That's a quality that might make her a lovely person to spend time with (she's worth finding on Twitter, where her posts are forthright and funny) but is cloying on the page.
By resisting the bossy tug of plot, Gowdy finds plenty of time to notice those unimportant-to-the-world details that make her writing so lovely.
The hyperextended knees that are part of what makes Copeland's lines so lovely also make her more vulnerable to certain kinds of injury, just as the pointe shoes that foster the illusion of a ballerina's length also damage her feet.
I keep trying to make her smile because she looks lovely when she smiles, but it is uphill work: she seems to think it is her duty to be serious.
And next she's at her magazine job, then down the pub with her mates, talking about the the US road trip she's going to make with her lovely husband, who is also there.
And the choreography makes her look more than lovely.
Writer-director Nicole Holofcener served her apprenticeship as an editor on Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters before making her mark with the lovely and insightful feature debut Walking and Talking.
When Helo Pinheiro, "tall and tan and young and lovely", made her way through an artsy neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro on her daily walk to the beach, she was the unwitting muse for a song that has become symbolic of an entire musical genre, bossa nova.
She dares even more when she visits his bedroom, delightedly discovering that sex is "the most natural and lovely thing," making her feel as if "I'd been only half awake all my life, only half alive".
But she's not keen to leave her simple, idyllic life in the Hebrides, running and swimming and making biscuits with her lovely hunky husband and daughter.
