Romantic Comedy

“Their sincerity and spontaneity and sheer optimism all seemed so misguided, so destined to fail, that how could anyone, including a cynic like me, not root for them?”

This quote establishes Sally’s disillusionment with love. Love that is optimistic, sincere, and spontaneous seems “destined to fail” in Sally’s eyes. As the novel opens, Sally is not a romantic, and she doesn’t appreciate overly demonstrative romance in others—a coping mechanism rooted in Sally’s own internal difficulty giving and receiving love. Sally’s proximity to high-profile celebrity relationships on TNO highlights a distinction between larger-than-life romance in the public eye and private love between average people. To Sally, Annabel and Danny’s love seems “misguided” because Annabel capitalizes on it to gain attention and publicity on her social media platforms, which Sally feels makes their relationship performative instead of authentic.

“But I suspected that much of my writing emerged from this tension or lack of integration; I believed the perceptions undergirding my sketches arose from my being invisible or at least underestimated, including being mistaken for someone nicer than I was.”

Sally’s greatest challenge in the workplace is also her greatest asset. As one of only a handful of women in a male-dominated workplace, Sally senses that expectations for her comedy and success are low, setting her up to surpass them and carve out her own form of representation for women in comedy.

“Another of my pet peeves is that the female characters used to all be sort of cutesy, like having flour on their nose after they baked cookies and not knowing it. And now they’re all a mess, like waking up really hungover and getting fired. I want to create characters who aren’t flawless but also aren’t ridiculous or incompetent at life.”

In this quote, Sally reveals one of the tropes of romantic comedies that she wants to subvert. Romantic comedies often feature a female protagonist whose primary characteristic is cuteness whereas in reality, women are far more dynamic and complex than a standard romantic comedy allows. This quote also serves as an example of metafiction, because, as the protagonist of Sittenfeld’s own romantic comedy, Sally is already subverting those clichés of women in romantic roles.

“I would never again risk poisoning TNO for myself by falling for or trying to date anyone there. And this decision made me see that there was a different way I wrote when, even subconsciously, I was seeking male approval, male sexual approval: a more coy way, more reserved, more nervous about being perceived as angry or vulgar. It was the syntactical equivalent of dressing up as a sexy zombie for Halloween. From my third season on, I’d embraced my anger and vulgarity. I’d been a gross zombie.”

After being hurt by Elliot, Sally necessarily protects herself against workplace romances. She guards against sexualization in a male-dominated workplace by taking the option for romance off the table. While this inhibits her natural sexuality, it also makes her a better writer and a stronger colleague. Rather than acquiesce to a man’s perception of who a woman should be, she becomes a more traditionally masculine version of herself, channeling rage and aggression into her writing. As a character, Sally’s arc is, in part, about reclaiming her sexual desire on her own terms. This quote highlights how women like Sally working in male-dominated spaces feel the pressure to pick a lane: be a sexualized woman or desexualize yourself to become one of the guys.

“He hadn’t wanted to be romantically involved with a person with whom he shared a sense of humor, whereas I hadn’t been able to imagine anything better. Or maybe he’d just thought I wasn’t pretty. Either way, his aversion had made me question my view of the world, my own beliefs about what attracted two people, to such an extreme degree that I’d given up on romantic partnership completely.”

Sally’s disillusionment with love can be directly connected to her unreciprocated love for her colleague Elliot. Through his rejection, she discovers that her favorite quality in herself—her humor—is not a quality that attracts men. Even more painful, she was rejected by Elliot for sharing the very quality that she thought would draw them together. It makes her rethink what partnership looks like, and she internalized the rejection as indicative of what all men want, as opposed to what this one man wants, which hurts her ability to see herself as an attractive prospect for romantic partnership. Heartbreak makes Sally give up on herself.

“Could it be that Noah was one of those rare guys who didn’t essentially dislike or mock women, and who also didn’t ignore our existence, and who also didn’t see us primarily as objects of lust? That he was weirdly, disarmingly fine with us?”

