Latest news with #ShowDon'tTell
CBC
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Curtis Sittenfeld explores power of female friendship in middle age in latest story collection
Social Sharing American writer Curtis Sittenfeld's latest short story collection Show Don't Tell reflects the messiness of modern life and the complexity of human desire and emotion. From a woman looking back at rude characters from her MFA, years earlier, to another visiting friends she hasn't seen since her divorce, the collection examines the trials and triumphs of middle age with Sittenfeld's signature wit and humour. "[ Show Don't Tell ] is a celebration of middle-aged friendship and friends that you've known for many decades or people that you were very close to in your teens or 20s and then you're still thinking about experiences you had with them when you're in your 50s," said Sittenfeld on Bookends with Mattea Roach. Sittenfeld is the writer of novels including Rodham, Prep and Romantic Comedy and the short story collection You Think It, I'll Say It. She is based in Minneapolis. On Bookends, she joined Roach to discuss the power of female friendship in middle age — and how time can warp the things we've done. In Show Don't Tell, there's this through line of close female friendship in midlife. Can you talk a bit about how you came to a point where you wanted to write about this? Certainly in my own life, my friendships are incredibly important to me. The friend that I walk with almost every Saturday morning and then the friend that I walk with on Sunday morning, that's more like on a monthly basis. But in both cases, it's like pouring out our souls. One of them, we walk for an hour and a half and then we stand in front of her house because we're not finished covering it all. I have kids. I have an older mother. A lot of people I know also have kids. They also have aging parents. People's marriages are not always stable through their 40s or before or after that. So there's just like all kinds of life challenges that come up. And I do think, I mean, this is such a sort of obvious thing to say, but such a true thing, having people to confide in and talk through your experiences can really make you feel so much better, even if the external experience doesn't change. Having people to confide in and talk through your experiences can really make you feel so much better, even if the external experience doesn't change. Why did you want to explore marriages that are breaking down and marriages that are facing a significant challenge in many of your stories? In a larger sense, this is my second story collection and I sometimes think, had my story collections come out when I was in my 20s, I would have written stories that were more different from each other for the sake of being different from each other almost to prove to the world that I could. In Show Don't Tell, these stories are very much about being middle-aged, being American, Midwestern, with mostly female protagonists. Slightly making fun of my own book, I say it's mostly about grouchy, liberal Midwestern women. And so I do think that I'm kind of approaching similar characters from slightly different angles. All writers have their own preoccupations. And I do think a certain kind of intimacy and marriage and family life and relationships is one of my preoccupations. Some of these stories feature characters who are reflecting on experiences in their late teens or early 20s, but they're doing so from middle age. How does it feel to dive back into that period of time from the perspective of somebody who's in their 40s? I feel like the passage of time is the ultimate plot twist. If you see a person and you haven't seen them for like 20 or 30 years, it's wild and fascinating, even if they have not done that much that's like objectively interesting — I mean, of course everyone's lives are interesting in their own way — but but a person can barely have left their house for 30 years and it's still like, "Oh my God, they're 30 years older and they barely left their house." That's its own story. That's part of it. It's interesting to gain life experience or to go through moments of cultural shift and the meaning of a moment in our own memory changes. I'm fascinated by the fact that we can have an experience or like an interaction with another person and nothing about that changes. In a way, it's frozen in time and again, 10 or 20 or 30 years passes and our interpretation of that experience or that interaction can completely change. It can be that we were very resentful of the other person and then we realized, "Oh no, I was in the wrong." Or, I felt like I was so rude, but that person was actually being incredibly sexist or whatever. It's interesting to gain life experience or to go through moments of cultural shift and the meaning of a moment in our own memory changes. In Show Don't Tell, there's a sense that there's a lot of opportunity and self-assuredness that can come with middle age. Is that something that you were trying to put across at all in this collection? I absolutely feel that way. I don't know if I was trying to put it across or if it just came through in terms of my trying to depict a kind of reality that I see, which is like, I think that that middle age can be very painful. Life will have its way with you no matter who you are. And it can be really beautiful. You can have these really close friendships, you can learn from your earlier mistakes. You can have these experiences as a parent that are so frustrating and then so deeply touching. You can contextualize that the good stuff should be savoured and you hope the bad stuff will pass. It might or might not pass. There are dark and light elements of the collection, but I see middle age as a really wonderful time, not a depressing time.
New York Times
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Curtis Sittenfeld Has a Question: ‘Isn't It So Weird to Be a Person?'
