How to Get Better at Love with Katherine Center

What if getting better at love is the key to a good life?  My guest today is New York Times bestselling author Katherine Center to talk about why love stories matter, how they help us grow, and what they teach us about relationships, joy, and self-compassion.

Katherine shares her journey from writing Duran Duran fan fiction in sixth grade to becoming a beloved author of rom-com novels like The Bodyguard and The Rom Commers. She reflects on the cultural stigma around romance stories, how they help us connect with our own lives, and why learning to appreciate and nurture love is one of the most important things we can do.

Plus, Katherine reveals how line dancing taught her an unexpected lesson about resilience, and she offers wisdom on what makes a happy ending—both on the page and in real life.

Katherine’s newest novel, The Love Haters, comes out in May, and you can preorder it now!

📖 Connect with Katherine Center:

• Website: katherinecenter.com
• Instagram: @katherinecenter

✨ Stay connected with Angie:

• Subscribe to Hello Friday, Angie’s weekly newsletter: angiemizzell.com
• Follow on Instagram: @angiemizzell

🎧 If you loved this episode, subscribe, rate, and review More Like You! See you next week.

Transcript

KC (00:00)
I think partly we're bad at love because as a culture, we don't take it very

We roll our eyes at it. We treat it like it's not important. And I just fully disagree with that

Learning how to be good at love is sort of the number one thing that you can do to live a good life,

Angie Mizzell (00:18)
Hi, I'm Angie Mizzell and welcome to More Like You. This is a podcast where we explore what it means to live a more authentic and fulfilling life. I'm a former television journalist and author of the memoir Girl in the Spotlight. And I believe that one small shift in perspective could be all it takes to help you create a life that feels like home.

Today I am so excited to have Katherine Center as a guest on the show. Katherine is the New York Times bestselling author of 11 novels, including The Bodyguard and Things You Save in a Fire. And her newest novel, The Rom Commers, was an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. her next book, The Love Haters, is coming out in May. Her novels, Happiness for Beginners and The Lost Husband, are top movies on Netflix.

And number one New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult says Katherine Center is the balm we need in the world right now.

And I 100 % agree. And after listening to today's episode, I have a feeling that you will too.

Angie Mizzell (01:23)
Katherine, it is so good to have you here. Thank you so much for your time. So I just want to get right into it. I've heard this story before. I wonder if it ever gets old for you, but tell everybody your very first novel that you ever wrote.

KC (01:38)
Yeah, well, I never get tired of telling that story. So I wrote my first novel when I was in the sixth grade. And it was fan fiction about the 1980s boy band Duran Duran.

Angie Mizzell (01:50)
Yes.

KC (01:52)
And I was super, super dorky in the sixth grade and super, super miserable and overly self-conscious, you know, and just really hard on myself at that age too. And somehow my two best friends and I got this idea that we should write novels about Duran Duran and we should cast ourselves as the main characters in the novels.

and we should basically write romance novels. I mean, we didn't think of it that way, but yeah. So that's what we did. That's how I got through sixth grade, through all the misery of sixth grade was just, carried a little notebook around, know, Harriet the Spy style and had it in my backpack. And whenever I didn't have anything to do, I would just...

Angie Mizzell (02:19)
Mm-hmm.

KC (02:36)
more chapters to this novel. And the plot of the novel was that Duran Duran was driving through my childhood neighborhood in Houston, Texas in their stretch limo, their way to a concert, as they do, as they do, as could happen on any given day. And they got a flat tire and they had to, you know, find a landline to call a tire guy, because this was the 1980s before they'd invented cell phones.

Angie Mizzell (02:46)
Mm-hmm, as they do.

You

KC (03:02)
And so they walked up to the closest front door, which just happened to be my front door in the fictional story. And I just happened to be there watching MTV and busting my dance moves to their Hungry Like the Wolf video. And I opened the door, find all five of these world famous rockers, my front stoop, let them in, let them use the phone, make them microwave popcorn like a gracious hostess. And then, you know.

Something was going on with the tire guy that day. He was like super, super busy. He could not get to us in a timely manner. So I wound up hanging out with Duran-Duran in my mother's living room for like several hours. And by the time the tire guy finally got there, all five members of Duran-Duran, all five had fallen in love with me. Of course. And...

Angie Mizzell (03:31)
Right? Right.

All five.

Of course.

KC (03:49)
Yeah, had to, I had to spend the rest of the novel deciding which one to marry. was the whole, the end, the whole plot, probably ever after. And I always forget to say who I chose. I chose Simon Le Bon. John Taylor would also have been a good choice. He has aged like a fine wine, but there it is.

Angie Mizzell (03:54)
The end, happily ever after.

So I think it was Simon Lebon that I saw one New Year's Eve singing at Times Square. So I was watching New Year's Rockin' Eve and I was like, every time I see them or hear of them, I think of you. And I snapped a picture of my television screen and I sent it to you. And I mean, I'm sure you get a million messages, but you did respond. I was like, ah! It's just stuck in my head. The story never gets old. It's a fantastic story.

KC (04:13)
Thank you.

Thank

It doesn't get old for me.

Angie Mizzell (04:32)
Well, and I think it's really interesting, and those early stories of how writers become writers. I have a Harriet the Spy story, like reading that story. And I remember how it inspired my best friend and I to walk around with our notebooks and we gave ourselves names. I was Veronica Bates and she was Victoria Brewington. And I don't know how long it went on, but it was just the idea of having our notebooks and we were writing what we were observing.

So even then, did you know I want to be a novelist when I grow up?

