Romantic Comedy: The bestselling Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick by the author of RODHAM and AMERICAN WIFE

He didn’t put it in these terms, and I’m not even sure if he knew this was what he was saying, but his message was: Act like a guy. It was a message that turned out to be invaluable.

Sometimes, of course, I had the impulse to check my phone during meetings, before remembering that there was an infinitesimal chance that any message from outside could matter to me as much as what was happening in this room.

senselessly, I mumbled, “You can leave the mollusks.”

and wished that being aware of my own ridiculousness could somehow decrease my ridiculousness.

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.

Attraction has to do with so many things besides appearance.”

If you’re our age and single, dating kind of has to be an act of reckless optimism, right? The triumph of hope over experience?”

“For sure our culture is obsessed with how women look, and we’ve all been infected. But at the individual level, people are way freakier than we acknowledge.

and I felt a flare-up of loathing. How and why had Catchphrase been hired? How and why was he so confident?