How COVID, People.com and Pete Davidson inspired Curtis Sittenfeld's new lit-pop romance

Earlier this year, Curtis Sittenfeld’s publisher, Random House, held an online giveaway to celebrate the upcoming release of her new novel, “Romantic Comedy.”

“They were giving away copies of the book along with really nice sheets and chocolates and even a fancy bathrobe,” Sittenfeld tells me over video from her home in Minneapolis. “And I thought, I want a new bathrobe!”

Did she get one?

“Yes,” she says. “I ordered one from Lands' End.”

Unlike some of her subjects — prep-school kids, presidents’ wives, fictional celebrities — Sittenfeld doesn’t go in for fancy freebies. She has a knack for nailing the zeitgeist with a light touch but also a hardcore work ethic, carving out something of a conventional life and career out of making things up. Born and raised in Cincinnati, she climbed all the rungs on the ladder, graduating from Stanford and receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Sittenfeld proceeded to hone a genre you might call literary-with-a-hook. Her debut novel, “Prep,” a fish-out-of-water satire of prep school, was a runaway bestseller in 2005, setting her up to write full time. Her third book, “American Wife,” was a darkly shaded roman à clef about a woman very much like First Lady Laura Bush. In 2020 she threw away the key and wrote “Rodham,” an alternate history of Hillary Clinton. In between first-lady books, “Eligible” rebooted “Pride and Prejudice” in the thick of a Jane Austen revival. And now “Romantic Comedy” takes on an even stranger pop phenomenon — the celebrity-comedian meet market of SNL.

To the outsider — or perhaps the rival — this feels like a path almost too well plotted. But Sittenfeld puts her 20-year run down to luck. “I do work hard, and I feel very grateful to have the career that I have,” she says. “I consider my stability as a working novelist an incredible privilege. I know plenty of writers who work as hard as I do and haven’t necessarily had the luck that I’ve had.”

She adds that she doesn’t exactly live to work. While writing is “a really central part” of her identity, “I don’t think that in my daily life it is for anyone I interact with, including my own family members!” She shares that before she logged on to speak with me, she’d been using a lint roller to remove dog hair from her fleece. “My daughter looked at me and said, ‘Whoa, this must be a fancy interview. … It’s just another job, really. I lead a sort of ordinary suburban life of running errands at the drugstore and, you know, being covered in dog hair.”

The protagonist of “Romantic Comedy,” Sally Milz, shares her creator’s no-nonsense approach, if not her work-life balance. At 39, Sally works as a senior writer for “The Night Owls,” usually shortened to “TNO” (just as “Saturday Night Live” is “SNL”). She loves her job in spite of, or maybe because of, its hectic timetable, which boils her outside life down to takeout and a booty-call buddy.

Until the week that "TNO" brings on superstar singer-songwriter Noah Brewster as both host and musical guest. His shaggy gold locks and handsome face stupefy a writer accustomed to having all her desires in check and on schedule. What’s more, Noah has a thing for Sally too, even serenading her during a sound-check rehearsal.

The genesis of the novel offers an insight into Sitteneld’s brainstorming process. “Several times over the years I’ve started to tweet things like, ‘I’m going to write a novel about such and such,’” she says. “Then I’ll stop myself and think, wait, maybe I really should do that! But it wasn’t until the pandemic, when our family was watching a lot of 'SNL,' that I thought to myself, someone should write a screenplay for a romantic comedy that’s about this phenomenon of male cast members dating up, dating these super-gorgeous models.”

There were, of course, Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson, Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian. (Sally is irked, early in the novel, when her plain colleague Danny Horst hooks up with a hot actress.) In the summer of 2021, Sittenfeld realized her notional screenplay should actually be a novel. But was it serious enough?

“I had to ask myself,” she recalls, “am I allowed to write a book that has such a purely fun premise? And then I realized the answer to my own question was, yes, I am allowed to. I give myself permission.” She acknowledges that “whatever my last book was, I probably feel tempted to go in a different direction, but I don’t think I have a grand strategy. This time, I definitely wrote the book that I wanted to read. … It was the pandemic, and as a writer you create this alternate universe to live in while you’re writing. It was a joy to exist in Sally’s world.”

Sally and Noah find their lives changed by COVID isolation. I suggest that while finding a way to incorporate the pandemic into her novel, the author was also figuring out how to cope with the actual pandemic. “That’s actually a perfect way to put it,” Sittenfeld says with a laugh. “I feel we’re still dealing with the past few years and I’m a realistic writer. I had to include something about what happened if I was going to set a book during or after 2020.”

As a fan of both rom-coms and romance novels (“I started reading Harlequins in grade school”), Sittenfeld knew she was less interested in the couple’s eventual, ahem, coupling than she was in “that moment leading up to the first kiss. Yeah. Like, will they or won't they kiss? Getting from sort of not knowing each other to kissing was more significant. It’s not the marriage plot, about — am I going to find a spouse? It’s more about: Does this person want to make out with me?”

And yet, in “Romantic Comedy” as in rom-coms as in life, there is more after the kiss. Over the course of the novel, Sally will take a road trip from Kansas City to Los Angeles that might end in bliss or embarrassment. Sittenfeld says she wanted her main character to be both bold and vulnerable.

“I think people have different sides to them, and the same person can be confident or insecure depending on the moment or who they’re with,” she says. “Who doesn’t have significant insecurities about their appearance or desirability? That’s very human and normal. If you’re writing the kind of fiction where the plot is as much internal as external, I do think there has to be a certain emotional openness to make it worth the reader’s investment. I’m not sure I really see the point otherwise.”

She pauses, with a small smile. “My go-to form of procrastination is reading People.com, which makes me feel like I was formally doing research for this book. I could look at patterns of behavior among those couples, patterns that I don’t know much about. Again, it’s not my direct world. I live in Minnesota.” Where a comfortable bathrobe and a steady schedule foment the invention of distinctly unusual lives.

Patrick is a freelance critic, podcaster and author of the forthcoming memoir ”Life B.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.