“Isn’t Writing Supposed To Be Harder Than This?” – Curtis Sittenfeld On Having Fun With Her New Novel 

“I knew I wanted to write a fun book this time,” author Curtis Sittenfeld tells me. We are discussing her seventh novel, Romantic Comedy, a smart and witty romance that reads the way When Harry Met Sally plays. It tells the story of the aptly named Sally, a comedy writer on a late-night sketch show, whose cynical approach to love is tested when a famous musician takes an interest in her. But ‘hot’ men don’t date ‘ordinary’ women – do they? 

“I spent a lot of lockdown watching Saturday Night Live,” Sittenfeld explains. “I noticed this trend for very ordinary men on that show marrying or dating these extremely famous, hot women… Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost, Emma Stone and David McCary, Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson. I thought to myself, someone should write a book about a female writer and a super-hot male celebrity. I first thought that would be too delightful for me, isn’t writing supposed to be harder than that?” 

The bestselling novelist, whose books are widely acclaimed, was clearly due something lighter, less weighed down with – for example – hefty political associations. Her last novel was Rodham in 2020, a counterfactual reimagining of the life of Hillary Clinton if she had not married Bill. Her third novel, American Wife (2008) was a pseudo retelling of Laura Bush’s life, and The Nominee from her sublime 2018 short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It, felt like an early stab at writing Hillary.  
 
She describes these women as prime Sittenfeld fare, namely, people whose consciousness she wants to roam around in for the years it takes to write a novel. “I have to have a certain amount of compassion for a character,” she says. “I would not want to write from the point of view of a character I found despicable. It’s like going to lunch with a person you hate – why would you do it?” 

I ask how it felt to inhabit the persona of comedy writer Sally – wasn’t there pressure to ‘write funny’? Yet her easy wit as we chat makes the inquiry redundant. She approached Sally as a fellow writer, which explains the epistolary interlude in the novel’s middle section, set over some Covid-era flirtatious email exchanges (“Sally is at her best on the page,” notes Sittenfeld). It could have been clunky, but instead feels fresh and compelling.

“There’s something charming and irresistible and timeless about two people falling in love,” she says, of the smart dissection of romance – of why and how we fall in love, and what it feels like – which forms a connecting tissue between so many of her novels. “To me, it’s endlessly interesting. It’s always fertile ground to explore.” The result is, as Sittenfeld herself would say, “too delightful”. 
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld is out now 

Marie-Claire Chappet is a London-based arts and culture journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar