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NEW
YORK—A few years ago, when the jaunty advice manual
He’s Just Not That Into You reached its zenith,
coauthors Liz Tuccillo and Greg Behrendt—both writers
for HBO’s Sex and the City—scored best-selling
ubiquity and couch time with Oprah by espousing a
refreshingly pithy empowerment: If a guy is into you,
he’ll make the effort. If he doesn’t, move on. No
womanly excuse-mongering.
Soon
after, the whole singles-industrial complex came
calling—Could she do a TV segment on assembling just the
right outfit for a first date? An article about shopping
for Valentine’s Day?—and an inadvertent career in
relationship punditry was almost born.
 That
didn’t sit well with at least one of the would-be
pundits.
“I’m not
that girl,” Tuccillo said over a late Sunday brunch. “I
don’t know how to dress for a date. I don’t like
Valentine’s Day. There was this moment when I could have
been positioned to be this dating expert, and it was the
last thing I wanted to be. I’m so proud of [He’s Just
Not That Into You], but I didn’t need that next step
of being, you know, an expert.”
So
instead, Tuccillo hopped on a plane, started taking
notes, and came up with a novel, How to Be Single.
At its
center frets Julie Jensen, a late 30s Manhattan
publicist whose life’s work is to promote titles such as
The Clock Is Ticking! How to Meet and Marry the Man
of Your Dreams in Ten Days.
Unhappily unhitched and unimpressed with her career
trajectory, Jensen opts for major life surgery after a
night out with the gals ends up ignobly in the emergency
room. Curious to see if her international cohorts are
faring any better, Jensen embarks on a global
fact-finding mission about singledom. Set in Iceland,
India, Brazil, Beijing, Bali, Rio de Janeiro, Paris,
Australia and Rome and intercut with scenes of
relationship free-falls back in the US, How to Be
Single seeks to fashion a beach-read-cum-travelogue.
A
Brooklyn native with roots in Iowa, Tuccillo, then a
playwright bereft of television credits, landed at HBO
in late 2001 after a friend’s exquisitely timely
introduction to Sex and the City show runner
Michael Patrick King (the following day, one of his
writers quit). The self-help tome that sprung from the
show’s loins, meanwhile, keeps on giving. The film
version of He’s Just Not That Into You, a
romantic comedy starring Gennifer Goodwin, Jennifer
Connelly, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore and Ben
Affleck, among others, is scheduled for a fall release.
“I can’t
be cranky anymore,” Tuccillo confessed. “I want to say
things never fall into my lap, but I kind of can’t say
that anymore. All the bad luck I’ve had for all these
years, I think this is a break. This is the good run.”
But why
continue to dwell on singlehood? Tuccillo lingered over
her mineral water a long moment. As the last writer on
board, she said, Sex and the City ended a year
too soon. “I felt like I had one more, one last thing to
get off my chest about being single. It felt almost like
a continuation of that experience,” Tuccillo said. “My
friend who read the book recently said, ‘You’ve compiled
the comprehensive book on being single. Check it off
your list; now you’re ready for the next phase of your
life.’”
Tuccillo
already has lined up several projects. At the moment,
she’s collaborating with Italian director Gabriele
Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness) on a film
about divorce, as well as a series for Italian TV
revolving around Italian men married to American women.
She’s also penned a feature of her own, which she hopes
to direct this year, a drama about tragedy among three
friends. “It’s the darkest thing I’ve ever written,” she
says. “People were laughing at me, ‘This is the same
woman who wrote for Sex and the City?’
“I think
I’m just like most writers, affected by circumstances.
It feels like a very serious time, and that’s reflected
in what I want to write about now.”
Tuccillo
originally conceived of the project as a nonfiction
work, based on jet-setting interviews intermittently
conducted over a year-and-a-half on Yahoo’s tab—early
on, the book was to pull double duty as a Web series
only didn’t because “everything changes every two
seconds with online media,” Tuccillo said. Even now,
How to Be Single reads like the thinly veiled
research project it is. “I did not sleep with anyone in
Brazil, if that’s the question,” Tuccillo said, cagily
adding, “I have a soft spot in my heart for French men,
and I love Italian men. And Australian men really did
make me feel bad. I came back from Australia a broken
woman.”
But it
only took one abortive attempt at the truth—too dry, too
many cross-cultural pitfalls—to persuade her to start
fictionalizing. Even in sidestepping reality, though,
Tuccillo found herself wanting to retread some self-help
ground. How to Be Single incorporates a sort of
prescriptive element as the author’s alter ego demands
answers from one representative demographic after
another. The lessons, however, owe more to new
perspectives than facts.
“Nobody
grabs self-help books like they do in America. Maybe in
England they do a little. And maybe Australia. Nowhere
else are people talking about ‘I just read this book
that tells me I have to do X, Y or Z,’” she said.
In
Chapter 2, amid the emergency room hoopla, Tuccillo’s
Jensen declares herself “frankly tired with America.”
No, it’s not a dig at the Bush administration, and in
talking to Tuccillo it appears that writing How to Be
Single left its author with an almost maternal
concern for her fellow countrywomen, subjected to a
particularly emphatic mantra of relationship,
relationship, relationship.
“My
nature wants to make fun of the idea that the answer to
everything is we have a lack of self-esteem so
everything can be solved by loving yourself. They’ve
become trite and empty words. I’ve been in therapy a
really long time and still I come back to, ‘Really,
that’s still the issue, I don’t love myself enough?’”
she said. “That’s so boring, I’m such a cliché.
“But
then, traveling around the world I saw that all women,
and single women particularly, do so much better in the
cultures where there’s this ingrained message of loving
yourself just the way you are.” Tuccillo repeatedly
cites Iceland as an exemplar, with its lingering Viking
ethos, a culture predicated on men at sea while fiercely
independent women held the frigid home front together.
Tuccillo’s drawn to a fundamentally forgiving mentality.
“Women,
particularly American women, have all these messages
telling them they’re not good enough. You do have to
love yourself almost as an act of defiance, as a
rebellion. Not a ‘bubble bath’ kind of loving yourself.”
While
the dinner, drinks and view of the Manhattan skyline at
the book’s conclusion might ring out with the emotional
resolution of a Sex and the City episode, in a Greenwich
Village café, as in real life, it’s an open-ended story.
“I’m ready to not be single,” the 45-year-old said by
phone a few days later. In a new relationship, she
remains amenable but ambivalent on the subject of
family. “I’m at the age where....How can I make it not
sound dark?” She paused with a laugh. “I mainly want a
partner to have a partner. That’s always been the most
important thing. I’d love to meet someone soon enough
that adoption’s an option.”
For the
moment, though, there’s still a book about the
relationship question to promote, which tends to bring
out the comedy writer within. “Somehow being on Sex
and the City was a curse for practically all the
women on the show,” she said. “It’s like fate wanted us
to stay single so we’d have material.” |
