It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Puts Their Heart Out: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

If you had to tell someone your love origin story by choosing its television genre, is it a sitcom or a sketch comedy?

For Sally Milz, it’s probably a little bit of both.

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Romantic Comedy,” the author leans into familiar territories — familiar in that readers should almost immediately recognize the setting (in this case, the days in the lives of people on a sketch comedy show that happens to be on TV, live, every Saturday night) and familiar in that Sittenfeld employed a similar tool with her most recent novel, “Rodham.”

Sittenfeld’s protagonist, Sally, is a sketch writer at “TNO” and has been for long enough that she’s beginning to consider her next steps when music phenom Noah Brewster lands the coveted host AND musician slot for an upcoming episode. Sally’s lackluster love life is mostly by design — divorced at a young age, cynical suits her and her style of comedy. It’s her shield she hides behind, which makes it increasingly frustrating for her when she finds that armor is in fact useless against someone like Noah.

A quick connection between the two is set to pause with one wrong conversational exchange, only to be revived via email in the heart of the pandemic. With distance serving as a foil to anything physical, a true friendship emerges, and Sittenfeld is able to explore what happens when two people can do nothing but just talk.

In some respects, it reminds me of the wholly underrated movie “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” where a pet psychiatrist radio show host (played by Janeane Garofalo) falls in love with a caller (Ben Chaplin) who thinks she is really someone else (Uma Thurman.) The point being, if it isn’t love at first sight, can it be love at first conversation? Does physical attraction supersede, or follow, mental attraction? Can you really be friends AND lovers?

If Sally has always been unlucky in love, is she in fact resigned to singledom, or can she fall for someone that also falls for her?

Having served as the proverbial wingman many a time in my high school and college years, I can appreciate Sally’s psyche. It’s hard to see yourself as the ingenue when you are used to spending the majority of time in the friend zone. So it’s refreshing, even if it’s a tad cheesy, to be witness to the possibility of romance blossoming between Sally and Noah. I actually had bets on a different ending, so kudos to Sittenfeld for keeping me guessing.

A great beach read for what’s left of summer, or even a soccer practice stash-in-the-car kind of book to keep you entertained between drop-offs and pick-ups. And if you are into pop culture, you get a bonus peek into late night TV life, which Sittenfeld did a lot of reading research on — and I thought I had read all the books on that. Enjoy!