Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan

C+
Nora Goes Off Script
by Annabel Monaghan
June 7, 2022 · G.P. Putnam's Sons GothicHistorical: EuropeanRomance














I was mildly annoyed the whole time I was reading Nora Goes Off Script but I also enjoyed the heck out of it. I’m not sure how to grade a book that’s simultaneously pleasurable and grating.
Nora is a single mom and a Hallmark-esque screenwriter who just had her big break—her depressing script detailing her recent divorce from her self-absorbed husband sold for a bunch of money. The book opens just as the movie crew shows up to film at her ramshackle house in rural New York. Nora’s ex always hated living in the sticks, and she’s ambivalent about having her carefully constructed life disrupted by a bunch of charismatic stars. Nora awkwardly watches as Leo Vance, the most famous movie star in America, recreates her loveless marriage, opposite a gorgeous actress who he seems to be ignoring in favor of teasing Nora and playing with her two school-age kiddos.
Nora is looking forward to getting back to her normal life when the film ends, but Leo begs to stick around for a bit, seemingly lost and a little sad. She agrees to rent him a room for an exorbitant amount of money, and despite her attempts to keep him at arms length, Leo continues to wiggle his way into her daily life. Nora is supposed to be working on a new saccharine romance script, but it’s hard for her to concentrate with People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive showering across the hall. Is she misinterpreting his newfound love of the small town simple life? And even if Leo falls for her, why on earth would he want to live in nowheresville?
This book straddles the line between Women’s Fiction and celebrity romance. The part of the story that’s about Nora healing from divorce worked for me. I was rooting for her to get her groove back. But the romance evokes the fantasy of being associated with fame with an intensity which left me unsettled and annoyed.
Nora is living an incredibly predictable life until Leo shows up. Her days revolve around her children’s activities and she craves the comfort of a rigid schedule. She drops the kids off, goes for a run at the same time on the same route, cooks the same meals every week, and has the same cheap glass of wine after putting them to bed. The most luxurious part of her life is the light-filled tea house in the garden where she writes from precisely 10am-2pm each day. I appreciated how Nora’s divorce is presented not as tragic, but as reclaiming her peace after a poorly fitting marriage. She has a full life of kids, friends, and a career that she knows she’s fabulous at.
As much as Nora’s post-divorce life is oriented around structure, it is also focused on frugality. She worries about money constantly, and is only willing to accept the chaos of a film shooting on her property because of the cash infusion and the chance to wow her neighbors. But solving her financial worries upsets her careful schedule. When the film crew shows up, Nora tries hard to maintain her regime: tacos on Tuesday, meatloaf on Wednesdays, homework, bathtime, bedtime etc. But Leo is an irritant. He appears in her kitchen at odd times, drinks her coffee, is mesmerized by her chicken roasting technique, charms her kids, and drunkenly falls asleep on her porch.
Once the film’s crew leaves and Leo decides to take a vacation in her backyard, he continues to ingratiate himself into Nora’s life. Leo happily slides into her school pickups and grocery runs. He marvels at the bananas at her local supermarket. Despite growing up in New Jersey to a “normal” family, he’s awed by the minutiae of family life, has never seen meatloaf, and doesn’t know how much food costs. I found this both entertaining to read and also confusing. It was as though Leo was birthed as a fully formed movie star. I enjoy secret nobility tropes where a slumming prince discovers how hard it is to be poor, and this book has similar energy. But in Leo’s case it didn’t make sense.
Nora’s two children play a large role in the plot and he offers a first taste at what it’s like to have a little help from another adult. Nora starts to fall for Leo when she sees him enjoy playing with her children and occasionally providing for the family by ordering takeout. But I frequently felt like Nora’s standards for a partner were extremely low. That became a running frustration for me, especially in the early parts of their romance, when Leo came across as selfish in small ways, like stealing her daily crosswords puzzle before she could get to it. Or entering her home during filming breaks to drink all her whiskey and eat her food without asking. Leo sometimes felt like a manchild she was responsible for, and he never apologizes for imposing himself in Nora’s life. Meanwhile, Nora is grateful to have a functional adult around for the first time in her adult life, which is both understandable but also a little sad.
Still, Leo’s love for the children and their hijinks together was ultimately what made me start to like Leo. He has a parental love story arc with both children (instalove with the daughter, enemies to wary love with the son) that parallels Nora’s. At the start of the book, Leo is unmoored after the recent death of his mom which is part of why he’s such a mess. It only takes a few days with Nora’s family to ground him.