Noah represents new hope for Sally. She rarely meets men who genuinely like women as more than a prop in their lives, especially men like Noah whose fame gives him access, in her mind, to any woman he might want. This quote highlights Sally’s initial attraction to Noah and the respect that he gives her, and also emphasizes how much Sally has internalized male rejection as indicative of her own inability to measure up to an impossible standard.

“I’m wondering if the thing I’ve been missing all these years is a pen pal. In all seriousness, this is the quietest my life has been in two decades and it’s really nice to connect with another person.”

A major plot development occurs when Noah and Sally reconnect as pen pals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Success in love often depends on being in the right place at the right time. Despite the odds of a global pandemic, or perhaps because of it, Sally and Noah rediscover each other at the right time and in the right place to fall in love.

“[I]t took me years to cop to the entitlement or even arrogance inherent in thinking you have the right to pursue and share your art. It turns out a disproportionate number of people in the music industry grew up privileged, and many of them will go to great lengths to make you think otherwise.”

In this quote, Noah reveals the inner conflict he feels hiding behind the facade of his public persona. Stories of starting from the bottom and achieving fame and wealth are a key element to a celebrity’s legend. Though Noah hasn’t lied about his upbringing, he doesn’t reveal to the public the full extent of the privilege that afforded him disproportional resources and opportunities to succeed. Noah’s connection with Sally allows him to feel safe discussing more and more elements of his privilege, which demonstrates how much Noah trusts Sally and wants her to know the real him, underneath the facade.

“I actually think this was a profound lesson about how with incomplete information, we choose our narrative. I also think my mom believed he did it on purpose, because before I left for college, she told me that no matter how bad I ever felt, the one thing I shouldn’t do was kill myself. She said that ideas that seem right in the moment can seem wrong later, and that a lot of things are reversible but killing yourself isn’t.”

The loss of Sally’s mother was deeply painful for her, and this passage recalls an important lesson that connected her and her mother—the shared trauma of Sally’s father’s likely suicide. This quote highlights the way people construct a narrative based on their own perception of a situation, internalizing it as fundamental fact rather than a fleeting feeling rooted in their own pain. Sally’s mother’s musings on her father’s death take on new meaning in the context of Sally’s belief that she is not attractive enough to be loved by Noah.

“She conveyed to me without ever saying it outright that we all have public and private selves, which also was a very important lesson. Oddly, this ties into why I’ve been thinking I should leave TNO. With every passing year, I can feel how the writers coming up behind me are increasingly different from me.”

The conflict of the public and private self is important throughout the novel, as both Noah and Sally have built up certain walls to protect their private selves. Noah struggles to have a private self at all because of his fame, whereas Sally self-protectively guards her private self and rejects a public self. In an age of social media, the new generations of writers at TNO see private and public selves as one and the same, giving Sally an overwhelming sense that the world of TNO is changing and evolving away from the type of work she wants to do.

“Now, just for the record, this does not mean I buy into the idea you refer to where I am a celebrity recognized far and wide and you are an unknown. You for sure have fans, even if you aren’t recognized in the grocery store […] But I know you are a star in the comedy world.”

Part of Noah’s role is to act as a foil to Sally’s myopic perspective on herself and her talent. In this quote, Noah attempts to help Sally understand that the connection between an artist and those who engage with their art works by the same the principles regardless of the scale of that engagement. Sally may not sell out stadiums like Noah, but she is well respected and even beloved as a comedy writer.

“As you know from TNO, there is nothing else like the magic of a crowd feeling a collective and ephemeral joy, and in those moments, when I am onstage looking out at so many faces, I feel like a vessel in a way that’s an incredible privilege.”

