Sweetbitter is filled with the kind of characters that make you say "this is painful to read" and "this content is not relatable." It's a coming of age story about a young woman (Tess) who moves to New York with nothing but an English degree and the clothes on her back. With no goals in mind, she becomes a server at a high-end restaurant and you, the reader, get to watch her make mistakes for 356 pages. I don't doubt that it was well-written, but I suffer from second-hand embarrassment and the author seemed to be purposefully exploiting that. Alfred A. Knopf gave Stephanie Danler a sweet sweet six-figure, two-book deal AND a TV show.
Sweetbitter had mostly excellent reviews. I'm just increasingly convinced it also had a mostly excellent marketing team. Those juicy restaurant industry tidbits probably had something to do with it. And just look at that millennial pink minimalist cover! Who wouldn't want to pick that up for the explicit purpose of posting about it on Instagram? And look at all of these articles that have come out about Stephanie Danler, debut author. I'll be curious to see if her second book causes as much of a stir.
The show featured similar levels of intrigue and secondhand embarrassment but with the added bonus of bad acting. But it's renewed for season two, so I guess something is clicking?
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