Katherine Center wrote her first novel in sixth grade, about a girl and her friends meeting Duran Duran. Her preteen crush Simon Le Bon, the band’s front man, featured prominently. But don’t expect to read it.

“ It’s probably the worst novel ever written in the English language,” she says, laughing. “My older sister has explicit instructions that if I’m ever hit by a bus, her number one job is to go find it and burn it before it ever sees the light of day.”

Luckily for contemporary readers, the Houston-born Center kept writing novels (they got better). Her debut, 2007’s The Bright Side of Disaster, was reviewed as “a deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.” Today, she’s the author of New York Times bestsellers How to Walk Away, The Bodyguard, and The Rom-Commers. Her novels The Lost Husband and Happiness for Beginners have been adapted as Netflix movies.

But back in the 1980s, writing—whether about Duran Duran or something else—helped her navigate the highs and lows of middle school, a time when Center says she was “very, very awkward…and very dorky.” On weekends, she and similarly awkward and dorky friends would have sleepovers and share their written work, ridiculous boy band plots and all. 

“That was the moment when I first sort of tasted the very, very sweet nectar of fiction and how it can change your life and change your perspective and give you hope, and make you laugh and give you something to look forward to,” Center says. By high school, she started to take the idea of being a writer seriously. 

She takes her Bayou City roots seriously, too. Center is a fifth-generation Houstonian. Her mother’s family came to the United States from Germany in the 1860s, settling in Houston. Center grew up in Afton Oaks and was what she calls “a lifer” at St. John’s School, attending the prestigious preparatory academy from kindergarten to high school. (Her mom went to St. John’s, too.)

At Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, she majored in English and won the Vassar Fiction Prize. The school was her first choice for two reasons, she says: It had no math requirement, and Meryl Streep had gone there. After graduation, she returned home and attended the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Both her undergraduate and graduate classes offered different perspectives on the craft. She read Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver—an experience she calls “a lot of brainwork.”

While it gave her a solid foundation, the literary canon she studied during her formal education is far from the only influence on her work. Around the time she turned 40, after she had three published novels under her belt, something unexpected happened. 

“My agent sent me a romance novel,” she says, recalling the book cover’s “scripty writing, sort of ripping-bodice kind of look.” She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. “I don’t want to say that I was snobby about romance novels, because I tried never to be snobby about anything,” she says. “But I had absorbed some attitudes about the cultural value of romance that I had not yet questioned in my literary life.”

Not wanting to be rude to her agent, who also represented several romance writers, she figured she’d read a chapter or two and be done with it. “Two hours later, I was done with that book and I was in the car driving to the bookstore to go get another one,” Center says. “I felt like a person who had spent her entire life eating boneless, skinless chicken breasts, and I had just discovered chocolate cake.”

She was hooked. She read every single book by Tessa Dare, then moved on to Julia Quinn, author of the Bridgerton series, then Eloisa James. All were writers, she says, “who I had never heard of, who are doing fantastic work and writing stories that are just totally page-turning. It kind of just shifted my path a little bit and made me a much better writer.”

Center and her team classified her first outings as “bittersweet comedies,” character-driven stories where there was certainly an element of love, but it wasn’t the overriding theme. After tearing through all those romance novels, though, Center began using her foundational talents and innate funniness to create what are essentially contemporary romantic comedies.

“When I first started publishing novels, rom-com was not a category for novels. ‘Rom-com’ was only a term anybody ever used for movies, right?” she explains. “And then there was women’s fiction, centered around a central female character’s struggle and personal growth. I was somewhere in between those things.”

As she’s grown in her craft, she realizes that she’s writing books that she wants to read. “I want the personal growth. I want the struggle that you get in women’s fiction,” she says. “But I also want somebody to take their shirt off at some point.”

She’s writing books other people want to read, too, and stories people want to watch. The Netflix adaptation of The Lost Husband, which stars actor Josh Duhamel, hit number one on the platform in 2020. “It’s amazing to see characters that once existed only in your head come to life in a whole new way on the screen,” she says. In Netflix’s 2023 version of Happiness for Beginners, there’s a scene where the main character, played by Ellie Kemper (The Office, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), cuts her knee on a rock. “That moment in the novel is based on something that happened to me in real life,” she says. “To see Ellie Kemper having that moment in the movie was totally surreal.”

Center has just put the finishing touches on her next novel, to be published in 2026. As she turns her sights to the book after that, she takes stock of her life and success. Her two children, now 19 and 22 and also St. John’s alums, are grown and living their own lives, and Center is adjusting to empty nest life with her husband, Gordon, a middle school teacher. “I got very lucky and met like the nicest man in the world, and we’ve been together since I was 22,” she says of her own romantic narrative. And he loves her deep roots in Houston, where she connects with her family and the city’s welcoming, friendly vibe, whether she’s walking trails along Allen Parkway or exploring the shops and restaurants of Rice Village, near where she lives. 

She knows, most of all, that she is lucky. For all her hard work and goal setting, writing as a career is often unpredictable. 

“Deciding that you want to be a writer is basically kind of like deciding that you want to win the lottery or something,” she says. “I think that rom-coms are having a moment right now, and for me, that’s just good luck rather than any planning.”

Good luck? Serendipitous timing? It almost sounds like something out of a rom-com.