The Ex Talk

The fake-relationship canon closes its file with the desk's favourite variation in the whole catalogue, and the variation is this: the couple fakes the breakup instead. The Ex Talk is Rachel Lynn Solomon's public-radio romcom about two colleagues who have never dated pretending to be exes, on air, weekly, with chemistry the microphones keep committing to tape, and the desk shelves it last in the canon deliberately, because it runs the trope's oldest machinery through its most modern venue and, in doing so, says the quiet part about every fake relationship on the list: the performance was always the intimacy. The rest was paperwork.

Shay Goldstein has given ten loyal years to a Seattle public radio station, produced everyone else's shows, and quietly inherited her love of the medium from a father whose absence the book carries with real tenderness; radio, for Shay, is the sound of being raised, and the station is the last room her father is still somehow in. Dominic Yun is the newsroom's new hire, five years younger, one journalism degree shinier, and precisely as certain of his own rigour as Shay is tired of hearing about it. When budget panic births a ratings pitch (two exes co-host a relationship show, dissecting their failed romance for the audience's benefit), the station loves everything about it except the fact that no such exes exist. So management invents them. Shay and Dominic, hostile colleagues, are assigned a shared romantic history, briefed on their own fictional breakup, and sent live. The show is a hit. The chemistry is not fictional. And every episode deepens both the connection and the lie it is built on, in an industry whose entire currency is authenticity.

What the desk admires is Solomon's honesty about the cost. The premise is a fraud perpetrated on listeners, the book treats it as exactly that, its leads included, and spends its final act collecting the debt properly rather than waving it off — the unravelling, which the desk keeps folded, is public, painful, and earns the repair that follows. Underneath, the grief thread and the workplace politics of being a woman who trained the men promoted past her give the comedy real load.

Honest notices: content guidance for parental loss and panic attacks, gently held; the radio detail is affectionate and specific. Heat is warm, modern, and candid.

Who is this for? Fake-anything completists, public-radio loyalists, and everyone who has performed a version of themselves so well it came true. Sign off warmly. The desk always does, and this file is now, fittingly, complete.