As Dunham put it to the Hollywood Reporter last month: “When it was leaked how much I was getting for my book, there were 39,000 articles asking, ‘Is she worth it?’ Then it came out what Aziz Ansari was making on his book. Her book covers roughly the same ground as Modern Romance – life advice for twentysomething Americans suffering from ennui in the absence of anything else wrong in their lives – but its initial reception was very different.

The first news of Ansari’s project was announced in late 2013, just after Lena Dunham, the 29-year-old writer and star of HBO’s Girls, collected a reported $3.7m advance for her non-fiction debut, Not That Kind of Girl. The book is therefore grandly billed as an “investigation” into modern romance.īefore we go on, a brief aside. I’m fucking done with my book!!! YEAH!!!”)ĭepressed by Tanya’s failure to reply, Ansari told his tale of woe on stage and had an epiphany: “I could tell that every guy and girl in the audience had had their own Tanya in their phone at one point or another.” So, as you do, he scored a $3.5m (£2.28m) advance from Penguin and hooked up with the sociology professor Eric Klinenberg to research the subject through focus groups and a special internet forum. That money is MINE.” Its final section ends: “Okay, well. The book begins: “Oh shit! Thanks for buying my book. (Ansari does not believe in self-deprecation. In the introduction, he recounts the story of a woman called Tanya who inexplicably never replied to his texts after they spent an enjoyable night snogging in a Hollywood house he had rented from James Earl Jones. One such situation prompted the 31-year-old comedian, who is best known for his role in NBC’s sitcom Parks and Recreation, to write a book on the perils of the modern dating scene. The ones about which you will always wonder if you let something special slip through your grasp. No, the worst encounters are those that seem initially promising and then fizzle out – the contacts who “die inside your phone” or never respond to your text messages. F or Aziz Ansari, the worst romantic dates are not the disastrous ones, the evenings that end in awkward silence or acute embarrassment or childhood anecdotes so boring you decide to make a break for it from the bathroom window.

Aziz ansari book review