KC (05:03)
Yes, I did actually I mean because that was really that was the moment right when I first sort of tasted the very sweet nectar of fiction right and and how How life-changing it can be because like we wrote those stories and You know, we weren't crazy. We knew that they weren't real right? I knew that that wasn't really happening. I knew that Duran Duran was not really in love with me

But at the same time, whenever I would go into that fictional world and write about these characters, one of which was me, it was incredibly comforting, right? And like soul nourishing. Because I was at this point in my life where I...

was so mean to myself all the time, right? I just picked on myself. just like all day, it was just making lists of my, know, personal flaws and areas for self-improvement. And, you know, I was hard on myself in that way that girls become hard on themselves you know, in middle school, you start to realize that the world is looking at you and judging you and you can't just be the goofy little kid that you always were. And I needed some encouragement and I needed some hope and I needed some...

Angie Mizzell (05:56)
Wow.

KC (06:17)
some sense that things were gonna get better, that I had something to look forward to, you know? And that's what those stories turned into for me. We would write all week, and then we would get together on the weekends and have these sleepovers, and everybody would put on their PJs and we'd pile into somebody's bed and we'd open up these spiral notebooks and we would read our novels to each other out loud in installments.

And it was so, I looked forward to the sleepovers and to sharing the novel that I was writing, but I also looked forward to what was gonna happen next in the fictional world that I was creating. So it was incredibly nourishing in this really profound way, like on this cellular level. And that I never, like I'm still kind of doing the same thing. I mean, I'm not still writing about Duran Duran, but I'm still trying to wield the magic of stories in the same way all these decades later.

Angie Mizzell (07:05)
And you just helped me make a connection about how inspiring you are to others, even about your own creative process, writers like to talk about how hard it is to write and they like having written, but not actually writing. But you're like, no. And I can see now how at a young age through writing, you learned how to be good to yourself. So I can tell you're taking that into

your creative process and it's the energy you're giving on Instagram and even when you're sharing insights into your creative process. I don't think I ever really put it together like that, but that must have been it.

KC (07:44)
That's exactly what it is. I mean, that's right, because stories, and love stories in particular, but lots of stories, have always been a way for me to connect myself back to joy, right? And I don't think I've ever even phrased it like that until this moment, but like, I was just thinking over the holidays about how when I was a kid, my dad, who really, really loved the opera,

always used to take me to the opera and the symphony and the ballet. He really loved all these things. And I did not love any of those things as a child. And so I would just get trapped, you know, in these dark theaters for many hours with my dad on these, know, he thought they were cultural experiences. But I was thinking about like how often that happened and how every time it happened, I would just go into my head and tell myself a story. Like that's how I would entertain myself while I was...

as a child I remember sleeping through the magic flute as a six writer. But I think that I do that in lots of ways. I constantly use stories to entertain myself, to comfort myself. Actually when I'm writing a book, that moment between when you turn off the bedside lamp and then you put your head on the pillow and then you're waiting to fall asleep.

When I'm writing a book, the place that I go in my head is always to that story and those characters just to kind of see like, what are they up to? Like, I'm not writing, I'm not working. I'm just like hanging out with them. Like, what are they doing? Like, let's go see those guys. So yeah, for me, it's always play, it's fun, it's joy. I see that you brought up a thing that I have like like a, you know, beef with because I hear this, this gets said a lot. I heard it on two.

Angie Mizzell (09:07)
Right.

KC (09:24)
podcasts in a row one time, people saying, when I hear people say they enjoy the act of writing, I think to myself, they must not be very good writers. And as a person who really enjoys the process of writing and like takes a lot of nourishment and pleasure and fun and play and excitement out of it, I always like that kind of gets my back up because I'm just like, hey,

Angie Mizzell (09:32)
Mmm.

Right.

KC (09:46)
Writing can be hard if you don't write all the time, right? Writing can be hard in the same way that playing piano is hard if you haven't spent your whole life playing piano, right? Like I've been writing since sixth grade, actively memorizing song lyrics and poems and studying other people's stories and copying things down and taking notes on what people write and just practicing, practicing, practicing since the age of 12. It's been many decades since that happened. And I'm now...

Angie Mizzell (09:49)
Yeah.

KC (10:15)
at a point in my life where like, I feel like I'm the yo-yo ma of rom-com writers. Like, you don't, like when you see yo-yo ma play the cello, you're not like, that guy's struggling. Like he's really working hard. He's not working hard. He's over the hump and he's at the point where his whole life of studying how to be good at doing that thing allows him to just kind of go into this very blissful state when he's doing the thing. And I think I'm kind of the same way with writing. It's fun for me. It is.

Angie Mizzell (10:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

KC (10:42)
I mean, it's not that you don't have to sustain your concentration. There's all sorts of things you have to do to focus, but it's really a joyful process. there are a lot of reasons for that. I could teach a whole class on it.

Angie Mizzell (10:45)
Mm-hmm.

I wish you would, and I wish you would

put it online so

KC (10:59)
I think we're all really hard on ourselves, right? In all kinds of ways. And I think part of being a person who does a creative thing for a living or maybe a person who does anything for a living is to kind of master the art of self-encouragement, right? To notice. I mean, this might actually be the whole trick to life, in fact, in general, is to notice when you're getting things right in life and to just appreciate it.

Angie Mizzell (11:01)
Yeah.

Mm.

Hmm?

KC (11:25)
Enjoy it, like savor it, like be like, I got that right. Like, I wrote that line and it was funny, right? Or, you know, I recognized that teachable moment with my kid and I nailed it, right? Like, or I got the dishes done, you know, before midnight. Like whatever it is that you need to feel good about, just let yourself feel good about it and notice it.

