Review: "Sizzle Reel" by Carlyn Greenwald

Sizzle Reel by Carlyn Greenwald
Published April 2023 via Vintage
★★★

Things aren't quite going Luna's way: she's an assistant in a dead-end job rather than a rising star in the cinematography world, she's just barely come out to herself as bi and can't imagine coming out more broadly, and to add insult to injury she's convinced that she's the only virgin left in the world. Enter Valeria, one of Hollywood's new It girls...who happens to have a new project, and who is also tripping Luna's fledgling sense of gaydar.

Val is a highlight of the book—confident and funny and thoughtful. She's good at what she does, and she knows that she's good at what she does, but she's not precious about it. I also love that although there's a love triangle in the book, between Luna and Val and Luna's friend Romy, there's no bad guy here. So many love triangles in books end in "but actually, the wrong person is a terrible person!" which always feels to me like an unrealistic cop-out. And it's genuinely interesting to see Luna frame the world through the lens of a cinematographer: she looks at a moment and imagines it as a scene in a film, thinking about what she'd do with light and camera angles and focus.

In a lot of ways I think Sizzle Reel works best if you read it as being set not in the present day but a decade or so back. In the present day, we have Luna, who 1) is a raised-in-Cali liberal, 2) went to film school, again in California, 3) works in Hollywood, and 4) has a network of queer friends, including 5) her best friend and roommate, with whom she is used to discussing sex and romance. And in that context, I found it surprising that she has so little idea of how two women (or otherwise people without a certain piece of anatomy—they say "sapphics" a lot, perhaps to account for Romy being nonbinary) can have sex. It's more than ignorance, though; it's a real resistance to the numerous people who tell Luna throughout the book that there are more ways to have sex than Tab A into Slot B.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with being a twenty-something (or older!) in 2023 still trying to figure it out. (A man once told me that it wasn't sex if there wasn't the possibility of someone getting pregnant, which is wrong on so many levels that I still can't even begin to sort them out. I asked what that meant about the multiple years I had spent in a live-in relationship with another woman, and he concluded that sex had not been possible. That was in 2019, so I think it's safe to say that more education is needed.) But...it felt like so much of Sizzle Reel keeps circling back to "Okay, now I've done this and this and this and this and this, but none of that counts because it wasn't Tab A into Slot B, and I'm so inexperienced!"

So I'm left with something that is interesting but frustrating. Again, maybe best read as though it takes place a decade earlier, or as though the characters are—in a non-creepy, of-age-to-consent, smaller-age-gap-than-exists-in-the-book way—rather younger.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.