Drew Barrymore is poised to make her second feature as a director (after 2009’s Whip It) with the adaptation of Liz Tuccillo’s novel How to Be Single. The romantic comedy follows the “love lives and break-ups of a group of New Yorkers over the span of ten years.” Barrymore recently spoke a bit about the project:

“This has a very wide palette that I really really like. I’m so interested in so many different types of people and lifestyles that there is kind of a lovely mosaic, like a little bit for everybody.”

The screenwriting team from He’s Just Not That Into You, Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn, are set to script the film. Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen (who also produced He’s Just Not That Into You) will produce. Hit the jump for more from Barrymore, including why How to Be Single is not really a romantic comedy, and a synopsis of the novel.

In the interview with EW, Barrymore talked about their approach to the film and trying to reach a wider audience than the typical romantic comedy:

“It’s hopefully, in a lot of ways, not a romantic comedy. People have this weird stigma [with] that word — it’s a turnoff to guys or whatever. But I think we’ve honed in on a style that will be more universal, a little bit ageless and not gender specific.”

She also addresses the film’s similarity to He’s Just Not That Into, saying this isn’t necessarily a direct follow up, but the two are “cousin movies.” Barrymore explained that “they’re not carbon copies or sequels of each other but they have a connection.” The actress/director/producer hopes to start shooting the film this summer in New York.

Here’s the synopsis for How to Be Single:

The sassy coauthor of He’s Just Not That into You and former executive story editor for Sex and the City stays on familiar ground for her energetic fiction debut. It follows the dating lives of five single New York women, one of whom, narrator Julie, is writing a book about how bachelorettes across the world manage. A Yahoo-sponsored trip sent Tuccillo traveling the world interviewing women in preparation for her novel; Julie embarks on a similar journey while her four friends duke it out on the New York dating scene. The subsequent stories of courtship, marriage and romantic expectations from Julie’s travels are revealing and compelling, but the narrator’s interviews quickly give way to her own international affair. The friends back home engage in familiar behavior: the postdivorce fling, the forbidden workplace romance, the comfortable but boring relationship and the quirky pet as substitute-boyfriend [Amazon].