Angie Mizzell (11:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I notice when I'm doing something that makes me feel like myself and writing is one of those things. I write as a way to encourage myself in my own life.

But what I've realized is even for the things that make me feel like myself, sometimes it's getting into it, getting started, getting going. So I have to remember, wait, this is actually good for you and it will bring you joy. It seems like you have just, really understand your process.

KC (12:14)
Mm.

Angie Mizzell (12:14)
more

than maybe some people just don't really understand their process.

KC (12:18)
I I agree with you. do understand my process because I've been at this for a long, long time, right? I'm like the great grandma of rom-coms at this point. But also, I understand what my purpose is. Like, I understand why I'm here. And I had many decades to figure that out because, and I've thought about this a lot in the past couple of years, I'm sort of like the opposite of an overnight sensation, you know?

Angie Mizzell (12:22)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

KC (12:41)
it took me a very, very, very long time to get to the point where I even had any confidence that I would get another book

it just took a really long... It was... Look, my career has been a slow burn. I mean, it's a good thing that slow burns are the best kind of burns because it's just taken a really long time to sort of find the people who are going to like the very particular thing that I do. there's whenever you're doing any kind of creative or audience based...

Angie Mizzell (12:57)
Mm-hmm.

KC (13:07)
thing, you're only ever kind of as good as the audience thinks you are, right? So you're a stand-up comedian and you tell a joke and nobody laughs at it, it actually might not be funny. Like, you don't know, right? And the ground is always kind of shifting under your feet. It's not like you get tenure and then you're done and then there you are, there's your life. Like you can relax, right? It's a job where you're just constantly, constantly having to...

Angie Mizzell (13:14)
Hmm.

Right. Right.

KC (13:34)
find some kind of security and what I decided over many, many years of, you know, surprise blessings happening, but also lots of disappointments and opportunities for personal growth, just a very, very slow build. The thing I decided to double down on was gratitude. I was going to be thankful to be there. I was going to be thankful that I got to write stories at all. And that was going to be the thing that was going to keep me from losing my...

Angie Mizzell (13:58)
Mm-hmm.

KC (14:02)
way, you know, in all the storms of everything. And I think that was like a conscious decision that I made in like 2010 when things were not going the way I wanted them to. When, you know, it looked like I might not get another book contract when I was really sort of feeling panicked about my career. I was like, I can't change the world. I can't tell everybody else what to do. I can't, you know, make everybody and their dog buy my book. All I can do.

Angie Mizzell (14:03)
Yeah.

KC (14:28)
is be grateful to be here and just keep trying to get better. And so that's what I did. And the great thing about making that choice all those years ago was that it slowly taught me.

who I am and what I'm doing and why. Why I'm doing it, right? I know that I am writing stories for a very particular reason and it is a very joyful reason and it's because I want to help other people feel better. You know, I wanna make us all laugh and swoon and feel hopeful and feel excited about the future and feel grateful for our blessings.

And that's what these stories are for. And they're for everybody else, but they're also for me. Like the side benefit of it all is that I'm kind of the first reader of all these stories and they do the same thing for me. So when I'm writing about forgiveness, I get to learn about forgiveness. You know, I've got my new book that comes out in May is called The Love Haters. And the main character goes on a kind of an enemies to lovers journey with her own body. She's like mean to herself, hard on herself about her body. And she kind of...

Angie Mizzell (15:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

KC (15:33)
goes through a process of learning to be kinder and more appreciative towards herself. And that was very healing for me to write. And I'm now like seeing early reviews on Goodreads that it's been healing for people to read too. like that, you know, it's just all kinds of goodness, but I'm just here to make things better for all of us. That's what I'm trying to do.

Angie Mizzell (15:50)
Well, you absolutely are. I find it so interesting that you were saying 2010 was a time where you were struggling because that is around the time I found you. The novel, Everyone is Beautiful. I had a toddler and a new baby.

and I'd found you on the beautiful internet through blogging and commenting and things like that. But that particular novel found me at exactly the right time. So in that novel, you're writing about a young mother, that character has moved or is moving in the process of moving. Lainey, right?

KC (16:30)
Yes.

Angie Mizzell (16:31)
I really love the book. It's on my shelf back there. I took the cover off, but I think it's you see where my fingers the green. I think that's everyone is beautiful. I think that is it. Wow, that was good. But I just because I do like memoir and true story. I had never been pulled into a novel like that and connected with a fictional character that felt so real. But in that.

KC (16:37)
Ew!

Angie Mizzell (16:53)
story Lainey develops a relationship with herself. it through photography or there's something that happens that she starts to reconnect with herself. So that's what drew me in. So I just think that is so inspirational to me to know that somewhere in that time you were also struggling and yet you were making an impact and that's so cool.

KC (17:17)
Yeah, yeah, 20. So that book came out in 2009. And then, and then I had another book that came out in 2010 that, and that book, I had an old publisher. I'm with a different publisher now, but my old publisher, none of my books had done quite as well as they wanted them to. And,

And in 2010, I had another book that came out and it did not do very well. And I mean, my mom read it, you know, a few people read it, my neighbors, my neighbors read it, but it was not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Angie Mizzell (17:43)
Wait, was it Get Lucky? I read it!

Can I officially be the star of your fan club?