I appreciated the centrality of Nora’s role as mom as she navigates falling in love. She’s self aware and snarky as we see her trying to sneak around and find time with Leo, without letting her kids know. It added to the swooniness of their romance, and I felt like the book encouraged me to open up and learn to trust Leo, just as Nora was. I couldn’t put the book down during the first half.
But at the same time, I grew increasingly annoyed by their relationship. This book leans unapologetically on the fantasy of wielding the social power of knowing a celebrity. Nora’s social circle bends before Leo. Instead of being seen as the sad divorcee, her neighbors begin to envy her. Leo vanquishes the mean frenemy. The other moms at school dress up in the hopes of catching Leo’s attention, but she’s the only one he wants. As divorcee revenge fantasies go, this book is a fun one. But it also made Nora seem shallow, as though the idea of being Leo’s love interest was more intoxicating than anything about Leo himself.
Yes, part of this fantasy is about power, but a fair bit is about money. Leo adds little luxuries into Nora’s life. He buys her fancy towels, has NYC pizza couriered to her house in upstate NY, and replaces her cheap wine with delicious expensive varieties. If she stays with him, she’ll never have to worry about money again and will have servants to make her meatloaf. Reading this, I realized that I prefer Celebrity romances where we see the celebrity at their job. We see very little of Leo’s work, just the social benefits. This felt like a missed opportunity to show Leo as a good fit for Nora, since her ex-husband’s unwillingness to work is presented as his major character flaw.
Leo doesn’t have much of a personality beyond celebrity-ishness. He is charming and entitled. He does the bare minimum to contribute to the household, ordering dinner occasionally, helping her son with his school play, but mostly listening to her. Which Nora is BLOWN AWAY by. A man who listens to her? She’s in love, babes.
Her ex husband never appears in the book, but his influence on Nora lingers throughout the story. The ex was a selfish little rich kid who never learned how to work, and who endlessly fails at his attempts to start a business. He belittles Nora for funding their life through “stupid” romance movies but one of my favorite things about Nora is her backbone. She is sheepish about her line of work, but is also proud of her talent, offering succinct and accurate recipes for a successful rom-com. She likes being the person who kept her family together all these years thanks to her hard work, and her hustle felt realistic. I loved seeing her finally gain success and financial stability through her movie scripts. This book is more about writing than acting, and my favorite takeaway from the story was that life gets messy when you fictionalize your life for everyone else to read/watch.
I’ll be honest: from my perspective Nora’s life seemed really boring. She eats the same thing, every week, and it all sounds very unseasoned. But Leo and Nora both talk a lot about how her life is “real” and how he loathes his regular actor lifestyle. Leo wants a “real person” and doesn’t see his pre-Nora life as real. The repetition of this theme annoyed me. Being famous doesn’t make you inhuman.
But Leo loves the rigidity of Nora’s structured life, which I found kind of cute. Less cute is how Nora revels in being less normal by proxy once she’s having daytime quickies with Leo. For example she actually thinks:
“I am not a normal person. I’m Leo Vance’s girlfriend.”
Leo seemed to be falling in love with Nora’s highly structured life more than anything unique to Nora. He rhapsodizes about her schedule, and eagerly looks forward to running all of her errands with her, like an eager puppy. All this made it hard to feel emotionally invested in their romance. Leo loves Nora’s regimented and structured daily routine; Nora loves being Leo Vance’s’ girlfriend. Why exactly does Nora love Leo, besides his ability to listen and dispatch pizza long distances? Not sure. Why exactly does Leo love Nora? We don’t really know, and she doesn’t either, which makes the book hum with her constant low level anxiety that he’ll leave her, just like her ex.
I wanted Nora to be happy after her shitty marriage, so I was reluctantly #teamLeo because it made her happy. But I would have been a happier reader if the two of them had more substantive conversation, or if I didn’t have to read about Nora’s lackluster cooking.
And then there’s the second half of the book, which I can’t really discuss without spoiling:
Show Spoiler
The second half of the book is about the fallout from Leo’s attempt to resume acting, and the two spend a LONG time broken up and pining, which is one of my pet peeves. Could this have been resolved by a conversation? Yes. Did the resolution take too damn long because they let a misunderstanding get out of control? Also yes.

Nora Goes Off Script made me laugh out loud, and offered a soothing fantasy about discovering your humdrum life is someone else’s perfection. The parts of the story that focused on Nora’s growth and healing after her divorce were very fun to read, and I was cheering her on. While Leo was charming, I wasn’t as into the social power of dating a rich celebrity, but others may enjoy that aspect. It felt more like women’s fiction than romance, and I found myself wishing for more flavor in the love story, and in Nora’s meatloaf.