Noah and Sally come from very different worlds, but they both understand the thrill of seeing their art appreciated by the public. Live performances of Noah’s music or of Sally’s sketches connect them with audience, which allows their art to take on a life of its own independent from them. Connecting with the audience is a form of communion. Noah and Sally’s shared acknowledgment of this dynamic begins to form common ground between them.

“Obviously, endlessly emailing someone before meeting is a waste of time, but I do still wonder whether a person’s writing self is their realest self, their fakest self, or just a different self than their in-the-world self? Or maybe emailing with someone a lot before meeting is ill-advised not because the other person is real or fake but because there inevitably will be a discrepancy between your idea of them and the reality. Have you ever tried online dating?”

In this quote, Sittenfeld explores the more modern concerns of communication. In the contemporary world, most communication is done online. Such communication often feels inauthentic because it’s not done in person. On the other hand, writing instead of talking face-to-face has its own benefits, allowing people to let their guards down. Writing, unlike speaking, can be edited and thoughtfully planned out. Even so, there is also a danger inherent in communicating through writing because it creates an image of the other person that may only be part of who they are—the part they are willing to share. Sally applies these anxieties to online dating, in which people believe they are getting to know each other online but realize they have completely skewed perceptions when they meet in person.

“Apropos of my declaration above about thinking that I understand appearance pressure because I’m a woman, yet another of the reasons I suspect it’s almost time for me to move on from TNO is that, while so much of my worldview has been shaped by beliefs about men and women and sexism and feminism, most younger writers at the show accept as a given that gender is a social construct. And to my surprise, the more I read on this subject, the more I agree.”

Sally acknowledges that a lot of her worldview has been formed by perceptions of sexism. Sexist work environments and internalized misogyny have shaped Sally’s ideas about gender and catalyzed her internal rebellion against them. But the progressive, more fluid perspective on gender from the new generation of TNO writers allows them to define themselves outside of the sexism and misogyny that has dominated Sally’s adult life. Engaging with their perspective allows Sally to explore a new way of defining herself and her place in the world, embrace her own desires independent of her preconceived resentments, and open herself up to a relationship with Noah.

“Second, there are a lot of things about all marriages, including mine, that deserve flippancy and disrespect. Unfortunately, my marriage itself was kind of boring and not that funny, but it’s safe to say that I am not someone who thinks marriage as an institution is sacrosanct. In fact, I aspire to find anything in life sacrosanct.”

In this quote, marriage is treated with humor and a lack of sincerity. Sally's job requires her to view even the most solemn of things as an opportunity for a joke. Sally doesn’t have any hang-ups about her divorce, but her divorce is part of the reason she doesn’t find romance accessible. Sally doesn’t have that typical rom-com desire to get married, but in this quote, she hints at a desire to find something about which she can feel serious and sacred, something that can penetrate the shield of humor she’s built around herself to protect her from hurt and rejection—a belief in the possibility of Having It All.

“Aren’t we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?”

This quote foreshadows Noah and Sally’s love story, which has already begun via email through vulnerable admissions such as the one in this quote. Though romantic love sometimes seems cheesy to Sally, some part of her still longs for companionship and partnership and believes that life is meant to be shared. This quote also highlights the need to find a partner “worth the effort,” acknowledging the importance of personal connection and attraction.

“All of which was to say that the sketches I’d written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them but from my resentment at their hold on me.”

This revelation is an important moment of character development for Sally. Sally’s comedic posture toward societal beauty standards is her weapon of choice in the battle against systemic discrimination that feels oppressive and unjust. Sally ultimately realizes that her comedy comes less from a place of thoughtful social criticism than from her own rage at the way those standards made her and the women around her feel worthless. Sally would prefer to be a “clear-eyed” denunciator but admits that she’s been acting out her emotions about the beauty standards rather than actively working to dismantle them. Sally is deeply self-conscious and resentful of the beauty of others. In acknowledging that her approach to beauty standards has been more personal than critical, Sally takes a step toward greater self-acceptance.