KC (17:49)
You know, there was this feeling and I'm, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but there was this feeling from my publisher, like they had kind of decided, like I'd had my shot and I really wasn't going to amount to anything. And we should, they should, everybody should move on. And so the last book that I wrote with them was actually a book called The Lost Husband. And, you know, when I wrote The Lost Husband, I thought it might actually be the last novel that I ever got to write because I could just feel.

you know, interest and support from the publishing house just slipping away, you know, and then, you know, then things turned around in a lovely little twist. I wound up leaving that publishing house, going to the publishing house I'm now at, which is St. Martin's, which is part of McMillan. And they loved me and decided to do everything they could to like help and put things out there. And, you know, I got this fantastic editor, Jen Enderlin, who

kind of rescued my career. She read this book that I wrote called How to Walk Away and she said, I love it and I just feel like everybody else is going to love it too. Like we just have to get it out there into people's hands and once they've read it, they're going to love it too. And so she put it out there in a big way and it hit the New York Times bestseller list. was my first, it my sixth novel, but my first book to ever hit the list and then hitting the list, you know, changes your life as a novelist. Like you go from being someone nobody's ever heard of to being somebody

Angie Mizzell (19:01)
Yeah.

KC (19:11)
people have heard of and that is the difference between making a living and not making a living really as a writer. yeah, so, you know, the irony of course about The Lost Husband is that it many years later, 10 years later, wound up becoming longer even, becoming a movie on Netflix that hit number one on Netflix in 2020. you know, it's so funny to me looking back that I thought that was like the end of my career.

Angie Mizzell (19:38)
Mm-hmm.

KC (19:38)
When

I was writing that book, was like, this is the last book I'm ever going to get to write. And then it wound up kind of having this lovely, you know, rising up from its own ashes like a phoenix and having this lovely second chance where people went back and found it and read it.

Angie Mizzell (19:52)
when,

Did you decide or discover that I write romcom?

KC (20:00)
Mmm.

Angie Mizzell (20:01)
that's my thing. Because Everyone is Beautiful wasn't quite like that. It was more of a woman's story. And I'm sure there was like a love component, but there seemed to be a very noticeable shift.

KC (20:03)
Mm-hmm.

So I went to Vassar College, which is a very literary place. A lot of very famous writers went to Vassar College and I won the Vassar College Fiction Prize in college.

And so, you know, that was part of my sense of myself as possibly a somewhat literary writer. And then I went to grad school and I got a master's in fiction writing at a very literary program. There was nobody writing rom-coms in any of these programs. Actually, books weren't even rom-coms. That was only a movie category back in the day when I was in grad school.

Angie Mizzell (20:46)
Right.

KC (20:48)
And so what I, but I knew that I loved love stories, but I thought of love stories as like movies, right? Or like entertainment. And I thought of books as, you know, something you did in graduate school. I don't know. I thought of books as work maybe, or I thought of books as poetry, but I did not think that novels were supposed to be entertaining in the same way that movies were. And so what I, the way that I sort of navigated that early on was that I wrote what we called

Women's fiction with strong romantic elements. Women's fiction is basically kind of on the more literary side. But then I would always put in a strong love story with it. That was how I started out. But gradually over time, I went through...

this very beautiful and very inspiring process of literary de-snobbification, where I kind of started out with lot of inherited attitudes about the cultural value of love stories that I had never really questioned, right? I I think we all are a little snooty about love stories, whether we mean to be or not. And I had to rethink a lot of that because

Angie Mizzell (21:39)
You

KC (21:56)
What happened to me was that the year I turned 40, my agent sent me a romance novel that was one of her other clients. She just sent it to me as a gift. And I was very snooty about it. It had one of those like, bodice ripping looking covers, right? It's like a grocery store novel, but I thought, well, I don't want to be rude. So I'll just take a look at it. You know, I was going to open it up and read the first chapter. And then,

Angie Mizzell (22:12)
right.

KC (22:21)
I opened up, read the first chapter, and then two hours later, I was in the car driving to Barnes and Noble to go get another one. Like, it was the most fun I'd ever had reading. I totally loved everything about it. I felt like a person who had spent her entire life eating boneless, skinless chicken breasts, and I just discovered chocolate cake. It was this total awakening for me about what...

love stories can do to you and how much fun they can be for you and how nourishing they can be. And that year, by coincidence, the year I turned 40, my gift to myself was that I wasn't gonna read anything that I felt like I ought to read. I wasn't gonna read anything just because everybody else was reading it. I was only gonna read the books that I really felt like reading, the books that were calling to me in some way. And so I spent that entire year reading nothing but...

Angie Mizzell (23:09)
Okay.

KC (23:15)
historical romance. That's all I read for a year and actually probably two or three years. I didn't want to read anything else. I just wanted to read this. You know, like I felt like I'd done enough Kafka and Camus. Like I'd done enough of that. You know, I just did not need to do any more literary fiction that year. I dove headfirst into romance novels and I had the time of my life. And that was a life-changing thing for me because I really spent a lot of time trying to figure out like what's happening.

Like, what are these stories doing to me? Like, where is this magic coming from? Why am I having so much fun? Why is this so glorious, right? And through becoming like a real and very dedicated romance reader, like really committing to that, I was able to kind of let go of a lot of these sort of sad prejudices about the genre that had kind of held me back from kind of doing the thing that I really loved. Because love stories from the get-go have been the thing that I really loved.

but I was kind of holding back. And you know, I wish I could just liberate every woman in America to love love stories because I, and man too, men are welcome, jump in, because I have read so many reviews on Goodreads. Like I do read the reviews of my books. I sort them by five stars, but I do read them. And you you can see in people's writing when they're having trouble giving themselves permission to love love stories. So I've really done a lot of thinking about.

why that is and why we won't give ourselves that permission to have that kind of fun. I think there are a lot of reasons for it. But one of my sort of missions now as a fully formed adult is to give other people permission to...

commit to and enjoy and feast on all of the wonderful, nourishing, uplifting, joyful, hopeful, pro-social joys of reading love stories. Like, they're just so good for you. They're so good for you.

