Exclusive Interview
What To Know
- Rose Dommu’s debut novel Best Woman reimagines My Best Friend’s Wedding with a trans woman protagonist, exploring the complexities of unlikable female leads in romantic comedies.
- Dommu wrote the novel with a cinematic style inspired by classic rom-coms and now envisions a potential film adaptation, though she initially did not plan for it to be adapted.
- She emphasizes the importance of portraying trans characters as imperfect and human.
Author Rose Dommu remixed My Best Friend’s Wedding in her debut novel, Best Woman. Published in 2025 and releasing in paperback this month, the romantic comedy takes inspiration from Julia Roberts‘ problematic protagonist and puts a trans woman, Julia Rosenberg, at the center of the story.
In the video interview above, Dommu tells Swooon that Best Woman is both a “celebration” and “deconstruction” of the 1997 hit starring Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, and Cameron Diaz. She also designed it as a challenge for contemporary readers.
“The idea of an unlikable female protagonist who was kind of the antagonist of her own movie, that was super radical in the ’90s, and unfortunately I think it still kind of is today,” Dommu says of My Best Friend’s Wedding. “We still have a very narrow idea of what kind of women are allowed to be unlikable in stories. That was the big experiment of writing this novel. I wanted to see if you could take a trans woman and give her the same traits as a problematic rom-com protagonist and see if people would still root for her.”
TriStar Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
Spending so much time in main character Julia’s head, it’s hard not to understand how she was able to tell such a big, impulsive lie about her brother in Best Woman‘s opening chapters. It’s a cinematic read, which was also part of Dommu’s design. Does she envision it being adapted on-screen? And does she picture it as a film or a TV series?
“I’m not going to say too much, but I envision it as a film,” Dommu teases. “Stay tuned.”
The cinematic feel was a creative homage to the book’s film inspiration, but a screen adaptation wasn’t top of mind when she was writing and releasing it.
“It’s something that a lot of people have asked me while I was writing it, while it was coming out, since it has come out,” Dommu explains. “I wrote it very cinematically because I was aping the format of a romantic comedy film, and honestly, closer to publish date, I didn’t think I would ever want to turn it into a film myself. Let’s just say my thinking around that has changed.”
Dommu wants the glory days of rom-com films to return. When looking at the current state of the genre, which in 2026 has included films such as One Night Only, You, Me & Tuscany, and Office Romance, she says, “I’m both hesitantly optimistic and also I think it’s a little dire, because while I think rom-coms exist today in a way that they didn’t throughout the 2010s, they don’t have the kind of prestige that they used to.”
“They are mostly relegated to streaming,” she continues. “That is good, because I think it provides a place for these kinds of stories that people still really love and enjoy. But because they are seen as maybe this lesser form of film specifically, they don’t get the kind of budgets and star power as the rom-coms of when I was growing up, like the ’90s and early 2000s. We don’t get Cher in Moonstruck anymore with an Oscar campaign.”
MGM / Courtesy Everett Collection
Perhaps Best Woman will be the next big rom-com film. Until that day comes, if it comes (and Dommu teases it very well could), let’s look back on the complicated leading lady that is Julia in Best Woman.
Julia is the Best Woman in her brother’s Florida wedding. When picking up her dress from a New York City bridal shop, she runs into her unattainable high school crush, Kim Cameron, whom she recently learned is now in the bridal party after the bride had a falling out with her maid of honor. In flashback, viewers learn how Julia and Kim met (in a scene that also reveals that Julia was confidently bisexual before and after her transition) and why Julia is still so enamored with her in the present day.
Later, in a Cheesecake Factory, Julia gets misgendered by a waiter. Kim puts the waiter in his place, but the whole ordeal only makes Julia feel like an unpleasant spectacle. Moments later, to take back some agency, Julia lies about the true depth of her brother’s support of her transition.
It’s a messy, bad decision made on an impulsive whim, and her brother didn’t earn his depiction, but therein lies the drama of this story and the intrigue of a complicated trans protagonist: Even with a supportive family, the experience of transitioning can still be long, exhausting, and difficult, and sometimes you make bad decisions along the way. And the outside world doesn’t make it any easier. Julia makes a bad decision, but it’s a human one.
“The lie, she gets into it because she has actual trauma that’s valid,” Dommu says of her heroine. “She is existing in a transphobic world as a trans person. When that’s your experience, I think it’s very easy to see TERFs around every corner, ’cause they are. But it leads to her weaponizing that trauma against someone that she really shouldn’t, because they do something that she perceives as infantilizing or like a cis[gender] savior, whereas in the past she has been so annoyed by that.
“She’s like, ‘Wait, let me use that for my benefit. Let me use it for evil,’” Dommu jokes. “And she does.”
The writer explains why it was important to paint this character in a complicated light in our current political climate. Like any person, she says, trans people have the right to be messy and to see themselves reflected in imperfect fictional characters. Imperfections showcase human nature.
“It’s really important that we [know], because we are still at the beginning of what trans representation looks like, and especially in our current political climate, not every trans person should have to be perfect to have people care about them,” Dommu says.
Learn more about Best Woman and Dommu’s opinions on the current state of book adaptations on TV and film in the full video interview above.