This book explores the journey of learning that long engrained habits are no longer serving us, and that despite this knowledge it still requires immense fortitude to let them go. And then you have to go and do it again and again until you die.
Plot: Sally is a writer for the copy-right safe SNL called the Night Owls, and she’s kind of bitter. She had let a lot of her youth be dictated by what she was supposed to want, and when she finally got the courage to pursue what she actually wanted – a career in comedy writing – she succeeded, but can’t shake the feeling that she doesn’t belong. We meet her just as yet another of her male colleagues has gotten engaged to a glamorous and beautiful celebrity. Sally wants to poke fun at this unwritten rule of relatively speaking mediocre dudes getting together with incredible women in a sketch with this week’s host, the model-dating, singer-songwriter, and heartthrob Noah Brewster. Noah is pretty appalled by the idea but he’s a good sport, and he and Sally end up working together and actually getting along quite well. Only Sally really does believe this mediocre man- incredible woman rule and sabotages their budding connection before it can get going since there is no way an incredible man would go for a mediocre woman. Maybe a paradigm altering, once in a hundred years pandemic will dislodge her from the rut she’s stuck in. Shenanigans ensue.
If you like SNL and sketch comedy, you’re already going to find things to like here. I’m not a huge SNL fan, though I do enjoy it, but did participate in an annual version of it in law school and have a deep, deeeeep respect for the craft and hard work it takes to create an hour of light, fun, effortless-seeming comedy. The first half of the book is spent over the first week that Sally and Noah get to know each other on the show, and you get to see how the late night comedy sausage gets made. I found this fascinating. I am positive many readers will not, so your mileage here will vary.
The second part of the book is set during COVID, and I appreciate that some authors have actually delved into that world, because it does sometimes feel like a fever dream. This part of the story involves a lot of old school correspondence, since people couldn’t really go anywhere, a lot of introspection, a lot of reflection on the politics of the day that especially for a straight, middle class white woman and a straight, millionaire white man have never really penetrated their daily lives. It’s sweet and amusing and folks who love a love story by letter are going to eat this up.
I can’t say this is a particularly memorable story. I only finished it last week and already I am struggling to really remember if Noah had a personality outside of being a Nice Guy With Abs (he definitely evolved as a person, but this was done off page, so he just goes away one nice version and comes back a slightly more mature nice one), but I enjoyed it well enough while I was cleaning and whatnot. Damning with faint praise, I know, but there you have it.
There are a few things I saw on Goodreads that I wanted to address with respect to Sally’s characterization. There were several reviewers commenting on the failure of the book being centered on Sally, who is “old and ugly and not funny” and as a result “unlovable”.
For what it’s worth, my take on Sally is that she is incredibly insecure and since we are reading the book from her perspective, we hear that damaging self-abuse being stated as fact. She thinks she’s ugly. I recall feeling this way also, and being downright angry when my then-boyfriend would tell me I’m the most beautiful woman in the world because that is just objectively horseshit. It took hearing that shit pretty much daily for *checks notes* seventeen years to actually not mind hearing it, and even now I am compelled by some stupid internal force to point out that at 35 I may be decent, but I’m like 2-3 years away from JOWELS so he better get it while the getting is good.
My point is that Sally is an unreliable narrator, and people who are reading the book assuming everything being described is factually 100% what is happening I think might want to read it again. It’s another thing entirely if that kind of writing isn’t your jam – that’s completely fine, of course and there are reviews that quite rightly say that the amount of time we spend in Sally’s head listening to her self-loathing is grating. That’s very much subjective and something that won’t resonate with all readers. Indeed, the book title does seem somewhat ironic, since it isn’t really all that funny and Sally’s resistance makes the romance fairly unromantic. When I read the title though, that’s what I assumed? No actual romantic comedy would be called that, so it seemed to me link a wink to the reader that we’re going to be playing with the tropes, and it’s precisely what I got.
Also, a critique that she is old (she is in her late 30’s) is truly baffling since that’s (a) not old, just not young, (b) literally meaningless? So what if she’s in her late 30’s? You want to read about younger people? Go read the literal tens of millions of books that cater to that. It’s like reading Hamlet and giving it a bad review because it’s a tragedy. WHY ISN’T THIS BOOK ABOUT A MIDDLE AGED WOMAN DISCOVERING LOVE AND SELF WORTH MORE LIKE THE HUNGER GAMES (this is a strawman argument, no one actually said this, but this is what it FELT like they were saying, so take it as you will). I think those reviews say a lot more about the people writing them than it does about the book itself.