Angie Mizzell (25:02)
Well, you absolutely changed the way I thought about them. these are my thoughts about it and I'm thinking about it in real time. They're predictable. Like, you know how it's going to end and I'm not really in that demo anymore. You know, I've been married to my husband for almost 25 years. I've got three kids. I mean, I'm not running off and, you know, falling in love with somebody new. This is maybe for young people.

KC (25:17)
Thanks.

Angie Mizzell (25:25)
But some of my favorite movies are rom-coms. When Harry Met Sally, mean, on and on on on it goes. But when The Rom-Comers came out, I love this cover, so cute. This is your, Katherine's current book if you're looking at the video, if you're seeing this on YouTube. You started talking on Instagram about the fact that they're predictable is the point. If they don't end up together,

KC (25:28)
Of Of course.

Angie Mizzell (25:54)
then the book failed. So it isn't about the fact they get together at the end. It's about how they get from that initial attraction to getting over all of their stuff and the things that make them quote unquote bad at love and get better at love. And then when I saw you in Columbia, you came to Columbia this summer when the Rom Commers came out and it was so great to hear you talk about this in person.

This is how I remember it. don't know exactly how you said it, but you said rom-coms are about people who are bad at love learning to get better at love. And I was like, so then I became a different person. over the holidays, I watched every rom-com I could find,

KC (26:27)
Yeah.

Angie Mizzell (26:35)
I had such a great holiday season. It was such a comfort for me because this was the first Christmas without my mom. And I found so much joy from just trying to find the movies where this happens. So let me take a breath and just ask you.

Again, I don't know if that's exactly how you said it, if you said people are bad at love, but what do you think makes wonderful people really bad at love? That's why we're here today. That is really like the whole point of today's episode. I just really feel like so many of us are and we have the best intentions. But what are some of the things that...

KC (26:54)
That's perfect. You got it. That's right.

Angie Mizzell (27:19)
I have some ideas about this, but I want your thoughts.

KC (27:21)
Yeah, well, I mean.

What do I want to say about that? I think partly we're bad at love because as a culture, we don't take it very seriously. We roll our eyes at it. We treat it like it's not important. And I just fully disagree with that

Learning how to be good at love is sort of the number one thing that you can do to live a good life, right? It's not become a billionaire. Those folks aren't happy, you know? That's not the way to go. It's learning how to form.

nourishing human relationships with the people in your life. And so it's romantic love, yes. And that's always the backbone of any story that I write because it's the most intense, right? And so when you're writing something dramatic, like a story or a movie or a play, you have to go with the most dramatic thing because that's going to be the most compelling for the audience. So yeah, backbone of my stories is always a romantic love. But then all around it, know, strung all around it, like Christmas lights are

other kinds of love. The love we have for our kids, the love we have for our pets, the love we have for our friends, right? The love we have for our grandparents. Like, knowing how to interact with other humans in a way that is positive and nourishing is the crucial thing for living a good life. And we're not very good at it because we don't pay attention to it and we don't take it seriously. I mean, even just romantic love. I mean, if you think about it,

as a woman, if you get married and you have kids with somebody who turns out to not be good person in your life,

You're never getting away from that person. I mean, my parents got divorced in 1985. They had three daughters. They have seen each other at every graduation, every wedding, every grandchild birth for every decade since then, right? Like you make these decisions about who you're gonna form your family with and who you're gonna build your world with and around. And those decisions make.

your world. The people you fill up your life with are your life, right? And so, how to make good decisions romantically, I think is a very important skill for everybody. Learning how to find your person, learning how to recognize what a good relationship looks like and feels like. That's really, really crucial when you're younger to making your, making your decisions, right? Making good decisions that will like determine many.

threads through the rest of your life. So there's that part of it. But even after you're past that point, even when you're in your 30s and your 40s, you've made your decisions, you've picked your person, whatever. Love stories, romance novels are built on pro-social behaviors. Like, I think about this a lot.

Love stories are about people getting better at love in real time. They start out bad at love and over the course of the novel, they get good at love and they're not going to get their happy ending unless they can learn all the lessons they need to learn to get there, right? And so when you read a story about people who start out, often those people are angry, bitter about something. They've misjudged each other. They are enemies at the start, you know?

And over the course of 300 pages, they slowly, slowly have to forgive each other, learn how to see each other with better eyes, right? Understand each other, listen, take care of each other, right? Be kind. So all of the personality traits and skills that are driving a love story forward are things called pro-social behaviors. It's...

Angie Mizzell (30:58)
Mm-hmm.

KC (31:00)
doing things in the world that are good for you and the people around you. The same cannot be said of serial killer stories, right? Like, if you're reading thrillers and murder and stories about people betraying each other and doing horrible things, if you're reading stories about the dark underbelly of society,

that may have some benefits, I'm not sure what they are, but it's not this, right? Those stories are not helping us become better people, right? So I like to read stories that where the characters learn how to be better people in real time, because we learn by watching and we get to become better people going through that story. If the writer's doing their job and if the story is immersive.

Angie Mizzell (31:21)
Right.

