Nicholas Sparks has no love for people who call his stories "romances." The mega-best-selling author of The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John and Message in a Bottle stands in the aisle of Book Soup, literally and figuratively defending his turf.
"If you look for me, I'm in the fiction section. Romance has its own section," he says toward the end of a long conversation. Sunshine streams in from Sunset Boulevard. He's smiling. Hard.
"I don't write romance novels." His preferred terminology: "Love stories — it's a very different genre. I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels."
Rejection isn't something he has had to deal with lately. Sparks holds the No. 1 and No. 2 positions on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list with The Last Song, a novel turned movie vehicle for Miley Cyrus, and Dear John, recently released as a movie with Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum.
The Last Song movie, opening March 31, features Cyrus as a morose piano prodigy, reluctantly spending the summer with her estranged, dying father (Greg Kinnear). Cyrus' real-life boyfriend, Aussie actor Liam Hemsworth, 20, plays a kid who falls for her.
They met on the shoot, which means Sparks is a matchmaker of sorts. When Cyrus joins Sparks in the stacks at Book Soup, he asks about her weekend: "What'd you do for fun? Out with Liam?"
Cyrus smiles widely. "At first, he was working, so I was cute," she says. "I went and got him coffee, bought him an Elvis CD and went and gave it to him at the photo shoot."
Sparks sighs. The North Carolina native spent his time watching football in his hotel room.
Hollywood has been good to Sparks, and now he's returning the favor, crafting both the novel and the screenplay for The Last Song as a steppingstone for the Disney super-starlet, now 17, as she transitions from Hannah Montana, which is shooting its final season,to more mature roles.
Despite his status, Sparks, 44, says he alone was not enough to get the movie made. He told Disney about the story idea, and the studio expressed interest in it as a vehicle for Cyrus — but there were still a lot of maybes.
"It was not greenlit from the moment they got me on the project. She had to like it at the end, and Disney had to like it at the end."
Nothing personal, but …
Cyrus confesses that, well, she never finished the novel, originally published in hardcover last September. "With the book, I've only gotten through part of The Last Song," Cyrus says sheepishly. "Because the movie started first."
Sparks feigns being stricken, but then says: "I don't know if I ever watched a Hannah Montana show. ... Nothing personal. My daughters do every day."
" 'Nothing personal. I just hate her show,' " Cyrus says, laughing and mocking his voice.
The Last Song ended up being tailored to her tastes. "It's got things I would like," Cyrus says. "Even the name — I picked 'Ronnie' for my granddad. Things like that. But it was not written to make it easy for me, either."
The character is musical, but she's not singing Party in the USA. "She didn't want to sing," says Sparks, who wrote her instead as a classical pianist.
Ronnie actually seems like the type of girl who used to be a big Hannah Montana fan herself, but not anymore. "Exactly!" Cyrus says with a laugh. "Anything that would make her parents happy is something she doesn't want to do."
And though The Last Song is not as squeaky-clean as her Disney Channel show, the PG-rated movie is still very "chaste" (Sparks' word). "My own opinion is: dark — easy to write. Easy!" he says. "I find no challenge in it."
Instead, he aims for the hopeful, which may be what his fans love. If Stephen King injects magic and the supernatural into a secular, disbelieving world, and John Grisham provides people in suits with a pulse of adventure, Sparks may be filling the holes in the hearts of those who just want a little more love in their lives.
He wrinkles his nose at the theory.
"Mmmmm, OK," he says. "I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers. I feel as if, when they read them, they can feel — for instance, if you take The Last Song— that 'I know a 17-year-old like Ronnie.' And these characters are by no means perfect, but when the going gets rough, they do the right thing. People want to say, 'I would do that.' "
His tales also tend to be punctuated by death. In Nights in Rodanthe, which was made into a film last year with Diane Lane and Richard Gere, a middle-aged woman leaves her husband to oversee a beachside bed-and-breakfast, only to fall for a doctor who is trying to get over the accidental death of a patient. Love blossoms, but ... tragedy intervenes, adding a sheen of nobility that tugs the heartstrings a little harder than "happily ever after."
Cyrus says the threat of loss in The Last Song makes the viewer or reader feel good while feeling sad. "It is melodramatic," she says. "But there is a sense of celebration, too. Even though it is tragic, we still celebrate a life."
Pardon the interruption
Sparks says: "I'm going to interrupt you there. There's a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion, or manipulating emotion. It's a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it's very rare that it works. That's why I tend to dominate this particular genre. There is this fine line. And I do not verge into melodrama. It's all drama. I try to generate authentic emotional power."
But, well, he always does kill someone by the end of his tales, usually to maximum handkerchief effect.
"Of course!" Sparks says. "I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were called the Greek tragedies. A thriller is supposed to thrill. A horror novel is supposed to scare you. A mystery is supposed to keep you turning the pages, guessing 'whodunit?'
"A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance. What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms."
That's one of his favorites, and he points it out as he walks the aisles of the bookstore.
"Hemingway. See, they're recommending The Garden of Eden, and I read that. It was published after he was dead. It's a weird story about this honeymoon couple, and a third woman gets involved. Uh, it's not my cup of tea." Sparks pulls the one beside it off the shelf. "A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That's what I write," he says, putting it back. "That's what I write."
Cormac McCarthy? "Horrible," he says, looking at Blood Meridian. "This is probably the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboy vs. Indians story ever written."
Even hearing a passage about a sunset in which "the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples" doesn't sway him.
Cyrus pipes up: "The Catcher in the Rye. That's my favorite book." She smiles. J.D. Salinger's classic may be, by law, every 17-year-old's favorite book.
Sparks' favorite tale of youth? "I think A Walk to Remember," he says, citing his own novel. "That's my version of a coming-of-age." He pauses and adds: "You have to sayTo Kill a Mockingbird is an all-time classic."
Any he thinks are overrated?
"I don't like to say bad things about others."
Except McCarthy? "He deserves it," Spark says with a laugh.
Asked what he likes in his own genre, Sparks replies: "There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do."
When others (James Patterson?) are suggested to him, he keeps his lips pursed.
Sparks has been married to his wife, Cathy, since 1989, and they have five children. So when your business is love stories, is it hard to maintain that image with a wife who sometimes sees you sitting around, unshaven, eating pizza and watching a football game? "No, my wife and I are best friends," he says.
And you can't always be a living romance novel.
There's that word again
Sparks cringes at the word: romance. But since it comes up again, isn't he kind of splitting hairs with this whole "love story" vs. "romance" thing?
"No, it's the difference between Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet," he says. "(Romances) are all essentially the same story: You've got a woman, she's down on her luck, she meets the handsome stranger who falls desperately in love with her, but he's got these quirks, she must change him, and they have their conflicts, and then they end up happily ever after."
Some might say that's the plot to Nights in Rodanthe, apart from the happy ending.
Sparks disagrees. "No, the themes in love stories are different. In mine, you never know if it's going to be a happy ending, sad ending, bittersweet or tragic. You read a romance because you know what to expect. You read a love story because you don't know what to expect."
Is it annoying when someone doesn't see the distinction? "Uh, no," he says. "But it has been a struggle."
When the interview is over, he has a question of his own.
"You going to call it a romance novel?" he asks.
