Let me begin this week’s blog post with an excerpt: 

“With her trademark ability to bring complex women to life, Curtis Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance in the modern age.”

The paragraph above comes from the back cover of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, a book that became a Reese’s Book Club pick back in April 2023.

I have just finished reading, and really enjoying, this smart, fun, touching novel. The first part of the book gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at “The Night Owls, a late-night live comedy show that airs every Saturday.” That section was fun because I kept thinking about Saturday Night Live while reading. 

But it’s the rest of the book — including the honest, friendly, thoughtful emails written by Sally Milz and Noah Brewster that make up Chapter 2 — that had me turning pages. I couldn’t wait to find out how things would play out with Sally and Noah. 

I highly recommend Romantic Comedy. There are so many passages that caused me to pause and reflect. So many passages I thought were just so well-written. So many passages that expressed a human sentiment so spot-on. Here are a few of my favorites:

“Or maybe the real worst-case scenario was that they’d know me in a way I didn’t want to be known by them. Even I wasn’t sure if my in-person self (a mild-mannered woman of average intelligence and attractiveness) or my scripts (willfully raging sketches about sexism and bodily functions) reflected my real self — or if I had a real self, or if anyone did.”

“I often thought that TNO was like a sped-up version of life itself, and that whether something proceeded magnificently or disastrously, time always kept rushing by and the next moment was happening.”

“… a math teacher once said at assembly that the point of life is to find the thing you’re good at and enjoy doing, and to do it for other people.” 

“Btw the other secret to becoming a TNO writer, besides getting your own TV in fifth grade, is being obsessed with Mad Libs. Did you like Mad Libs? In fourth grade, my friends and I were doing them on the bus ride back from a field trip to a nature center and, to this day, nothing has ever made me laugh more than the sentence “I was so happy that I couldn’t wipe the smile off my penis.”  (Side note — I regularly used Mad Libs in my fourth and fifth grade classes. Though, the rule was all words had to be appropriate for school. So we never had a sentence that included the word, penis.)

“Aren’t we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?”

“Even now, I don’t have the words to express how shocked and thrilled and overwhelmed and disbelieving I was. It was like swimming in the ocean and feeling something shift under you and the next thing you know, a gigantic magical sea creature that you never knew existed is rising out of the water with you on its back.”

“This is all a (very very) long way of saying that after being married to a guy who didn’t like what made me me, and then being friends with a guy who adored me but didn’t want to make out with me, I don’t trust my own instincts. Both those situations scrambled my brain, and I know it’s a small sample size, but I decided to be done with that shit. And now our emails are scrambling me again.”

“Wasn’t this more than I’d ever imagined I could wish for, that a kind, thoughtful, smoking-hot man would think I was terrifyingly, awesomely perceptive? That he understood how neurotic I was, and didn’t seem to mind? That he saw neediness not as annoying but as normal? Hadn’t it all seemed so unlikely that I’d genuinely made peace with never finding someone like Noah except perhaps in the pages of a screenplay I wrote?”

“But human beings aren’t static images. We’re dynamic and kinetic, and it’s like I said before — right away, I wanted to talk to you, and every time I’ve talked to you since I’ve always wanted to keep talking to you.”

“I wordlessly turned my face into his chest and closed my eyes. Through my mask, his neck smelled the way he smelled on waking, some combination of being outside in the woods and bread, and I thought how in the last few weeks, the idea of him had sometimes made me nervous but the reality of him always comforted me.”

Friends, have you read Romantic Comedy? Were any of my favorite passages your favorite passages? Have you read any other novels by Curtis Sittenfeld?

Please note: I am including a link to buy the book that I’m highlighting this week. If you use my link, I do make a small commission on your purchase at no additional cost to you. I am working with Bookshop.org which also sends a portion of the profit to support local, independent bookstores.