Sunny Side Up

Sunny Greene is a 35-year-old recently divorced public relations firm owner living in New York City. The novel opens with Sunny in a too-small swimsuit in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, spiraling into a panic attack as she realizes she can no longer fit into a size 14. The moment triggers memories of childhood humiliation over her size and cruel remarks from her ex-husband, Zack, who once compared her to "a football player who tried on the cheerleader's outfit by mistake." She flees the store, only to face a subway billboard for Zack's sports podcast, a campaign she helped him land. At her lowest, she vows to start climbing back up.

Sunny built her career from scratch, launching Le Ballon Rouge (LBR), a boutique PR firm representing small, women-owned fashion and lifestyle brands, and was recently honored with an Entrepreneur magazine 35 under 35 award. She met Zack, a charismatic Upper East Side native working at ESPN, through mutual friends and helped build his brand while he gradually pulled away emotionally. She deferred to his preferences out of fear he would leave her for someone thinner.

Now living in Chelsea with her two rescue dogs, Sophia and Blanche, collectively called the Golden Girls, Sunny begins rebuilding with the support of her closest friends: Brooke, a freelance stylist whose husband cheated with the nanny, and Noor, a celebrity chef whose husband came out as gay. At LBR, Sunny hires Avery, a recent New School graduate who is a longtime reader of Sunny Side Up, a newsletter Sunny once wrote about her outfits, dates, and city life. Sunny abandoned the newsletter after Zack called it embarrassing and mocked the body-positive photos she posted.

Two men enter Sunny's life. Cillian, an Irish construction worker outside her apartment window, becomes a brief, liberating sexual encounter that helps Sunny reclaim her body. Dennis Matthews, the building's mailman with striking blue eyes and a thick Queens accent, catches Sunny's attention during a chaotic couch delivery and later walks her home after a bad date, offering easy conversation and comfort.

Sunny relaunches Sunny Side Up on Substack, announcing her divorce and a self-imposed "Wedding Date Deadline" to bring a date to her brother Michael's June wedding. The newsletter draws thousands of subscribers who respond to her candor about body image and dating. The dating journey proves mixed: A promising Hinge date with a man named TJ ends in humiliation when he tells Sunny he has "always wanted to fuck a fat girl" and that she helped him check items off his pre-marriage "checklist." On Valentine's Day, Sunny runs into Dennis in her lobby and they spend a spontaneous evening at a local bar. When Sunny leans in for a goodnight kiss, Dennis jumps back. Baffled, Sunny writes a newsletter post about the evening, nicknaming Dennis "Mr. Postman," and deletes her dating apps.

A visit to her tailor, Kateryna, plants the seed for a new business. Kateryna transforms one of Sunny's swimsuits into something stylish and suggests making a pattern to produce more. During a vacation in the Bahamas, Sunny debuts the redesigned suit and her friends urge her to start a swimsuit line. Back in New York, Sunny and Avery build a business plan for SONNY, a size-inclusive luxury swimwear company. Brooke connects them with Ted Manns, a handsome venture capitalist whose fund, Fieldstone Capital, backs female-founded brands. Moved by Sunny's pitch about the fashion industry's exclusion of women above a size 10, Ted offers to invest.

Romance complicates matters. Ted takes Sunny to dinner at Rao's, and their professional relationship shifts into something personal, ending with a passionate kiss. Sunny rationalizes that Dennis rejected her and has not pursued her since. But Dennis soon texts, and Sunny begins seeing both men, writing about them in the newsletter under the nicknames "Mr. Postman" and "the Silver Fox." Through the spring, she and Ted sleep together while she and Dennis share a tender first kiss at Battery Park and begin their own slow courtship. Dennis confesses he is "crazy about" Sunny and asks her to be careful with his heart. She promises she will not hurt him, then lies about her plans to attend a Knicks game with Ted.

After months of slow-building intimacy, Sunny and Dennis sleep together in an encounter that is tender and deeply connected. But the next morning, when Dennis hints at a future together, Sunny panics and fabricates a work call to cut the morning short. Meanwhile, Zack reenters the picture, proposing that Sunny turn Sunny Side Up into a podcast under his new Spotify-backed network. Ted reveals a troubling side when Stonebridge's, a department store, agrees to carry SONNY but only in straight sizes, excluding the plus sizes central to the brand's mission. Ted dismisses Sunny's concern, calling her stance "hysterical."

The SONNY launch at The Mark hotel is a triumph. Sunny delivers a rousing speech about the Bergdorf's breakdown that inspired the company. Before the speech, her mother shares an emotional admission that she wishes she had not passed down her own body anxieties and tells Sunny she is proud of her fierce confidence. But the evening unravels in three collisions. Ted kisses Sunny publicly onstage while Dennis watches from the crowd. Zack arrives with Jessica Rose Baker on his arm, and Jessica reveals they have been together for "almost two years," confirming that Zack cheated throughout the marriage. She also inadvertently exposes that Zack's podcast offer came with a signing bonus he needed for a new apartment. Sunny declines the deal to Zack's face.

Dennis sends a devastating text. Fans recognized him as "Mr. Postman" from the newsletter and showed him screenshots revealing the Silver Fox, the Wedding Date Deadline, and the fact that Sunny had been dating multiple men while writing about it publicly. He tells her to leave him out of her "publicity stunts."

Sunny buys back Ted's stake in SONNY after he dismisses plus-size women as outside the target demographic, and she makes Avery and Kateryna official partners. Dennis goes silent despite Sunny's calls, voicemails, and a four-page handwritten letter. She writes a final pre-wedding newsletter post announcing she is going solo, reflecting that she fell in love and ruined it.

At Michael and his fiancée Ellie's wedding in Chicago, Sunny's father pulls her aside to tell her he is proud and that she was always the first love of his and her mother's life. Walking down the aisle as maid of honor, Sunny spots Dennis in the last row and stumbles, blurting "I'm falling." Dennis rushes to help. After the ceremony, he explains that Avery papered his mail route with printouts of Sunny's final newsletter post, directing him to read the handwritten letter in her mailbox. Dennis had been away on a cousin's bachelor party, not avoiding her, and the letter had no stamp, so his substitute carrier left it untouched. In the catering kitchen, they confess their love. Dennis tells Sunny he has loved her since the first time he saw her in her lobby, in her leopard coat with the Golden Girls, when she yelled "SHIT" because she forgot poop bags.

The epilogue, set six months later, finds Sunny and Dennis living together in his grandmother's Chelsea brownstone. SONNY is carried in Bergdorf Goodman and department stores worldwide, and Sunny is writing a book on body acceptance. When she hears someone crying in the Bergdorf's dressing room, frustrated by their reflection just as Sunny once was, she grabs an armful of SONNY suits and heads to the fitting room. She knocks twice on the door.