I thought the title might be an interesting metaphor or dichotomy. Nope, the book is as dull and literal as the title. May as well have called it “Writers Who Date Each Other” since we’re already going for complete lack of subtlety. Or maybe just “First World Problems and the White People Who Overcome Them” since the only message is be a pretty white woman and then life will just hand you everything you want, as long as you date your quota of mopey sad white boys first.

I really, really tried but could not connect at all to the characters or story. Casey’s problems are never real problems - this has to be a very privileged person’s idea of “adversity”. I cannot relate at all to such a passive protagonist - she barely makes any choices at all, just whines for 300 pages until things work themselves out. It’s so, so hard to root for a protagonist that just lets life happen to them, not taking any responsibility for their own life. The story plays out like hearing mediocre secondhand gossip from a friend. You listen with polite detachment about this angsty artsy loser girl who dates angsty artsy loser boys and it just functions to make you feel better about your own life. Her life sucks, until it doesn't, which is great for her I guess. She does nothing but mope and yet every man she meets asks her out and she gets her dream job and dream apartment delivered on a silver platter, just in the nick of time. This reads like an upper middle-class white millennial woman wish fulfillment fantasy. Just steeping in white privilege and wallowing in self indulgence. (But what did I expect from a writer choosing to write about how hard it is to be a writer? That’s already a deeply self indulgent exercise by definition.)

Casey is also oddly judgmental for someone so bland. She makes zero decisions of her own - a true snob and hypocrite. She judges her friends for giving up writing ("getting over it like the flu" as she says) but can barely get out a few pages at a time herself and hasn’t finished her novel in over 6 years, while also being broke and drowning in debt. Not much of a high horse there. More like a stunted Shetland pony. She turns her nose up at the writing events Muriel tries to bring her to but doesn't seek out any writing communities of her own. She makes fun of the overly flowery and poetic language her various love interests use while being equally pretentious herself, saying things like “I write because if I don’t everything feels worse”. She judges her love interests for being jealous while dating two different guys at the same time. But of course, everything still falls into place for HER - perfect health, the perfect guy, the perfect job, the perfect book deal, all for next to no effort at all.

Now sometimes I can excuse a terrible (read: basically non-existent) story if the writing is truly amazing/compelling, but the writing is equally bad if not worse than the story. The first hundred or so pages were torturously slow with random irrelevant info drops every so often that never pop up again. Who even is Paco and why is he never mentioned again? Why do we need to live through the mundane shifts of a restaurant waitress, including what customers she gets, what they order, where they sit, how hot the utensils are? Why do we need flashbacks of her equally boring bookshop job? Why does her cringey affair with Luke (“you taste like the moon”) take up so much of the first few chapters when she’s completely over it by page 50? Why did we need to know about the size of her brother’s childhood poops? What could these things possibly add?? And yet, the most important thing - her writing her novel - is glossed over completely! We have no idea when/what she writes, what her process is, how she even finishes it. It just chugs along in the background like an ambient decoration until it arrives at the book’s climax fully formed.

Reading this book actively took joy from my life, and if I didn’t have to finish it for book club I would’ve DNFed almost immediately. This is like the self insert Wattpad fanfiction you write for yourself in a depression haze at 3am on the eve of your 30th birthday to reassure yourself that things can still work out for you (Casey is 31 when she gets everything she ever dreamed of) and never share with another living soul.