Hallie Cantor's first novel, Like This, But Funnier, is a hilarious and brutally honest send-up of comedy writing for television, a serious consideration of the woes of modern womanhood, and a compassionate telling of one woman's fumbling journey.
Caroline Neumann is 34 years old. After a relatively successful and socially engaged stint in New York writing for a sketch comedy show, she moved to Los Angeles to write for a sitcom, which was then canceled. She's been working from home for the past four years--if you can call it "working" when she's mostly doing unpaid "development." "In their twenties, she and [husband] Harry had happily not known together" whether they wanted to have kids. But in the interim, he became sure that he did, while Caroline remains doubtful. Harry used to be unhappy at work, too, but now he is a therapist. "They'd made a little home in the despair together. Until he'd abandoned her to go off and get a fulfilling career that he loved. How dare he." Now, dubiously employed and depressed, Caroline navigates lonely, work-from-home desperation, cataloging all the ways in which she can feel bad (down to the varieties of milk she might put in her coffee: "oat milk: cliché spoiled California millennial princess, very bad"), while Harry nudges her to consider motherhood.
Propelled by work-related frustration and curiosity about Harry's favorite therapy client, whom she knows only as "the Teacher," Caroline indulges in a tiny bit of snooping. When she happens to mention a tidbit from the Teacher's life in a meeting with a producer, however, events snowball beyond Caroline's control, until she finds herself working on an actual television script featuring the confidential details of a woman's life that she has no business knowing. Caroline, for whom failure and rejection have come to feel like a professional norm, figures that rather than withdraw from the questionable project, she'll just tank the pitch meeting: "Why bother quitting when you could fail instead?" And just to keep things complicated, she assents to freeze her eggs for possible future motherhood, as "spiritual atonement for stalking and befriending [her] husband's favorite therapy patient." What could go wrong?
Cantor brings her experience writing for Arrested Development, Dollface, and Inside Amy Schumer to Caroline's often excruciating story: despite the considerable pathos, these conflicts are deeply funny. This protagonist--liable to clog a toilet at the most inopportune moment, frozen by self-loathing, desperate to do the right thing in an industry that's never heard of it--is, against all odds and her own fears, uncomfortably easy to relate to. Like This, But Funnier is winning, awkward, and unforgettable. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: A 30-something woman writing for television comedy in Los Angeles must wrestle with personal and social as well as professional qualms in this discomfiting and hilarious debut.