This is an audio transcript of the Behind the Money podcast episode: ‘Romantic comedies, with novelist Curtis Sittenfeld

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, listeners, a note before we start. We are preparing for a summer-themed episode in which Matt Vella, the editor of FT Weekend Magazine, comes on the show and he and I help you have the summer of your lives. But we can’t do it alone. We want to crowdsource it. So I’m here to ask you to send us one small thing that you like to do that makes your summer 90 per cent better.

Here are some examples from our team: Get a lightweight, foldable chair. Makes your summer better. Make a friend with a boat. Be the last person on the beach. Buy extremely last-minute concert tickets, like moment of concert tickets. One of mine is: Just don’t over structure your summer. Take Fridays off without a plan and just wander. Just let your city take you where it wants. So, OK, send us your summer tips. Deadline is this Wednesday, May 31st. There’s a link in our show notes where you can easily record us a voice message and send it. Matt and I will play some of them on the show and talk through them. You can also email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com or message me on Instagram, @LilahRap. OK, have fun with it and let’s get on to the show.

Growing up in the 1980s, the author Curtis Sittenfeld, watched a lot of romantic comedies. So many that they were kind of burnt into her brain.

Curtis Sittenfeld
I saw a lot of those golden age of romcom movies in the theatre as a teenager, and they were kind of imprinted. And so it’s like I saw, you know, When Harry Met Sally in the theatre . . .

Clip from When Harry Met Sally
I’ll have what she’s having.

Curtis Sittenfeld
. . . Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral . . .

Clip from Notting Hill
I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking to love her.

Curtis Sittenfeld  
. . . Dirty Dancing, Say Anything. So I have those movies in my bloodstream.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Curtis is a bestselling author. She’s written seven novels and two books of short stories, and she’s known for being the smart, satirical commentator on modern American life. Her novel, Rodham, envisions who Hillary Clinton would have been if she hadn’t married Bill. In her latest book called Romantic Comedy, she takes on modern love. Curtis loves romcoms and she loves love. But she also knows that there’s a real difference between how love is portrayed in TV and movies and what it’s like in real life.

Curtis Sittenfeld
I think that the nuclear family, which seems tied obviously very closely to sort of the two-person monogamous marriage, can be very isolating for a lot of people who are not that happy, you know, feel kind of bored, overwhelmed and like, again, isolated. Yeah. I mean, I think . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
They get married and they’re, like, forever? OK. (laughter)

Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Curtis likes the way the romantic comedy genre has been expanding. She also wants to see more. More kinds of people falling in love and more kinds of love. Today we talk about it. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Here’s what Romantic Comedy is about. The main character is Sally. She’s a comedy writer in her late thirties, and she writes for a weekly sketch show called Night Owls. She starts to notice that these gorgeous celebrity women are coming through to guest host the show, and a lot of them are getting with her kind of very average looking male co-workers. This realisation comes from something Curtis noticed on Saturday Night Live. People like Scarlett Johansson marrying Colin Jost or Kim Kardashian dating Pete Davidson. So in the novel, it crosses Sally’s mind that this would never happen to her like a sexy, famous man would never get with the funny, smart, hairy, normal-looking woman. But then, romance ensues. Sally meets a man named Noah. He’s a wildly famous heart-throb, pop star, kind of cheesy. And he guest hosts the show and he kind of flips that theory on its head. Curtis, welcome to FT Weekend. It’s such a pleasure to have you.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Thank you so much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you have joined us to talk about romantic comedies today because you just came out with a novel about romantic comedy, that is a romantic comedy, that’s called Romantic Comedy (chuckles). And to start, great title. (laughter)

Curtis Sittenfeld
Haha. Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And so just to set the premise for listeners, if they haven’t read your novel yet, there’s Sally, the smart Saturday Night Live writer, and there’s Noah, the hot pop star. And they may or may not fall in love. Can you, like, set the scene a little bit for us?

Curtis Sittenfeld
They may or may not.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Will they? Won’t they?

Curtis Sittenfeld
This may or may not be a novel about like a man and woman who meet and flirt and then I don’t really know it. (laughter) So they’re both in their late thirties. Sally has been at the Night Owls, the sketch comedy show, for nine years. She’s successful and confident. She was married and divorced in her early twenties and she’s not sort of actively yearning to get married. I think she just kind of feels like whatever is available to her is not what she particularly wants.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. OK, so you started writing Romantic Comedy in 2021. Why? Like how did it come about?

Curtis Sittenfeld
So early 2020, in spring 2020, my novel Rodham was published, which was this alternate history of the life of Hillary Clinton. If she hadn’t met and fallen in love with Bill Clinton but not married him. And ...

