"The Love Operation"

Before Melissa Collings started writing women’s fiction and romantic comedies, she worked as a surgical physician associate in Nashville, where one of her favorite procedures was reconstructing a lower-lumbar tattoo after a back surgery. Her stories, like her, are always a mix: light and dark, laughter and tears, outlandish and grounded, beautiful and ugly, glitter and charcoal smears. Her interests are way too varied; her imagination never fails to get her into trouble; and she lives by her life philosophy: nothing is impossible, and everything is better with glitter—except surgical wounds.

Collings applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Love Operation, and shared the following:

From page 69 of the paperback edition:

I resist the very real urge to bang my head against the wall. Instead, I summon patience from a well I’m pretty sure is dry. “I have nothing against chiropractors,” I say. “But you are a sneeze away from being paralyzed. A chiropractor cannot fix this.”

He hesitates, still unsure. “What if I just—”

“No.” I don’t yell, but I do walk out. I send my surgery scheduler in behind me, like backup.

The next patient, a grandma in leather spandex leggings and a cherry-red tank top, looks like she’s on her way to audition for an ’80s rock revival band. She waves me off as soon as I try to hand her over to Dahlia, since she’s a med refill only.

“Sugar, just refill my meds,” she says. “And add some Valium. My grandsons are fraying my last nerve.”

Right before lunch, I want to scream—or dissolve. But then I walk into the next exam room, and everything stills.

A woman in her thirties sits with her hands clenched tightly in her lap. She’s two weeks post-op from a microdiscectomy. A single mom. She needs clearance to go back to work—early.

She knows the rules. No bending. No lifting. No twisting.

But she works in a warehouse. That is the job.

She’s not supposed to, but she’s going to. Because she has to.

Her voice trembles. “I . . . I already had to borrow rent money from my sister this month. I can’t ask again. I need to go back.” Tears gloss her eyes, but they don’t fall. She’s too tired. Or maybe too proud.

I stare at her chart, but I’m not really seeing it because I get it. My chest aches with something hot and helpless. This woman did everything right—followed instructions, showed up, healed. And it’s still not enough. The system wants more.

I want to scream again, but this time it’s not about me.

It’s for her.

I exhale through my nose, slow and sharp. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I say, already writing. “I’m giving you a note for light duty—no

So, does the Page 69 Test work for The Love Operation?

Yes and no.

If you want to know who Dr. Cordelia Wren is, I actually love this page as an introduction to her. She’s impatient, funny, fierce, and very good at her job. But underneath all of that is someone who cares deeply about her patients. She can be frustrated with the world one minute and furious on someone else’s behalf the next.

It shows the woman in the lab coat, which is an enormous part of who Cord is.

What it doesn’t show is everything happening outside that exam room: her complicated family, her equally complicated love life, her pursuit of Chief of Surgery, or the experimental memory study that sends her digging through her romantic past.

So page 69 probably wouldn’t tell a browser what they’re getting into, but it would tell them exactly who they’re getting into it with. And I kind of love that.

Visit Melissa R. Collings's website.

--Marshal Zeringue