Nick Hornby is one of my writing idols. His way of combining pop sensibilities with serious emotions, humor, and great characters has always spoken to me and inspired me to become a better writer. So I almost felt like I had made it up myself when I read that his newest book, Funny Girl, was about a British woman in the 1960s who happens to be both beautiful and funny, who also happens to land on a groundbreaking television comedy. I wrote a book kind-of like that, except it was the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, and it was real, and the woman’s name was Mary Tyler Moore.
If you have any interest at all in The Mary Tyler Moore Show — and I suspect at least some of you found me because you do — you should definitely check out Funny Girl. My book, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, focuses a bit more on the female writers and the feminist movement than this one does. But it’s easy to see Funny Girl almost as a prequel, documenting a fictional history mixed in with some real history; the book does mention the influence of Til Death Us Do Part, for instance, which was the precursor to the massive U.S. hit All in the Family. It also documents the difficulties of being an ambitious, independent woman at the time. I even suspect that the heroine, Sophie Straw, is modeled loosely on Moore; Sophie rises to fame as the wife in a domestic comedy, like Moore did on The Dick Van Dyke Show, though Sophie gets first billing in the humorously punctuated Barbara (and Jim). Her follow-up show includes a female co-writer and features Sophie as a single woman, though her show sounds fluffier than The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
In any case, if you love Mary, you’ll love Sophie.