KC (31:39)
And if we believe it and if we feel like we're in it and if we're empathizing with the characters and if we even are stepping into the shoes, like crawling into the skin of those characters and like not just watching them from across the room, but like becoming them, right? And wanting what they want, feeling their feelings, know, tearing up when they feel sad, having our hearts thump when they're frightened, right? When they fall in love, we fall in love too. Like all of that stuff, when we're kind of having this mirror neuron experience.

Angie Mizzell (31:52)
Mm-hmm.

KC (32:07)
of empathizing with these imaginary people, if the writer is doing a good job, if they're really crushing it, it's like it's happening to you, the reader. You're reading the story about people who don't exist, but the story is making you believe it's real. It's like The Matrix, right? It's like that movie The Matrix. so what happens is, it's not real life, but it's kind of the next best thing. And you go through this other person's experience and challenge. And of course,

Angie Mizzell (32:30)
Mm-hmm.

KC (32:35)
That is where wisdom comes from in life, right? Is the challenges that we have to go through, the hardships we have to suffer through, the moments when our life falls apart and we have to put it back together. That's where wisdom comes from. So if we go through stories where we get to be other people as they do that, the benefit of it all is that we get to pull that wisdom out on the other side for ourselves, right? It didn't happen to you, but it feels like it happened to you, right? And you get to pull that wisdom out. So they're incredibly,

Angie Mizzell (32:57)
Yes.

Well, you're right.

KC (33:04)
good for us, they're incredibly beneficial. And I'm interested in using that wisdom and that magic that stories kind of hold to help us all learn how to be better people.

Angie Mizzell (33:14)
I think a lot of people have had stuff happen to them that changes them in a way that makes it difficult for them to be in a...

truly connected relationship with other

and I've seen it in my own life especially, and it's why I write and tell stories. I think we take things from the past into the present. And if it is not examined, or if life doesn't force you to examine it, it's gonna wreck even some of your

best relationships because sometimes you're trying to control things that you have no business controlling. and there was a beautiful scene in the Rom-Comers where that wisdom comes out. we can't really do anything to prevent catastrophic things from happening.

and we have to live and we still have to take care of each other well. And you kind of are going into it knowing your heart might get broken, you know. So I love that you bring all of those universal things out. And even in the happy ending, it's still mixed up with the hard.

KC (34:23)
the best rom-coms are about people who are flawed, who have unexamined ideas that they picked up somewhere along the way about who they need to be to have love and to be loved, or even unexamined ideas about what love is gonna mean in their lives. And then when you put those characters into a rom-com,

Every single piece of the plot is there to force them to re-examine those assumptions. That's what the plot is for. So you put a character, like in my new book, The Love Haters, which comes out of May, the main character has to go to Key West. She's a video producer and she has to do a video about a US Coast Guard rescue swimmer. So she has to spend a lot of time.

you know, in the water or around the water, but she doesn't know how to swim and she hasn't owned a bathing suit since middle school. So every single piece of the plot that comes along that follows is there to force her to go swimming and to put on bathing suits and to confront, you know, her stuff about being in the world, right? Being in her body, being in a swimsuit.

Angie Mizzell (35:31)
Mm-hmm.

KC (35:35)
And she just gets pummeled, right? That's what plots do. They just pummel the character with the thing that they don't wanna get pummeled by. But over the course of the story, it forces that person reluctantly, sometimes kicking and screaming, to be brave, right? And to rethink it and to re-conceptualize what really matters and who they are in the world. So yes, that's what rom-coms are for. That is part of their very nourishing special magic is that they take people who don't believe in love or people who...

think that the only way to be safe in the world is to be completely closed off or whatever their mistaken assumption is, and they force them to re-examine this mistaken idea. And it's so fun to watch. And it's so fun to be there for that transformation, right? And when you step into the skin of that character, you get to have that transformation too. So it's healing for you in addition to being healing for the main character, which is why I think love stories are

uniquely particularly nourishing.

Angie Mizzell (36:35)
Yes. How, hmm, this is a big question, but how do you think we, collective we, get better at love?

I wrote it down earlier and I was like, this is a big question.

KC (36:50)
Yeah, no, I mean, this is, I mean, I love that question. I think about that question all the time. How do we get better at love? I think that I did not start out great at love in the beginning. You know, my parents were divorced when I was 13 and they were not having like the most fun before that happened.

And my sort of vision for what it meant to be married was not particularly compelling. And then when I was 22, I met this goofy, sweet boy who within two weeks of meeting me was like, we're gonna get married. And he was the funniest person I've ever met and the nicest person I've ever met. And at the time,

when we'd known each other for two weeks and he was like, we're gonna wind up getting married. I know this is gonna happen. I was like, you know, I don't have the highest opinion of marriage. Like my sense of it is not great. And he was like, I'm gonna talk you into it. And I was like, all right, knock yourself out buddy. Let's see what happens. Good luck. And he did wind up talking me into it. And I did wind up marrying that guy and we are still happy together and just like possibly having the best time ever. And I thank my lucky stars every day that he

Angie Mizzell (37:49)
Wow.

KC (38:05)
picked me because he is really, really good at love. And I'm also constantly studying him like a specimen, you know, because it's fascinating to me. like, how do you do that? Right. And I mean, I've spent all these years just kind of trying to figure out like, what is the magic that he is like wielding? He's a volunteer firefighter and he's a middle school teacher. And I just feel like

Angie Mizzell (38:09)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

KC (38:32)
Everybody who's lucky enough to spend any time with him just kind of starts to blossom under his sunshine he's really really good at seeing whatever it is about you, that's awesome and making you aware of that thing but kind of reflecting it back to you in this way and There's something really nourishing about that and I so I you know I have many many theories about how to get better at love But I think I have gotten much better at love from spending

Angie Mizzell (38:50)
Hmm.

