic hero, and she writes their love story in her mind immediately upon learning he has returned to town. She changes her appearance to resemble someone who she is convinced Michael would be attracted to, losing her own unique style in the process. She gets in the way of Michael and Laney’s “happily ever after,” believing Laney to not be worthy of him.
Liz takes her love of the rom-com genre and, fueled by its romantic ideals, forces herself into the role of heroine. She dismisses everything that does not fit into a rom-com, which is why she does not initially see Wes as her hero. She and Wes do not share a traditional “meet-cute,” and he is not Mr. Darcy from Bridget Jones’s Diary or Harry from When Harry Met Sally.
Liz is shocked to discover that she finds Wes’s knuckle-cracking endearing, as it’s something she would normally consider unattractive in other guys (233). Her definition of the perfect hero slowly changes as she falls for Wes. The story’s irony lies in that she does not realize that she and Wes fulfill other traditional rom-com tropes such as the fake relationship and enemies-to-lovers. Their scheming leads Michael and Joss to believe they are romantically involved, so they must pretend to like each other. They also begin as rivals and next-door neighbors but end up falling in love. Wes even points this out to Liz in the end, simultaneously highlighting the novel’s self-awareness and Liz’s apparent lack of it: “Enemies-to-lovers—it’s our trope, Buxbaum” (343).
Liz ultimately does become a traditional romance heroine—she is literally the protagonist of a romantic comedy novel with a happy ending. She also learns that expecting the “happily ever after” in movies and fairytales to happen in real life can be harmful. She must practice separating fiction from reality in the future because, as the title notes, her real-life happy ending turns out better than the fictional ones she has grown up with.
Coping With Grief and Loss
Ever since her mother was killed by a drunk driver when Liz was in fifth grade, Liz has struggled with growing up without her closest confidante. The pain of losing her mother at such a young age has haunted her. Liz initially resents her nemesis, Laney, because of the affectionate notes Laney’s mother would leave in Laney’s fifth-grade lunchbox, while Liz’s mother was no longer able to leave similar notes.
Liz believes the best way to honor her mother is to latch onto their shared love of romance, even when her best friend, Joss, advises her against over-romanticizing her own life. When Joss repeatedly invites Liz to go dress shopping for prom, Liz lies and avoids her because she cannot bear to go through such a meaningful rite of passage without her mother beside her or with her stepmother, Helena, in her mother’s place. Instead of communicating this to Joss, Liz rationalizes her lies by telling herself that Joss would not understand. She recasts Joss’s friendly concern as criticism and ignorance because she wants ”a rom-com happy ending that [her] mother would have loved—that could change all the bad feels to good” (22). Liz’s fixation on Michael is her way of coping with the grief caused by her mother’s absence.
As Liz spends more time with Wes, she learns that she was wrong to idealize her relationship with Michael for the sake of her mother’s memory. Instead of avoiding a painful, truthful conversation like she has done with Joss, she confronts her grief head-on and tells Wes about her fears. In their “Secret Area,” Liz confesses to Wes that she is afraid that growing up and moving away will diminish her mother’s role in her life. Until this moment, Liz has been afraid of people seeing her as “weird Little Liz […] the freak who can’t get over her dead mom” (175). Grief has been a source of shame; she feels that she has dwelled in it too long alone.
Wes affirms Liz’s grief as “normal.” He helps Liz realize that speaking honestly with someone about her mother can help her heal: “There was something about his casual confirmation of my sanity, my normalcy, that healed a tiny little piece of me. Probably the piece that had never discussed my mother with anyone other than my dad” (190). Even Helena encourages her to grieve openly by decorating her mother’s gravesite. Liz happily discovers that discussing her mother openly may prompt others to share their own fond memories of her; Wes tells Liz how Liz’s mother once helped him after a childhood fall. These new memories help Liz cope by keeping her mother present in her life in a healthy way.
Adolescent Concern With Future Uncertainty
The transition from childhood to adulthood is filled with fear, uncertainty, and anxiety. Graduating from high school, going to prom, and applying to college are all monumental milestones meant to highlight the closing of one chapter and the beginning of the next. The novel begins and takes place in the final stretch of Liz’s senior year of high school, where many students are impatient to start college but afraid to leave the familiarity of home. Liz is especially concerned with beginning college because she will be traveling out of state from Nebraska to California on her own for the first time. This is one of the main reasons that she tries to avoid thinking about prom: Planning for it makes the end of high school real. She is not ready to leave her home, filled with memories of her mother and childhood friends.
When Liz learns that Wes is looking forward to leaving their hometown for college, she feels betrayed by how willing he seems to leave her behind: “Maybe it [hurt my feelings] because I’d been having fun getting to know him, and I’d thought he felt the same way” (223-24). She cannot understand how easy it seems for him to move forward as a grownup. Still, she wants to be taken seriously as a soon-to-be adult woman and is frustrated when Wes suggests Michael still sees her as “Little Liz” from their childhood. Liz wants to be seen as a woman capable of falling in love like the heroines in her rom-coms, but she does not want to move forward and outgrow childhood memories of her mother. This seeming contradiction is emblematic of the adolescent experience.
Although Liz’s obsession with movies, her romanticization of true love, and her belief in fate may seem childish, the novel shows how they make her unique. Her idiosyncrasies help her cope with the mystery of the future and other things out of her control. She eventually learns that as much as she wants to screen-write her own life, she must accept that she cannot. She must live in the moment and occasionally venture outside the safety and predictability of her beloved rom-coms. After a red cardinal lands on her mother’s grave, she knows that she is ready to step into the uncertainty of adulthood: “After another moment, [the bird] flew away, but my heart felt lighter, like my mother had wanted to make sure I knew she was happy about me leaving” (348).
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