‘Celebrity culture holds a mirror to our own lives’ Curtis Sittenfeld
Romantic Comedy
centres on the dating life of a comedy sketch show writer. Where did you draw the inspiration?
My family and I watched a lot of Saturday Night Live during the pandemic, and through following the people on the show, I was struck by the fact so many of the male writers and cast members dated the female celebrity guest hosts – like Emma Stone [married to former segment director Dave Mccary], Scarlett Johansson [married to head writer Colin Jost] and Ariana Grande [who dated former cast member Pete Davidson]. I found myself wondering, would the phenomenon ever work in reverse, where a talented but essentially ordinary female writer ended up dating or marrying a super-famous celebrity? It seemed unlikely to me, and also like a juicy premise for a novel.
Do you often immerse yourself in celebrity culture?
It tends to be my go-to form of procrastination… In fact, I think I know about the dating lives of celebrities whose movies or TV shows I’ve never even seen. It’s interesting – although celebrity culture might seem far removed from our world, I do think it holds a mirror to our lives. Romantic Comedy
is your seventh novel. What unites your books?
I often find myself using fiction to explore gender double standards, and I seem to have a thing for writing very intelligent women who have strongly held views, often about themselves, that get contradicted by external events. I think that in all my fiction I like to assert something and then kind of blow it up myself, or present the opposite idea. In this age of social media, where we all have these forums for making really provocative declarations, we rarely acknowledge exceptions and I think fiction can be a great place to explore that ambiguity.
One of your many talents is writing brilliantly observed dialogue. Where does your love of language come from?
My dad, who died in March 2021, was very verbally clever and funny, and loved all sorts of wordplay. Rowdy family dinners featuring wide-ranging conversations and lots of jokes have always been a central part of Sittenfeld get-togethers. But, if I’m being honest, I’m also very fond of eavesdropping. A lot of writing is trial and error, so I will also revise dialogue until it sounds natural and effortless.
You once said that you’re ‘very neurotic for a normal person, but actually very well-adjusted for a writer’. What personality traits do you have that are useful for writing (and not so useful)?
I think my writing self is bolder, more confident and less discouraged by criticism than my regular self. I accept that my books aren’t for everyone, so if someone says something bad about one of them, instead of questioning my abilities, I’ll think, ‘Oh, you’re probably not the right reader for this book’ – or even, ‘Oh, I don’t think you get what I’m doing!’ However, if someone said to me, ‘That’s a really terrible pair of trousers you’re wearing,’ I’d think, ‘Oh no, I can’t believe I left the house wearing them.’
Do you read your critics?
I definitely read reviews early on, and I read them from writers or publications I respect, but I don’t read them all. I’m not a perfectionist in my writing, although I do think it’s my responsibility to take something as far as I can. As in: I can know a book has flaws and let it be published, but only if I don’t know how to fix the flaws. If I know how to fix a flaw, I believe it’s my obligation to do so. But I don’t think a perfect novel exists – part of the beauty of humans creating art is that all of it is flawed.
What are you reading at the moment?
Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes and, before that, the memoir-ish novel The Hero Of This Book by Elizabeth Mccracken.
If you could have written any other book, what would it be?
I’m going to say Trust by Hernan Diaz – about a staggeringly rich 1920s financier who’s actually evocative of Jeff Bezos. It’s spectacular and very casually authoritative on a lot of subjects, some of them esoteric. I loved it.
Romantic Comedy (Doubleday) by Curtis Sittenfeld is out 6th April
From left: the exhibition; the cast of