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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new novel takes on the pop culture phenomenon where a beautiful, talented and accomplished female celebrity dates an average-looking funny guy. Think Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson. Curtis Sittenfeld's new book is called Romantic Comedy, and takes that situation and flips the script. The novel follows Sally, a writer at an SNL's late night comedy show called The Night Owls, TNO for short.

Sally is nearing 40, she's divorced, she's a little jaded to the current dating world. Her much younger colleague is dating a superstar. What happens when Sally who is [unintelligible 00:00:47] is pursued by a pop star named Noah Brewster who signs on to be the host and musical guest of TNO. The book follows Sally and Noah seemingly improbable flirtation-ship to relationship as they navigate the pandemic, and paparazzi, and self doubt.

Kirkus Reviews calls Romantic Comedy, "Romance artfully and entertainingly deconstructed." It was just selected for Reese Witherspoon's book club. Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of seven books. Last time she was on the show was for her 2020 novel Rodham. Of course, you know her 2005 big hit book Prep. She joins us now to discuss her newest work Romantic Comedy. Welcome back.

Curtis: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: The story goes that you were watching SNL skits with your family during the pandemic, you'd been a big fan and you thought, why didn't somebody write a romantic comedy about this story?

Curtis: Yes. At first, I thought that someone else should do it and that it should be a movie. Then I think because I'm a novelist and not a script writer, I came around to the idea that actually it should be a novel and I should be the one to write it.

Alison Stewart: Was there an exact moment? Was there a certain skit that was on, a certain player?

Curtis: No. Sally says in the book that there's a rule of three. There are more than three examples of this. [chuckles] This is not a Pete Davidson novel. I can joke that it is, it's actually not. For the record, I think that Pete Davidson is charming and I think that if I were Kim Kardashian, I would be delighted to date him or to have dated him. It was actually, it preceded that relationship, because I think that I might not have had the nerve to start this novel if that relationship had existed because I wouldn't perhaps have wanted to take on the project of a Kim Kardashian novel.

Alison Stewart: What did spark that idea?

Curtis: One, it was just a love letter to SNL, which I've been watching off and on since the age of 10, but also as you were saying about my last novel Rodham came out in early 2020. I think it's just been such a rough few years, and I really actively wanted to exist in a fictional world that was fun, and to create that for myself, and then my hope would be to eventually create it for readers. It felt like the mash up of sketch comedy, and flirting and romance. If that is not going to be fun to write about, then I don't know what is.

Alison Stewart: You name the show The Night Owls, TNO. I'm curious, what other names did you kick around for that name of the show?

Curtis: Oh my gosh, I think I came up with about, probably at least 100. Most of them were terrible. I wanted it to be an acronym that you could use. The acronym almost mattered more than the real name. It was things like, At The Last Minute, Lightning In a Bottle, ha ha, ha.

[laughter]

Of course, I also had to cross-reference it and see, is this a documentary about a comedian that was made in 1988 or something? Ultimately, in all honesty, I think The Night Owls started as a placeholder, but then it just never went away.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Curtis Sittenfeld. The new book is called Romantic Comedy. Parts of it, it is a romantic comedy, but there's also a workplace story as well. We really get a behind-the-scenes feel for what the writer's room is like, backstage, there's a lot of action, there's a lot of detail. What was it like to research this book? Do you have moles on the inside at SNL? [chuckles]

Curtis: Well, I did. I did interview two people who've worked there in the recent past, but I should say there are no secrets of SNL that I know that are not available to the public. There's this amazing 750-page anthology called Live From New York, which will tell you almost everything you want to know. There's a ton of material about SNL and it was such a joy to consume it. Doing the research was so much fun, and it was like, we're in the Golden Age of comedian podcasts. I live in Minneapolis so I'd be walking around in the snow by myself. It'd be like five degrees and I would hear, say Mike Birbiglia interviewing Bill Hader, and Bill Hader giggling and giggling and giggling and then I'd be like, "Giggling in the snow by myself in Minnesota."

That was super fun. There's so many obviously memoirs by current and former cast members. I think the most famous is Bossypants by Tina Fey, but I love Colin Jost's A Very Punchable Face, which is more recent. There's also a gold mine was, he was only on SNL for two years in the early '90s, but Jay Mohr wrote something called Gasping for Airtime. The beauty of that memoir, is that he dispenses with his childhood and his entire life except SNL. It's just all SNL page after page.

Alison Stewart: I think I'm remembering [unintelligible 00:05:55] Amy Poehler's Yes Please, I think it is.

Curtis: Oh, I love Yes Please. Some of these I had read before. Yes, Rachel Dratch has Girl Walks into a Bar, Tracy Morgan I Am the New Black. There's Molly Shannon's Hello, Molly!, a joy to read. It's very sad parts, but also just a really interesting-- She's had a quite fascinating life.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting. Between the encyclopedic tome about Saturday Night Live, and then the various memoirs of people who had been there, you were really able to pull out and extract certain details that might be useful to tell your story?

