by Curtis Sittenfeld
This was the second to last romcom I read this summer, having needed a break from intense books after finishing Babel. And this one I read in actual book form! (The rest I listened to while busy at work) I passed on this one in lieu of Ana María and the Fox and regretted it. Honestly, I saw the name and assumed it to be a male author and didn't want to read a romcom by a dude at that time. Never judge a book by it's author's name!
Romantic Comedy is about Sally Milz who is a writer at an SNL analogue called The Night Owl, or TNO. We meet her and her coworkers, who are other writers and performers at the show, as they meet their next celebrity host/featured musician Noah Brewster. You learn a lot about the process of putting on a show in a week, which in itself was very fascinating, but when sparks seem to fly between Sally and Noah, she manages to say the wrong thing and they don't talk for two years. Mind you, her attitude harks back to her writing a sketch about how the males of the show tend to hook up with celebrities and the women never seem to.
Noah emails Sally out of the blue during the Pandemic. Yes! A modern book actually dealing with it! A book that wouldn't really work without it, actually. They grow close as they email each other back and forth, the middle section of the book being more epistolary in nature. The second half of the book is their online pseudo-courtship and then her driving out to meet with him. Her dealing with his celebrity is realistic but so is his want to have it but also protect her from it.
There are many romcoms dealing with a male celebrity and a writer funny enough (Funny You Should Ask, Nora Goes Off Script). Or a male celebrity and a bodyguard (The Bodyguard). Or a male celebrity another celebrity (Once More with Feeling). And though it's a strange trope of the romcom world, I love it when it's done well. (And all the ones I have referenced here do it well!) Curtis Sittenfeld does it well. Sally's hesitation and self sabotage with Noah is very relatable. I am sure that is how I would act if a cute musician started flirting with me.
It was fun to look through time stamps of their email correspondences and see when they would be emailing each other because, as when you are writing emails yourself, you rarely mention the time; so it was fun to see when one of them wrote back immediately or late at night or first thing upon waking up. A cute detail that could easily be overlooked. I did make note that it is also a wonderful way to sneakily infodump cause that's what one tends to do in an email; not even texting would have worked the same. All in all, I really enjoyed this romcom, as well as it's approach to celebrity and the pandemic.