Lilah Raptopoulos
So good.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Thank you. Thank you. So and that was a book that had, you know, required a lot of research and it’s a very political novel. And I was then at that point, people would say to me, “What’s the next thing that you’re going to write?” And I would say, “I want to write something short and fun.” And I go down the path of writing this, this sort of utopian community-ish novel, which I was doing a lot of research for it, and I found the research super interesting. But I thought, this is not shaping up to be a novel that’s short and it’s not shaping up to be a novel that’s fine. But I might go over to you on my goals, and then it gets to be summer 2021. And I had a very consciously wanted to write something fun and fizzy and escapist because I wanted like I want more fun in my own life. And it felt like, OK, if I can combine people flirting and falling in love and the setting of a late-night sketch comedy show, like, the chances of that being fun and escapist for me is very high. The daily grind of the pandemic could be like, set aside. While I enjoyed the world of romantic comedy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. This might not be how you think about it, but how did you think about the arc of the story and the idea of happily ever after? And like, I don’t want to spoil it, but you know, if Sally and Noah do end up together, who knows? Then it becomes a traditional romcom in some ways, right? Like she gets super-rich and presumably moves into his castle in LA and they live happily ever after.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah, yeah. That’s I mean, so as some people have said to me, like, “Oh, do you see yourself as subverting the romantic comedy?” And I would say, “Not especially”. Like, one, I think there is a lot of subversion going on already. And I think that, you know, people who don’t read romances would probably be surprised by, you know, I think they’re quite different from 20 years ago in a way that I think is healthy and exciting. There’s a lot more diversity in terms of, like, race or queerness. So, I mean, I think that Sally herself struggles with the question of: If she ends up with this rich, handsome man who’s also famous, you know, does she lose her identity? And is that a sacrifice worth making? And I think that’s like that’s a question that’s handled realistically. Like, it’s not, I think that maybe the fairy tale version of things would be like, “Who wouldn’t want to move into the mansion in LA? And I think she’s sort of like, “Do I or don’t I?”

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, it’s an active choice. I’m really curious about sort of, like, how romcoms are changing? How they’re diversifying and how they’re, like, different ways that we visualise them than we used to when they were really popular? I feel sort of like there was this golden time for romcoms in the nineties where they were these like big box office draws and they were taken seriously by the Academy and they were weird like Jerry Maguire, and they were sort of deranged like You’ve Got Mail. Like there are so many types and it feels like now a lot of them just go straight to Netflix and streaming and they kind of often like disappear as soon as they show up. And I’m curious if you have any thoughts about that. Like maybe it’s a Hollywood business model thing. Maybe what we want has changed, like dating apps are changing how we find love. And so the way we fantasise about finding love is different.

Curtis Sittenfeld
No, I think those are interesting questions. I mean, I think the reality so it feel movies feel different in general. I mean, I’ve seen the last two romantic comedies that I saw. I watched Ticket to Paradise. That’s one that Julia Roberts, George Clooney, which I thought was actually I mean, it was thoroughly entertaining. I think they’re supposed to be in their late fifties, which I found kind of fun and refreshing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And also, I mean, Julia Roberts and George Clooney, it’s like platonic ideal, the OG romcom couple.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, it’s I mean, they’re much older than those movies, you know, that starred Meg Ryan 30 years ago. And then I also saw a British romcom called Rye Lane. It’s super charming and delightful. And the leads are black, as are many of the cast members, which is not was not the case again with you know, there’s almost exclusively white leads in the romcoms from the nineties . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally.

Curtis Sittenfeld
. . .  that I most remember so. So I feel like the state of the romcom is maybe more robust than people want to give it credit for. Like it’s just our culture is so splintered or something that it’s really hard for anything to get attention or anything to be the show that everyone saw, the movie that everyone saw, the book that everyone read, at this point.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I also think maybe like the way that we define romcoms might be different now. Like they used to be, as you were saying, pretty said, it was like two people, a man and a woman, both white, often both straight, like high jinx ensue, they fall in.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Hah. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And now the narrative is like, there’s so many types that, you know, Crazy Rich Asians, like, could be a romcom.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Oh, I think it is. I would definitely classify that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And it’s sort of like it’s both a romcom and this ode to like, you know, East Asian culture or I was thinking also about Fire Island, which is like a romcom.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Oh, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
This like ode to this queer utopia kind of.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah, yeah. And a Jane Austen-inspired.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And Jane Austen, yeah, for sure. Is there anything that you want to see more of that you think we don’t see enough?