Curtis: Tere actually are these-- I don't even know what the word is but it's almost teeny tiny documentaries that SNL itself makes. Say like, "This is how the makeup department works, and this is how the sets get built." Those are also riveting and a goldmine of information.

Alison Stewart: You're a writer. What did you learn about the way sketch comedy writer's room-- what did you learn about writing, from writing about them?

Curtis: Well, I think there's maybe two things that I learned. One, you have the idea a lot of SNL comes together in the middle of the night. That's really literally true. I think if you work for the show, it could be normal to get almost no sleep at least two nights a week. I'm 47, I don't think I could do that, physiologically. There's that. Then also, in some ways, it certainly gave me more respect for the sheer efficiency of what they do. These sketches come into our lives and give us catchphrases for decades to come.

I routinely use the phrase, Debbie Downer. Someone probably thought of that, I don't know. Obviously, Rachel Dratch is Debbie Downer but someone might have thought of that at 4:00 in the morning one night. I have even more respect for how quickly they all turn it around. Not just the sketches, but the makeup, the costumes, the sets, it's amazing.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting the way the first part of the book, it's a ticktock. It's because it's a week before the show. For example, there's chapters that say it's like, 1:00 PM, on Monday, and it's 2:00 PM on Tuesday, and this is happening. What was it about that pace, that setting that up in a week, that heightens the tension of your story?

Curtis: It's funny to hear you use the word ticktock. [chuckles] This does not mean the social media [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: No. Like a clock, like ticktock. Hands on the clock.

Curtis: Yes. We lost that expression, I don't know. There's the tension of the live show, which I'm sure you yourself are very familiar with. Where the magic and the beauty are really intertwined with the potential for disaster, when it's live. There's that, but yes, you're counting down. You have this deadline. Also, as a writer, I think a lot in terms of structure. What scenes go in what order, and because the structure of an episode of SNL is very fixed and the structure of how the people put the show together in a week is very fixed, that was just a gift to me as a writer. Lorne Michaels did all the work 47 years ago when he created the show.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new novel Romantic Comedy with Curtis Sittenfeld. Sally is a writer on the show. She's been there a little while, where is she in her personal life when we meet her, where is she professionally when we meet Sally?

Curtis: Well, there are two different answers to those two different questions. Professionally, she's won Emmys, she's pretty confident. She has good friends at the show. It was a little bumpy at first, but she's figured out her place and she regularly gets sketches on the air. Personally, she's not miserable, but she's in a situationship or a friends with benefits type except that he's not a friend, but [laughs] a benefit situation where she's not aspiring too much, I think because she feels like she's decided that not much is available to her. She was married and divorced in her early 20s. She's now in her late 30s and there's not been a ton of excitement in the last decade or so for her.

Alison Stewart: That sets us up for you to read a little bit from the book about this situationship.

Curtis: When I heard the section you wanted to me to read, [laughs] I was like, oh, how interesting.

Alison Stewart: You can read whatever section you like. This is the funny, just describing her love life and the way she thinks about the world.

Curtis: I think it's like my own prudishness about reading the stuff that I myself have written. This is her situationship. This is not the ultimate love interest.

"Also, though we had decent sex, I didn't like Jean that much. He was a financial analyst who'd early on mentioned that the University of Florida's business school, which he'd attended, was ranked among the top 15 in the country. Though I'd never previously wondered about the University of Florida's Business School ranking, of course this had prompted me to look it up and discover the claim was off by about 10. Far more alarmingly, he'd once used the word snowflake to disparage a coworker who regularly took sick days because of migraines. While it was possible he meant the term apolitically, the meaning he apparently did intend wasn't much better.

I hadn't called him on it because I feared doing so would result in my needing to find another sexual outlet, meaning I'd have to resubscribe to a hookup app and meet enough strangers at enough bars to determine which one probably wouldn't kill me if we went back to my apartment. If on the plus side Jean wasn't homicidal, he wasn't particularly cute either. He was of medium height and build with light brown hair and there was something so generic about him that he could have played an extra in any TNO sketch set in an office. He was unobjectionable in the way that a person you sat next to on an airplane was usually unobjectionable. Unlike with an airplane seatmate though, most of what we did was get each other off. In the months this had been going on, he'd asked me exactly two questions.

The first was if I'd ever tried butter coffee, no, and the second was if I'd ever been to Rockaway Beach also, no. None of Jean's predecessors had been particularly inquisitive, but they'd asked enough that I'd given a fake job, which I never had to do with Jean. I told the other guys I dated that I was a writer for the newsletter of a medical device company, which had been one of my jobs before TNO.

