Thirty-One.
YOU CAN TAKE THE GIRL OUT OF SWEETVILLE, BUT CAN YOU TAKE THE SWEETVILLE OUT OF THE GIRL?
After seeing my puffy postcry eyes, Bolero insisted she buy me a “glow-up kit,” so I arrive home with a heavy Sephora bag of potions I’ll never know how to use to Bolero effect.
But she also gave me an on-camera makeover—claiming one step in everyone’s Real Face Positive journey is to understand their face’s full potential—and paid me one hundred dollars without pointing out all my flaws.
“You look fucking gorgeous,” Zav says when he comes over for our first real hangout since I got back. He pulls out his phone. “Show me how to find this Bolero. Do you think she could unearth my cheekbones?”
Zav sucks in his rounded cheeks.
“I think Bolero would want you to embrace your real face,” I tell my friend, patting his shoulder.
“I know. Self-acceptance is just so much more work than a twelve-step skin-care program, though.”
“Zav, come on—you’re adorable.”
“I know, and I always bring snacks.” He picks up a heavy-looking Handy Mart tote bag and extracts a wooden cheese board, then proceeds to assemble a charcuterie spread on my wobbly coffee table. It reminds me of Sweetville Grant bringing out a platter for me and his dad.
“Is this part of your Healthful Hedonism protocol?”
“Oh, no—this is me trying to level up to a Tony Soprano aesthetic for the new year. I think you were right and that was a cult. They won’t stop calling me!”
“Zav!”
“It’s fine! My guess is it’s not that pleasurable to stalk people, so they’ll probably give up on me soon enough.” He flips on the TV and chooses a streaming app—he’s lent me all his passwords, so I give him full control of the remote. “Let’s find some trash to watch while we eat.”
The top row of choices is a selection of Heartfelt movies with the headline “It’s Not Too Late for Christmas Love!
” “Oh, fun! Total trash!” He selects, of all things, a Heartfelt movie called A Kitten for Christmas .
As it begins, the sounds that have grown so familiar to me play before the opening credits.
Sleigh bells. A sigh. “Open your heart.” And I think, Why not?
Clearly it’s a tribute to Bringing Up Baby .
In it, an all-business scientist learns she’s inherited a tiger from a long-lost royal relative who delivers it via an emissary in the form of a superhot guy who adores all things Christmas and teaches the scientist to embrace the season—not to mention her new exotic pet, even after it wreaks havoc on her lab.
It’s true that the movie never gets into whether the scientist was on her way to curing cancer when her careful life is upended by a tiger and true love.
But the smoothing over of the complexities in her life to cut loose with a guy who carries cinnamon sticks in his pocket doesn’t bother me.
In fact, I enjoy it so much that when it ends, my face is sticky with happy tears.
“That was adorable,” Zav says. “I should go. My mom is coming to town next week, and I need to buy a toilet seat. Who knew you needed one?”
“I’ve been telling you that for a year,” I remind him.
“You’ll get along great with my mom!”
When he leaves, I put on the next Heartfelt movie in the queue, Two Decembers .
There’s a Sliding Doors vibe to this one.
The lead misses her plane to a family vacation in the tropics in one reality and makes the plane in the other.
In the first reality, she’s stuck with her city-dwelling boyfriend who does not want to celebrate Christmas with her big family, while in the tropical reality, she finds love with a solo-traveling widowed syrup maker who happens to be from right near her hometown and who adores her relatives.
She breaks up with the non-Christmas-loving boyfriend, and she and the widowed guy go on to make syrup together in perpetuity.
It’s been so long since I’ve watched one of these movies with an open mind that I forgot how comforting they are.
Granted, there are a few things I’d tweak about the dialogue, and maybe they could dial back their obsession with flannel, but it’s like Frankie said—maybe love is a big, important thing to write about.
And true, Nora Ephron didn’t write Heartfelt movies, but she didn’t think she was lowering herself when she wrote about love. Maybe this whole time I’ve been thinking it’s beneath me to write about love when, really, I’ve been afraid that it’s too far above me.
But I think I get some things now. Number one being that maybe I wasn’t in Sweetville to fall in love with Corey, or even to get back together with Grant.
Maybe I was there to fall in love with love stories again.
To tell myself that Christmas is for me, and so is romance—in whatever shape I want it to take.
I don’t know what my plans are, exactly, when I open my laptop and launch Final Draft.
Words pour out of me faster than I can check for misspellings as I whip through beats and scenes and acts.
For the next two days, I write more than I have in the last year and end up with a draft of a romantic comedy about a woman who wakes up in a Heartfelt movie and finds herself in a love triangle with her down-to-earth hometown crush and her slightly surly ex.
“Everything is copy,” I say to an imaginary Nora Ephron.
“Even the extremely realistic hallucination of a winter wonderland brought on by drinking too heavily and passing out in a car dealership Santa sleigh.”
While I manage to skirt around any R-rated sex scenes, I do succeed at weaving in some actually good jokes and just enough subversiveness to make this Heartfelt movie one that feels like it’s mine.
Because it is, more than anyone will ever know.
And I can’t help but think it will also belong to the kind of people who’ve put up so much emotional armor they’re afraid to enjoy a Heartfelt movie.
I text Frankie, not expecting her to respond anytime soon. But to my surprise, she texts right back. Send it!
Frankie takes only a day to text me again, saying she loves my script. The few notes she gives are minor. You have a winner , she says.
She offers to send it to her agent, but I tell her I have an agent—at least for now.
Then I text Lacey. It’s January fifth, a week before my meeting with Heartfelt, which—up until a few days ago—I was planning to cancel. When I text, she gets right back to me.
I am so glad you came around. See? You are a Christmas person! SMHead! I’m going to send this to them before your meeting so we have something to talk about!
When I text a few days later to confirm my meeting, she writes back immediately.
That meeting is canceled.
My heart drops. I knew it. I’m not cut out to write a Heartfelt movie.
But then another text comes in: Rebooked you for two weeks from today. They want to MAKE your movie! Holy f’ing ESS, right?
The meeting at Heartfelt is so unreal and smooth and I am in such a state of disbelief that I can barely remember how it all unfolds.
Everyone involved is as nice as if they stepped out of Sweetville.
Confidence I’ve never felt before allows me to answer every question with ease, like I have life-changing meetings every day.
The only snag comes when one woman wearing a black blazer so classy I vow to buy myself one taps the pages in front of her and says in a tone I can’t decipher, “What I want to know is if Golden Grove is a real place.”
Oh shit. I set my script in a fictional version of Powell Park, and I really thought it would make it unique to set a Heartfelt film in a sort of mundane suburb instead of an unrealistically charming small town. I bristle at the idea that she’s about to pitch a change of setting.
“It is a real place. Well, based on the real place where I grew up. That aspect of the script is really important to me. I’d rather not change it.” I hate myself for saying the words. I’m supposed to be agreeable and accommodating and open to changing whatever they want to change.
But the woman smiles at me. “I wanted it to be a real place! I’m thinking we film there. What do you say to going on location?”