If, like me, you’ve been waiting with not much patience for Nicholas Sparks and Miley Cyrus to find a project worth working on together, wait no longer. That project is the movie The Last Song, an adaptation of a Sparks novel that hits screens later this month. This article started my day with a good laugh. Sparks bristles at his books being called romances. Then Cyrus calls The Last Song “melodramatic.” And then it gets really good:

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.”

Yes, it’s a pretty straight line from Sophocles to Austen to Hemingway to Sparks. If by “pretty straight” you mean “crooked beyond comprehension.” Today’s song is dedicated to Mr. Sparks: