And yet, first impressions can be deceiving. At a Fourth of July barbecue, Chip takes an immediate interest in Jane, but Chip's friend, neurosurgeon Fitzwilliam Darcy, reveals himself to Liz to be much less charming. Bennet has one thing on her mind: how to marry off her daughters, especially as Jane's fortieth birthday fast approaches.Įnter Chip Bingley, a handsome new-in-town doctor who recently appeared on the juggernaut reality TV dating show Eligible. Mary, the middle sister, is earning her third online master's degree and barely leaves her room, except for those mysterious Tuesday-night outings she won't discuss. Youngest sisters Kitty and Lydia are too busy with their CrossFit workouts and Paleo diets to get jobs. When their father has a health scare, they return to their childhood home in Cincinnati to help and discover that the sprawling Tudor they grew up in is crumbling and the family is in disarray. Darcy is one that you have and haven't met before: Liz is a magazine writer in her late thirties who, like her yoga instructor older sister, Jane, lives in New York City. The Danny Horst Rule asserts that while an ordinary male comic can date a female 10, it never works the other way around.This version of the Bennet family and Mr. Sally Milz, a writer on “TNO,” is pitching a sketch called “The Danny Horst Rule.” Horst is one of her fellow writers and he has been having a very public romance with a beautiful, volatile actress named Annabel. The reason you need to know this is because the meet-cute in Sittenfeld’s latest, “Romantic Comedy,” relies on it.

The examples are Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande, followed by Kim Kardashian Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson Dave McCary and Emma Stone. It’s now become a thing when a talented but not super-hot comedian dates a gorgeous female star. If you’re not a connoisseur of comedy and celebrity gossip, there’s something you might not know. Here, the reality is “Saturday Night Live,” reimagined as “TNO,” “The Night Owls.” It’s run by Nigel, not Lorne, and “Weekend Update” is called “News Desk,” 30 Rock is called 66, and most of the details - the pitch meetings, the table reads, the run-throughs, the 11:30 airtime - seem to be modeled directly on the many “SNL” memoirs that Sittenfeld said she read as research for this project. I am a big fan of Curtis Sittenfeld, and particularly love her reality-adjacent work - riffing on Hillary Clinton in “Rodham,” Laura Bush in “American Wife,” and on “Pride and Prejudice” in “Eligible.” OK, perhaps “Pride and Prejudice” is not an example of reality, but “Eligible” is an example of how much fun Sittenfeld has playing with existing characters and story structures.

Eligible by curtis sittenfeld