Though I wasn't much of a liar generally, I feared the guys I hooked up with would be overly interested if I mentioned my real employer. In a best case scenario, they'd nearly want tickets to the live show, but in a worst case scenario, they'd be aspiring improv performers, 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, but I suspected that much of my writing emerged from this tension or lack of integration.

I believe the perceptions undergirding my sketches arose from my being invisible or at least underestimated, including being mistaken for someone nicer than I was. Since childhood, I'd often felt like a spy or an anthropologist and I was fine with others at TNO knowing who I really was, only because they too were at their core spies and anthropologists and weirdos."

Alison Stewart: That was Curtis Sittenfeld reading from her novel Romantic Comedy. She writes sketches that interrogates what it means to be a woman right now. One of them is titled Nancy Drew and the Disappearing Access to Abortion. How did she navigate being one of the few female writers on the staff in the beginning?

Curtis: Well, by the way, one thing I had to say, so, again, I pride myself on my meticulous research. I think that no self-respecting SNL writer would ever give a title that gives such a giveaway [laughter] to the premise of the sketch. In some ways, she addresses that issue head on in the book that sometimes she likes to lay claim to sketches or to topic matters so someone else can't do it when she wants to.

That is a little maybe creative liberty or license that I took. I think that early on she counts herself out or rejects her own ideas and a male coworker says to her, "Don't preemptively reject yourself. Make other people reject you," which I will say is something I believe as a fiction writer. I think there are people who will maybe write a short story and think it's not good enough to submit to a literary magazine. I think, "Submit it, let them decide that."

Alison Stewart: In the story, in walks Noah Brewster who is a very handsome, traditionally handsome movie star. Excuse me, he's rockstar. He's a pop star. He's an aging pop star, which becomes interesting we find out a little bit later on, and they really have a connection, not to sound too much like The Bachelor, but they have a connection. [laughter] [00:15:47] They're on a journey. They're on a journey. I don't want to give too much away, but Sally can't quite believe it. She won't let herself believe that this famous musician would be interested in her. Why is she self sabotaging throughout this situationship, which we hope will bloom into a relationship?

Curtis: Well, you're totally right that she's very self sabotaging and can't get out of her own way. I think that that's very normal. It's very normal for people to be self-sabotaging in all area, personally, professionally, and it's what makes us human. I find it endearing, but I think that she's fundamentally professionally confident and personally insecure, and she clings to these-- she has this theory of men, especially men in comedy can date up all the time, but it never happens for women.

Then when there's all this evidence to the contrary that there's this handsome, delightful, famous man who's super into her, she's still saying, it happens to men all the time, but it never happens to women in comedy. At some point it's like she has to take responsibility for if it doesn't happen, it's not because of external circumstances. It's because of her.

Alison Stewart: In the book, and I'm not giving too much away, the pandemic is part of the book as well. Sally, the writer, and Noah end up having this correspondence back and forth. They become pen pals. What opportunities did writing emails in the middle of your novel to tell the story of your novel? How do you write an email that's going to tell your story? [laughs]

Curtis: I thought it was really fun. I loved writing letters when I was little, and then when email-- I had my first email account when I was a freshman in college in 1993 and I think I thought, "What a delight for me to write a five paragraph email, and what a delight for the other person to read my five paragraph email." [laughter] Who knows if that's how they felt.

Of course, because Sally's a writer, this is her at her best. The pandemic, unfortunately, has arrived. Noah is isolated in his LA mansion. Sally has left New York and is staying in this the modest house of her childhood with her stepfather and his beagle. They're both bored and lonely and so hese emails escalate very quickly, but they can reveal themselves and they can flirt, but it's also at Sally's comfort level and she can be at her finest.

She can tell this anecdote. She says a few times that she feels like she can write other people's witty, flirty dialogue, but she almost can't say witty, flirty things in person, but this is like a middle ground where she can flirt a little bit.

Alison Stewart: One thing I wanted to ask, and I don't want to give anything away, is the character of Noah, the pop star, he's a really nice guy. He's not a jerk. He does not have jerky elements to him. Why did you make that choice?

Curtis: Well, I wanted to give Sally someone worthy of her. [laughs] What's the point of falling in love with someone jerky? I guess that's like some book, but that's not like the fun fizzy escape. That's a sad novel and this is a happy novel. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: It is a happy story. I won't spoil the happy ending. [laughter] The name of the book is Romantic Comedy. It is by Curtis Sittenfeld. Curtis, thank you so much for being with us and sharing your story with us.

Curtis: Thank you for having me.

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Alison Stewart: Tomorrow on All Of It, I love a good list, we love a good list, largely because we get to talk about them with you. We've got a great one, the best debut albums ever ranked. We'll speak with Uproxxs cultural critic Steven Hyden about the criteria behind the list and what he looks for in a debut album and we'll take your calls about your favorite debuts. I'm Alison Stewart, I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here tomorrow.

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