From 'Sex' to the single world
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 Tuccillo 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 United States, "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 sprang from the show's loins, meanwhile, keeps on giving. The film version of "He's Just Not That Into You," a romantic comedy starring Ginnifer 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 she feels, "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 originally conceived of the project as a nonfiction work, based on jet-setting interviews intermittently conducted over a year and half on
"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."
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 cafe, 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." 