Burnsville’s Ellie Palmer on her joke-packed romance ‘Anywhere With You’

Ellie Palmer’s writing career began with chiding from her family about her lack of production. But she’s getting the last laugh, having published two romantic comedies in the last year, with a third on the way.

“It was one of those things that, as a kid, I said I was going to write a book and it became a family joke around Thanksgiving every year: ‘Where’s that book?’” said the Burnsville writer, whose day job is in legal publishing (Ellie is her actual first name but she uses a pen name for her last name, to keep her careers separate).

Palmer published North Shore-set “Four Weekends and a Funeral” last year, its main character inspired by the Michigan native’s experience with a genetic mutation that increases the chances of breast cancer. Due next week is her joke-packed “Anywhere With You,” in which a woman and her platonic friend will-they-or-won’t-they up to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And her publisher just announced that her third romcom, “Married With Benefits,” is coming next summer.

“Anywhere With You” is about lawyer Charley, who deals with entitled jerks at work and whose friend could be a romantic partner except that he’s the exact opposite of Charley’s type, which she says “can be best categorized as a man who has strong opinions on German appliance manufacturers and always splurges on the extended warranty.”

I spoke with Palmer, 36, about how the pandemic kicked off her writing career, getting the funny right and ice cream:

Q: As an ice cream fan, I want to thank you for telling the truth about “light ice cream” Halo Top, which your main character, Charley, disparages in “Anywhere With You.”

A: It needed to be said. It’s not ice cream. I’m a big fan of ice cream. I have strong opinions on ice cream.

A: Soft serve. That’s my first love.

Q: Wait, but isn’t that usually ice milk, rather than ice cream?

A: I have a tree nut allergy, so when I go out for ice cream I can’t go to the ice cream places where they scoop the ice cream because, if at any point they had scooped pistachio or almond and then scooped my chocolate, I could go into anaphylactic shock. Soft serve is an oasis for me, a place of safety.

Q: Where’s the best place for it?

A: Dairy Queen will get you far. I also love — the name escapes me, but I do a lot of book events with Content in Northfield and every time, I’m there, we have to go. [Note to ice cream lovers: It’s The Blast.]

A: Oh, I made every mistake with my first book. I wrote it for fun, almost like a bucket list thing, and thought it would sit in my Google Docs forever. I didn’t intend for anyone to read it. I wasn’t thinking about story structure or whether it was tightly paced at all [Palmer rewrote it extensively]. But I enjoyed writing it and it really touched on some aspects of things I was going through at the time. The main character has the breast cancer genetic mutation and it was the book I would have wanted to read when I got that diagnosis. So I ended up deciding I kind of wanted to see if I could get it out in the world.

Q: You wrote it during the COVID-19 pandemic?

A: It was that moment where we all were trapped in our houses for so long. It was later into it, so it was nice to be on my own because I had spent so much time with my husband and child. I love them but it was nice to shut the door and spend some time on my own.

Q: Did the genetic mutation theme strike a chord with readers?

A: Yes! People who have the breast cancer mutation have reached out and said they connected with that. That felt really special. But people who don’t have it also said it resonated.

A: The characters are always very different from me but there are little things that are authentic to me, too, to make sure the character is authentic. Like Charley, I do tend to overthink things, I do have experience in the legal field. I will not say her experience is my exact experience but I have heard stories.

Q: Both of your books take place in Minnesota. Is it a good place for romance?

A: I love it as a setting. A romantic comedy really needs people failing to say the thing they need to say at the moment they need to say it. The Midwest feels like the perfect place for that. The Minnesota Nice of it all, where you don’t say what you want because you feel like you’re supposed to say something else, is perfect.

Anywhere With You

By: Ellie Palmer.