ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to take a romance novel that regularly induces some of those tears, one that "gets me every time," and shows that the novel is a smart, reflective work of art, not least because of the ways it reflects on what it means for a work of popular art to be at once generically self-conscious, profoundly conventional, and unabashedly commercial. Susan Elizabeth Phillips structures the rest of Natural Born Charmer around the questions raised by this early scene, repeatedly using popular music to talk and think about her genre. Popular music is not the only art that Phillips uses in this novel to think about and defend the commercial, conventional, and metatextual aesthetics of popular romance. Like the Bob Dylan described in Hamill's liner notes, the heroine of Natural Born Charmer is an artist—in this case, literally so, supporting herself by painting "children and pets.