“It was a belated realization to have, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was how grown-up conversations worked—not that your communication didn’t falter, but that you both made good-faith attempts to rectify things after it had.”

Sally’s relationship with Noah allows her to build healthy communication habits that free her from the fear of potential missteps. She learns to get over her fear of getting bored with Noah, discovering that communication can be silent but not awkward, and that people can address what they’ve said after they’ve said it, clarifying and getting closer to mutual understanding little by little. The precision and self-editing inherent in Sally’s job as a writer has begun bleeding into her personal communication as well, holding her back from full freedom and vulnerability. With Noah, she learns that she can also edit and revise what she says, because being an adult means acknowledging the words you’ve used and continuing to work toward greater understanding. For years, Sally avoided relationships because she wanted to avoid getting hurt, hurting someone else, or getting bored with them—a perspective that didn’t allow for the possibility of mutual growth and progressive deepening of love and intimacy between two flawed humans whose goal is connection rather than perfection.

“I also was thinking in an abstract way about how I had been one kind of person up until my divorce, a resigned and constrained person. Then I had been another kind of person for the last decade, a cynical and compartmentalized person. Was there any reason I couldn’t now become a third kind of person, made more confident by experience and braver by the current reminder of how fragile and tenuous all our lives had been all along?”

This quote emphasizes the importance of character development. Sally finally recognizes that she has changed over time and therefore can change again. The “cynical and compartmentalized” version of herself has been a protective armor against heartbreak and disappointment. But now, it’s time for Sally to become a new version of herself, in which she can open herself up to love and a greater sense of her own worth. People are constantly evolving. One is never too old or set in their ways to change for the better.

“Isn’t the goal to live with our demons, not to expect them to go away?”

One way in which Sally changes and matures throughout the novel is discovering that she doesn’t have to eliminate her anxieties and fears; she just has to find a way to live with them. Sally has been waiting for a time when she would get over her demons, holding herself back from fully embracing and living her life to the fullest. In accepting that she doesn’t have to fight, she just has to live and cope, Sally can free herself from anxieties that hold her back from, for example, embracing a relationship with Noah or transforming her career.

“Sometimes when I speak, I feel like I’m writing dialogue for the character of myself. I’m impersonating a normal human when really I’m a confused freak.”

Sally has been hiding behind her writing self. Her jokes are good, but they also provide a protective shield for her fears, hurts, and vulnerabilities. Further, she leans into her writing self because she’s no longer sure who she is underneath. Just as she writes dialogue for characters in her sketches, Sally self-edits in her mind and doesn’t believe she’s being her authentic self with others. This stems from her own self-consciousness and her past feelings of rejection.

“It’s when something in the plot or the logic of a film doesn’t quite make sense and the screenplay has the characters acknowledge it without resolving it. It’s a trick to reassure the audience that you’re not trying to trick them.”

This quote describes the screenwriting tool known as “lampshading.” Sally wants to lampshade the inevitable online trolls that will mock her looks as compared with Noah’s. She learns to acknowledge the online hate without seeking to resolve it—allowing her to move from a place of caring deeply about what other people think of her to deciding not to fix the problem of what other people think of her. Sally’s decision has a double metacognitive effect on Sittenfeld’s reader. Just as a film character acknowledges a problem without resolving it, Sittenfeld’s novel presents no solution to online hate, further emphasizing its toxicity.

“I was thinking about how in romantic comedies, don’t they usually end with one of the people hurrying to be reunited with the other and publicly declaring their love? Like at a party or an airport? I didn’t know I just had to buy a urinal at Target.”

A classic trope of the romantic-comedy genre is the grand gesture. The grand gesture usually occurs toward the end of the movie and saves the relationship because it proves one character’s love for the other. Humorously, Noah’s grand gesture is buying a bathroom commode for Jerry, demonstrating Noah’s thoughtfulness and proving that what is important to Sally is also important to him. This grand gesture is not a subversion of the genre, but it is a twist on the traditional grand gesture.