KC (39:00)
all this time with him. And I kind of think the number one thing, and this is in the Rom Commers, the number one thing I think, I mean, there are many things you can do to be good at love, but I think the number one thing is to pay attention to what's great about the people you love in your life. You know, it's so easy to criticize people and to be frustrated with them for whatever it is about them. But what my husband is really great at is,

Angie Mizzell (39:06)
I know.

KC (39:28)
seeing what's awesome about you, like whatever it is that you bring to the table, he sees it and he is grateful for it. And kind of laughing the rest off, you know, he married me and I'm a goofball and I have no executive functioning and I'm like, I mean well, I have a good heart, but I frequently forget to make dinner, you know, like that's kind of, like we have this, he doesn't really like to cook. So our agreement is that I make dinner and then he does the dishes. That's kind of our.

how we divide up the chores. And I will frequently...

Angie Mizzell (40:00)
That

must be a creative person thing. That's our setup too. And I am sometimes like, oh, it's that time again. Oops. Again?

KC (40:03)
you

Yeah, my god, again? Like, didn't we just do this

yesterday? But I'll like get in the bubble bath and start reading some fantastic book and all of a sudden it's like six o'clock and he'll just kind of look at me and be like, take out and I'll be like, yeah, let's do take out perfect, great idea. So, but he doesn't get mad about it, right? It's just, it's just me. I'm just the goofball that he married and you know, he kind of takes it in stride. So yeah, in the Rom-Comers at the end, Emma's

Angie Mizzell (40:20)
Sounds good.

Hmm.

KC (40:34)
Emma's dad gets to perform a wedding ceremony. what he says in that wedding ceremony is actually based on what I said when I got to be the officiant for my nephew's wedding. And I basically said, you know, appreciate your person. Like, this is the trick to being married. Appreciate your person. Like, notice what they're getting right. You know, notice all the great things about them and enjoy the hell out of those things.

Angie Mizzell (40:45)
It's beautiful.

KC (40:59)
That's the trick to it. It's also, I think, the trick to parenting and the trick to owning pets and the trick to living with yourself. I mean, I kind of think it's the whole trick to life, right, is to just pay attention to the good stuff and not all the worries and miseries and outrages that are floating all around you. There was a writer named Amy Krauss-Rosenthal, who I loved, who once said, pay attention to what you pay attention to.

Angie Mizzell (41:25)
Mmm.

KC (41:26)
And I think that's great advice, you know? What you pay attention to becomes your sort of mental world. And I think that's true for love stories too. If you're reading love stories all the time, you've got elevated oxytocin and serotonin. I don't know, I'm making up chemicals now. But you are walking around uplifted because you're so happy for these two cute people who are like falling for each other. You've got this wonderful.

Angie Mizzell (41:27)
It is.

KC (41:50)
feeling of anticipation for all the good things to come. Even when you're not reading, you're like in the grocery store, looking at apples, you know, in the fruit section. And you're just walking around feeling happy in a way that I suspect, and I don't know for sure, people reading serial killer stories are maybe not, you know, that's my guess. I haven't read enough serial killer stories to know, but I feel like it doesn't have the same uplifting sort of qualities.

Angie Mizzell (41:56)
Alright.

That's right.

I want to talk to you in the last few minutes that we have a funny story you told.

when you came to Columbia and you were on your Rom Commers book tour about going line dancing in real life But what I loved was the conversation you had with your daughter

KC (42:31)
So yeah, there is a line dancing scene in the Romcomers and it happened because I had decided to take line dancing a couple of years before. And it was right after my oldest child went off to college and I still had one at home, but there was this feeling of like, this isn't gonna last forever. Like I think when my kids were little, I thought that was how it was always gonna be. I was always just gonna be their mom and we were gonna go to the orthodontist and that was gonna be life. And my daughter going to college made me sort of aware in this new way

that like I was gonna need to find some hobbies, right? Like I was gonna need to figure out what to do on the other side. And so she, after her freshman year, she came home that summer and I told her that I had always wanted to take line dancing lessons and she offered to come with me. So we took line dancing lessons together and we signed up at the Bel Air Recreation Center and you know, Tuesday night, 6.30, beginner class, $8.

And we went and I was terrible. I, and I have to say, like I really kind of thought that I was going to be amazing. You know, like I really kind of, just based on all the boogieing that I have done in my kitchen.

Angie Mizzell (43:40)
Mm-hmm.

I dance so well in my head also. I'm

making up all kinds of dances in my head all the time.

KC (43:51)
Yeah, I'm fantastic in the kitchen alone, in the shower, know, living room. I'm great.

Angie Mizzell (43:53)
in the kitchen.

KC (43:58)
Yeah, but when it actually came down to it and I was actually, you know, showing up at this class, I was appallingly bad. And I really, like I've done some thinking about this. I think it's a memory thing. Like I couldn't remember the steps. It's not that I had no rhythm and it's not that, you know, it's not that I wasn't enjoying the song. It's just, she would teach it to us. And unless I could physically see her, like the minute we turned to the next wall, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't remember.

Angie Mizzell (44:09)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

KC (44:26)
And so I would just stand there, you know, the whole room would kind of move off in this unison and I would just be standing there sort of spinning around like, what the heck? And I found it just crushingly humiliating. And I really hated it. I actually went home after the first night and I was talking on the phone to my mom and I was like, I am so terrible, we're gonna need a new word for terrible. Right, that was my description of me in the class. And that line actually wound up.

