Miley & Nicholas Sparks Share A "The Last Song" Love Story

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.”