Curtis Sittenfeld
I mean, I think just sort of like I always welcome a movie that assumes the viewer’s intelligence. And I mean, especially as I get older, I like a middle-age romance seems delightful to me. You know, a little menopause. (laughter) Who among us doesn’t enjoy a menopausal romance?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. No, I agree. I was thinking that, too. I also, like. I don’t know, I would love to see, you know, Something’s Gotta Give of today. Like a you know, to older people using dating apps. I was sort of brainstorming about this about like, what are our other films that I would want to see? And I thought like, OK, what about these, like, complicated modern-day dating things like people on apps who are like polyamorous or in like different forms of relationships. I want to see that. Like, I want to see, I don’t know, an honest account of like being an interracial couple and meeting each other’s families. I want to see ... 

Curtis Sittenfeld
They must exist.

Lilah Raptopoulos
They must.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Actually I just started watching the Russian Doll. And there’s like a sort of, you know, polyamorous situation going on that one of the characters is kind of cheerfully waking up from. Look, I think all of that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it all kind of counts. I guess all of these things. It’s just yeah, all of these things are satisfying that itch. It’s just there’s just so many more.

Curtis Sittenfeld
I mean, I think that the volume of choice allows us to be very picky and maybe even easily dissatisfied. And you know, I came of age like in the eighties and nineties. It was like if you watched whatever was on TV, you know, like if you did not have this huge array of choices, which I think is a gift in some ways, but it can almost feel like if not everything is an A-plus viewing experience, it can feel like it’s a waste of time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, because there’s so much else.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah. Or like, yeah, how many episodes do you give a show?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I mean, I feel that there’s a strong correlation here to dating. (laughter)

Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. How much time do you give a person?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Curtis and I went on this long tangent talking about all the conflicts that are baked into how we think about love today. Of course, most people crave love and romance, but it comes with all these traditional custom. You know, do we still want our fathers to give us away? And the answer might be “Maybe” or “Yes”. But the fact that marriage began as a form of ownership doesn’t always square well with modern partnership.

I was at dinner with a friend recently, and we were talking about love and romance. And we were like, you know, we’ll never fully understand it. And then we, like, looked around the restaurant and thought laughed, like thinking about all the different people who are also probably talking about love and romance. We believe in love. We want happiness. We don’t understand it. We’re still sort of like, I don’t know, our hands are in the goo of trying to make sense of it. And I think that’s kind of nice.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Yeah, I mean, I agree completely. And I think actually this might be surprising given that I wrote a novel called Romantic Comedy, and it’s about people falling in love. But I actually like if someone wanted to make the case to me that love is all a lie, and it’s this sort of narrative that we all kind of perpetuate together who are like, you know, I’ve heard the argument that it’s marriage, obviously, marriage has its origins in like the consolidation of political power and real estate. Any counterargument to love I would be super interested in reading or discussing like it’s not I’m not particularly invested in making the case. I mean, I think that there is such a thing as really beautiful, transcendent moments of connection between people. Like I’m not sure about, like sort of lasting love (laughter) you know, or like, I don’t know, like. So I think that kind of debating all that is interesting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I’m curious if there were, like, tropes that you knew you were sort of didn’t want to fall into. Where there are certain things, as you were writing, that you were like, “No.

Curtis Sittenfeld
They will get asked often. And I think that a lot of writers are like, what’s the message in the book? Or what were you trying to say? And for me, it really is sort of more abstract than that and kind of like more and more nuanced and more like more messy, I guess. Like you, I’m not I’m not trying to sort of say this is the state of love in 2023. You know, this is what a heterosexual woman should or shouldn’t do. It’s more like, you know, it’s so weird being a person. And these are some of the experiences a person can have that are like swoony and delightful. And then these are some that are kind of like cringey and horrible and embarrassing and you mix them all together and then you have a novel.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing. Curtis, this is an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Curtis Sittenfeld
Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I have listed Curtis’s books and all the romantic comedies mentioned in the show notes.

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That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. Next week we are going to South Africa to talk about copper thieves with the journalist Monica Marc. It’s going to be fascinating.

Also, remember our callout. Tell us one small thing that you can do that might make your summer 90 per cent better. The link for how to contact us is in the show notes. Just go do it now. Don’t overthink it. Also in the show notes is a link to an excellent discount on an FT subscription. If you want to subscribe and see what’s going on in our pages, that is also at ft.com/weekendpodcast. As you know, we love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter, @FTWeekendPod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter, @LilahRap.

I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my world-class team: Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Mollie Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have the best weekend and we will find each other again next week.

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