His Daughter Made His Dating Profile. That Was the Least of It.
Gary Sturgis is forty-six years old, divorced three years, two months and something like nine days, and he only knows the exact number because the divorce was finalised the day before his Costco membership renewed. Life gives you landmarks.
His seventeen-year-old daughter Maddie wrote his dating profile, on the grounds that his own version made him sound like a murderer. Not an interesting murderer either. According to Maddie there are mysterious murderers and handsome murderers and murderers who get six-episode documentaries where women on Facebook say there was just something about his eyes. Gary came across as the kind who owns several tarps. He does not own a tarp. Maddie points out that this is exactly what a man with tarps would say.
Meanwhile his ex-wife Diane has moved on very successfully. She is dating a dentist. Gary’s dentist. Former dentist.
Then Vanessa messages him. Her opening line is you look harmless, which some men would take badly and which Gary finds genuinely thrilling. She is funny, she is fast, and she is comprehensively out of his league. He spends an entire evening unloading a dishwasher one plate at a time so he has an excuse to keep checking his phone.
The date goes well, in the sense that he does not die. He comes close twice, once to an ice cube, which Vanessa describes afterwards as touch and go. She makes him order dessert. She is, by an enormous margin, the most composed person at the table.
And somewhere between the entree and the fourteen-dollar flourless chocolate cake, Gary notices her Adam’s apple.
What follows is not a book about Vanessa. It is a book about the truly heroic amount of time Gary spends inside his own head. He decides to be cool about it, which goes exactly as well as deciding to be cool has ever gone for anybody. He worries about labels. He worries about anatomy. He worries about what his friends will say, what Maddie will say, what Diane will say, and what any of it means about him. He researches. He overthinks. He says several things out loud that he would like back.
The universe, sensing an opportunity, makes it worse. His ex-wife walks into the restaurant forty-three minutes in. It emerges that Vanessa knows absolutely everybody in town. His friends find out, and the group chat becomes a standing committee. There is a Sunday of football at Steve’s house. There is a gala, at which Gary learns that black tie does not mean a black tie. There is a stolen Dyson, a judgmental German Shepherd, a bottle of what somebody insists on calling trans bourbon, and a conversation about Gary’s late father’s underwear that nobody needed.
Through all of it Vanessa is patient, then less patient, then very funny about it, because she has done this before and Gary is not being nearly as subtle as he believes.
The last chapter is called Titties, Adam’s Apples, and Other Things That Don’t Matter, which tells you where this lands. Gary eventually works out the thing that was obvious to everyone else roughly two hundred pages earlier. Sometimes you like somebody. Sometimes they like you back. Everything after that is just logistics.
It is a romantic comedy with a filthy title and a soft centre, and the joke is on Gary from the first page to the last. Around 34,000 words. Adults only, obviously.
Everything after that is just logistics.
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