Angie Mizzell (44:38)
Mm-hmm.

It's in the book.

KC (44:54)
So,

Angie Mizzell (44:54)
I love it.

KC (44:55)
anyway, so after a few classes when I still was not getting it at all, I decided I was gonna quit and we're driving home from class and I got my daughter in the car and I'm like, you know what? I'm just gonna quit, I'm done. You know, I was like, look, here's the thing, pro tip. In adult life, no one can force you to humiliate yourself. Like I was like, I'm done. Like I'm just like, we tried it, it didn't work. And my daughter gave me this talking to, I mean, she really kind of.

took me by the emotional shoulders and she was like...

This is good for you. You're growing as a person. You're not quitting. You're gonna stick with it. You can't always just be doing things that you're already good at in life. It's okay to be a beginner. This is how you grow. know, she was like, you have to do this. If you wanna like live a good life, you have to not be a chicken. You have to go out and do the things you wanna do, like do the things that scare you. And so I had to keep going. And I will say, I am still going. I go every Tuesday.

to the Bel Air Recreation Center, for line dancing I do.

Angie Mizzell (45:54)
for you. I

good for you for sticking with it because did it start to get easier?

KC (46:00)
Yes, I will say that's the happy ending. So it's been two and a half years, I think. And only recently has it gotten easier. Like I can keep up now, I can do it. Like if we're doing a hard one, I'm not gonna win any prizes. All right, let's just say that. But I am at the point now where she can teach us a basic sort of 32 count dance and I can remember it. So yeah, it only took two years. But I felt like I had to grow.

Angie Mizzell (46:03)
You

KC (46:29)
new neurons, right, for like that specific.

Angie Mizzell (46:32)
Right. And that has

to be good, too, for us to continue to be growing those neurons.

KC (46:36)
It's gotta be great. Yes,

yes, it's been really fun actually. I'm so glad that I did it. But yeah, that whole scene in the Rom-Comers came right out of the deep human humiliation that I experienced trying to do line dancing.

Angie Mizzell (46:50)
final question. I know you believe in happy endings. What does a happy ending mean to you?

KC (46:57)
that's a great question. There is...

a quote that I'm gonna get wrong from the Rom-Cromers, I think it's in the Rom-Cromers, where she says, poor happy endings, they're so aggressively misunderstood. People talk about happy endings like they're trying to trick us into thinking that nothing bad ever happened to anyone ever again. And then I think it's Emma who says, but that's never the way I read those words. I read them as, and they made a life together and they looked after each other and...

you know, they kind of made every hard thing better by being sweet to each other. Now I'm just making stuff up. That's not the quote. But, you know, I think happy endings are about looking after the people you love, right? Being kind to each other and making things better. It's not that, getting a happy ending doesn't mean that nothing bad is ever gonna happen to you. Again, life is chock full of tragedies, guaranteed, right?

And you when you talked earlier about the word predictable, think there's, think rom-coms are predictable in the sense that you know it's going to end happily. And you know that these two people who you meet in chapter one are going to wind up together by the end. That is predictable, literally. That's a promise of the genre. That's actually a gift that the rom-com gives to you because then you meet these two people in chapter one and you get to spend the next 350 pages.

joyfully anticipating the moment when they're going to overcome all their internal and external obstacles and get together and have this sort of blissful moment. So that is predictable, but there's another kind of predictable, and I'm just going to pause. This is like a little writerly, but stories have two levels to them. There's kind of the big picture. You know, there's sort of the roller coaster shape of how you get from

beginning to end, whatever that shape is going to be. That's the big picture. That's one part of the story. But happening at the exact same time are all the details that make up the journey, right? It's everything anybody says to anybody else. It's the things people are wearing. It's the little tiny moments that happen between characters. Those are the details. The big picture of a rom-com is and should be predictable, but the details should never be predictable.

That's actually the difference between a good rom-com and a bad rom-com. You shouldn't be able to predict what the characters are gonna say to each other. You know, shouldn't know down to it, like, an easy prediction what's exactly what's gonna happen in the very next moment. It should be full of surprise and twists and little fun things, details that you never saw coming.

Angie Mizzell (49:15)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

you

KC (49:36)
happy endings are for me just about.

You know, being together and making a choice to look after each other and to be good to each other. It's about being a good caretaker.

and seeing the best in people. that's, yeah, I could go all day. I know you probably have to go, but yeah, this is...

Angie Mizzell (49:52)
No, I feel the same,

but you definitely are such a gift to us. Thank you for your time. The Love Haters is coming out in May. So we can pre-order that now, And you've got, you're already working on the next one.

KC (50:06)
Yes!

2026 book. Yeah. Yeah.

Angie Mizzell (50:11)
Well, that is good news for all of us. I cannot wait to hear more about that.

KC (50:17)
Yeah, that one's really fun. It's just writing itself. I'm having a blast writing that one.

Angie Mizzell (50:21)
Katherine, thank you for being here. It is so lovely to reconnect and see you in person sort of through the screen.

KC (50:21)
want.

Such a treat to see you, thank you. This was a very fun morning for

Angie Mizzell (50:31)
Thank you for listening to More Like You. If you want to connect with New York Times bestselling author, Katherine Center, you can do so by going to her website, KatherineCenter.com, and she's Katherine Center on Instagram. The links are in the show notes. If you enjoyed today's episode, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter, Hello Friday. Hello Friday is a weekly dose of inspiration and encouragement to help you create a life that feels like home. Subscribe to Hello Friday on my website,

angiemizzell.com. Thank you for listening to More Like You. I'll see you back here next week.