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A Novel
by Hallie Cantor
Book Reviewed by:For fans of Dolly Alderton and HBO's Hacks, a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about faking it (and "making it") as a writer in Hollywood.
TV writer Caroline Neumann is thirty-four and mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist husband, thinks it's time for her to press pause on her career ambitions and focus on getting pregnant, despite Caroline's serious ambivalence about having children.
When Caroline accidentally stumbles on Harry's patient session notes and offhandedly mentions what she finds in a meeting with a producer, the momentum of Hollywood takes over. Before she knows it—and unbeknownst to Harry—Caroline finds herself pitching a TV show about the deepest, darkest secrets of her husband's favorite patient, a woman known to Caroline only as the Teacher.
Amid the indignities of the Hollywood development process, Caroline must balance her burning desire for professional validation against her own morality and the health of her marriage. And when Caroline forms a real-life relationship with Teacher herself, the lines between art and life begin to blur further, shaking up Caroline's understanding of what it means to be the "likeable female protagonist" of her own life.
Like Jane, the fictional teacher she's writing about, Caroline keeps digging herself deeper into a guilt-ridden hole, unable to stop and unable to tell anyone the truth about what she's doing—especially Harry. Fittingly, there are sections of this book that are legitimately tense and gripping, thriller-like in their execution. While the book is a page-turner, it never becomes actually creepy, and Cantor never lets Caroline indulge in truly absurd or surprising behavior—every time she starts to do something that might take the plot in a genuinely dramatic direction, she pulls back into reality; or else Cantor gets her out of the situation safely before being confronted with any consequences. This, I think, is what limits the book. Cantor draws explicit parallels between Caroline's situation and Jane's, but where Jane's narrative becomes melodramatic pablum, Caroline's is confined to the "vague longing" and ambivalence and internal ruminating of realist novels...continued
Full Review
(900 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
Amy Schumer
Hallie is one of the funniest, most original voices I've ever encountered, and this book gripped me page one through the end.
Hallie Cantor's novel, Like This, But Funnier, is about a TV writer who, in 2023, is stalled in her career and hasn't been able to find steady work—a situation that makes her feel ashamed and financially anxious. In a letter to the reader at the beginning of the book, Cantor is up front that this is based on her own life: "I felt like a massive failure. I hadn't had a staff job in years." What she couldn't see, because she was so mired in her own personal anxiety, was that the entertainment industry was "teetering on an inflection point prior to the 2023 writers' strike." At the end of the novel, Caroline, Cantor's protagonist, hears murmurings of a writers' strike about to happen, and everyone she knows starts "comparing notes on...
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