Curtis Sittenfeld's 'Romantic Comedy' is about more than just laughs

Bestselling Minneapolis writer Curtis Sittenfeld's new novel “Romantic Comedy” is just that. A couple falls in love, then fall out, then … well, you will have to read it for yourself.

However “Romantic Comedy” is about much, much, more.

Here’s a partial list: women, men, dating, aging, social media, the media in general, TV, communication, non-communication and of course, the pandemic.

It's funny, but moving too. It's the story of Sally, a veteran writer on a familiar-sounding weekend late-night comedy show.

“I wonder if maybe that show was ‘Saturday Night Live’? Which, which is it lightly inspired ‘Romantic Comedy.,’” Sittenfeld admitted during a recent visit to the MPR News studios.

She was born two months before SNL's 1975 debut.

“So it's been a feature of my entire life,” she said.

Pandemic obsession

She watched as a kid, then drifted away as life got busy with her career and family. She moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis in 2018.

When COVID-19 hit, she says watching old SNL episodes became her family's pandemic hobby before morphing into an obsession.

And she noticed something: how, over the years, several male cast members had ended up dating and then marrying female guest hosts.

But never the other way around.

She mused someone should write a screenplay turning the situation on its head. She thought it should be about a TV show where a writer creates a skit about a “sort of plain female writer and a smoking hot male celebrity, and then, you know, a guest who should come on the show, and she should maybe have chemistry or sparks with him.” Sittenfeld said.

“And then a few months passed and I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe someone should write not a screenplay, but a novel and the someone should be me,’” she laughed. “So, and then I did.”

Curative rage

She had been struggling with another novel, but “Romantic Comedy” flowed really easily. It turns out all that SNL watching was actually vital research.

The first chapter describes her protagonist Sally opening her phone early one morning. It's blowing up with news about her office mate and fellow writer Danny.

She thinks he's a dweeb although she loves him like a brother. He's splashed across the gossip pages, linked romantically to a film star who recently hosted their show. This enrages Sally.

“But I also knew as I lay in bed glaring at the screen of my phone. Danny and Annabel's debut as a couple had occurred the night before in the form of making out at the club where Annabel's 24th Birthday had been held, that I would write about my fury, just as I always did, I turned my feelings into comedy. And that was how I cure myself.”

So Sally writes the sketch about the woman writer and the hot male host.

That same week Noah, a handsome sensitive singer-songwriter, turns up to guest host the show.

Not only does he want to do the skit, he also seems interested in her.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything of course. This is a romantic comedy.

Puzzle of writing

But it is also a Curtis Sittenfeld book where she dives deep into the human condition. During the part where they fall out, she tells their story through emails they exchange during the pandemic. It poses, she says, a romantic puzzle as they try to work out what the other person is actually saying.

“If the entire section is in email, the reader is in the same position as the characters, where all the information that the characters have, the reader also has. So the reader can also be evaluating like, ‘I think that comment was kind of flirtatious,’ or like, ‘I think he said that and she didn't pick up on it,’ or ‘I think she was putting a feeler out there,’” Sittenfeld said. “Is this platonic buddies who are like bored during the shutdown? Or is this some potentially romantic connection?”

Different kinds of writing

Sittenfeld says ultimately “Romantic Comedy” explores several different kinds of writing: comedy sketches, pop songs, romantic emails.

“The characters actually have this discussion, where they kind of are saying is, is your writing self, you know, like a truer self than your speaking self?” she said. “Or is it maybe a more artificial kind of composed self? Or is it just like a different self? I thought that it was just a way for them to kind of get to see a different side of each other during this shutdown, this sort of isolated vulnerable time.”

Curtis Sittenfeld will launch “Romantic Comedy” Monday at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis with a conversation with fellow author Julie Schumacher.

Stittenfeld's been delighted with how the local literary community has welcomed her.

“I was one time at a bar at a sort of writers' happy hour. And thought like, I'm in the presence of more writers than I met in 11 years in St. Louis. And like, they are writers in St. Louis. There are writers everywhere. But there are a ton here. And it's people doing all sorts of things,” she said.

And ready to help too. She says writer and performer Dessa gave her plot feedback, as did comedian Bryan Miller. It seems to have worked. Some early readers have asked her if she's ever written for Saturday Night Live.

She describes that as an unintentionally high compliment.

• Vacant no more: Artists, creatives move into empty storefronts for new Minneapolis initiative
• ‘Meant to be’: Four years later, Black Garnet Books owner is selling, to a friend 
• Dr. Marty Makary on medicine's blind spots
• Woman to Woman: Artist Hend Al-Mansour celebrates women and Islamic art