There really was a woman who photocopied her butt at a workplace in the 1980s. Curtis Sittenfeld, 49, heard about the incident when she was a girl and filed it away. Four decades later, the Great Butt Xeroxing makes an appearance in her new short story collection, 'Show Don't Tell.' She mentioned it one day last week when she met up with her oldest childhood friend, Anne Morriss, in Cincinnati, where they had both grown up. Ms. Sittenfeld, who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters, was back in town while on tour for her latest book. Ms. Morriss, a leadership coach in Boston, was there to celebrate her mother's 83rd birthday. 'It happened in my mother's real estate office,' Ms. Morriss said. 'I remember processing it with you. And you had questions!' 'It's all I think about,' Ms. Sittenfeld replied. Why did she do it? The mysteries of human behavior, along with the mortification that often follows an ill-considered act or remark, are of special interest to Ms. Sittenfeld, who made her name 20 years ago with her debut novel, 'Prep.' She's the patron saint of women who wish the floor would open and swallow them whole. 'People will have very different reactions to my writing,' she said. 'People will be like, 'I felt so frustrated by this character — they were so neurotic or cringey, and I wanted to reach into the story and shake their shoulders.' Or people will be like, 'I felt like you were inside my brain.'' The two friends lined up behind a gaggle of schoolgirls at Graeter's Ice Cream, a local favorite. They ordered cups of mocha chip (for Ms. Sittenfeld) and chocolate chip (for Ms. Morriss) and strolled to a park, taking advantage of the unseasonably warm day. They sat on a bench and watched a group of middle-school-age girls in Uggs and leggings who were making a video of themselves doing a TikTok dance. The girls ran to their phones to watch the recording, deleted it, and did the dance again. Ms. Sittenfeld, who was wearing New Balance sneakers and a blue heathered sweater, and Ms. Morriss, with her Hillary Clinton bob and silk scarf, didn't look like they had inspired the haughty queen-bee characters in 'Prep.' But Ms. Morriss insisted they had been 'mean girls' back in middle school. 'Were we mean girls?' Ms. Sittenfeld said. 'Obviously, I am a little defensive, but in middle school I would say that we were popular more than mean.' Then she pondered her statement, as though cross-examining her own recollections. 'Actually,' she continued, 'I'm sure we were mean. I unearthed some diaries recently. I read them to my own children, and one of my kids was like, 'You should write an essay called 'Diary of a Bitchy Kid.'' Cracking open another childhood trauma, Ms. Sittenfeld recalled a time in eighth grade when she and Ms. Morriss had stopped being friends for a while. The split occurred during what Ms. Sittenfeld described as her own 'social downfall.' It came about because she had committed the faux pas of skipping a friend's slumber party. After that, she found herself exiled from her usual peer group and sitting with the student council boys at lunch. She eventually felt so isolated that she ended up leaving the Midwest for the Groton School, an elite boarding academy in Massachusetts that provided her with material for 'Prep.' 'You were curious about the world in a way that the rest of us weren't,' Ms. Morriss said. Ms. Sittenfeld took a moment to consider this. 'Let's be honest,' she said. 'I do not think that I seemed brilliant as a child — and frankly, it's not like I think I seem brilliant now. Sometimes I'll encounter writers and they're so smart, and they've read everything there is, and it's almost like they have an inaccessible intelligence. I would not say that I have an inaccessible intelligence.' 'The Messiness of Life' In 'Prep,' Ms. Sittenfeld focused on a girl who pinballs between a hunger to be noticed and a desire to disappear. In the eight books she has published since, she has mined the terrain of female self-consciousness and status anxiety across all life stages. In 'Show Don't Tell,' the story that opens her new collection, she examines the unspoken rivalry between a pair of students, a woman and a man, at a top graduate writing program. When they meet up at a hotel bar nearly 20 years later, the woman is the author of five best-sellers and the man is the winner of prestigious literary prizes. 'He's the kind of writer, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions,' Ms. Sittenfeld writes. 'I'm the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery.' But here's the thing about American women recovering from knee surgery: They are shaping the country's political, social and cultural debates. Pundits want to know why a majority of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. Documentaries tell cautionary tales of affluent women who fall down social media rabbit holes leading to wellness influencers promoting dubious health regimens. Ms. Sittenfeld chronicles this demographic from within, not as an impartial observer. 'I'm not an ornithologist — I'm a bird,' she said, quoting Saul Bellow. And she isn't bothered by fancy male critics who might be inclined to dismiss the people and subject matter at the heart of her work. 'If I have an opinion, I should write a 1,000-word essay,' she said. 'If I want to explore the messiness of life, I should write fiction.' For years her books have captured the concerns of a group that has lately become a cultural fixation, middle-aged women who wake up one day and realize their lives aren't exactly what they'd planned. After reading 'All Fours' by Miranda July or watching Halina Reijn's 'Babygirl,' some are having frank conversations about sex and marriage; others are simply spiraling. Ms. Sittenfeld's heroines seem to want more than they should while bumping up against the limiting forces of age or wilted ambition. She has explored such women in best-sellers and two works selected for Reese Witherspoon's book club. Hollywood executives who optioned her books have suggested casting stars like Anne Hathaway and Naomi Watts. Her two teenage daughters have made it clear that they're not particularly impressed by her career. 'They see me as kind of ridiculous,' Ms. Sittenfeld said. 'My 15-year-old will sometimes be like, 'I can't believe you write books, you seem so apart from the world.' It helps that she lives in Minneapolis, where her husband teaches media studies, and which feels so distant from the hothouse worlds of Brooklyn and Hollywood. 'Sometimes in interviews people will say to me, 'Do you feel a lot of pressure in writing your next book?' And I'll think, Who would I feel pressure from?' Ms. Sittenfeld said. 'Nobody cares what I'm doing.' Still, the older Ms. Sittenfeld gets, the clearer she feels about what she wants to do in her work. 'Are you watching 'Somebody Somewhere'?' she asked Ms. Morriss, referring to the HBO show starring Bridget Everett as a woman who returns to her hometown in Kansas. There's a moment in the show, Ms. Sittenfeld recalled, in which the main character and her petite sister are talking about 'the pencil test.' 'You put a pencil under your breast, and if it falls out it means you have perky breasts,' Ms. Sittenfeld said. 'Then Bridget Everett's character takes a big salad dressing bottle and wedges it under her enormous boobs. That is the tone of the storytelling I want to do. It's not the person with the pencil falling out, but the person with the salad dressing bottle staying under her boobs.' She added, 'Isn't it so weird and undignified to be a person?' 'So Authentic' Shortly before 6 p.m., Ms. Sittenfeld stepped into the Mercantile Library, where she was scheduled to give a talk. The library's executive director, John Faherty, greeted her with some praise for her new book, while noting that its depictions of marriage were a bit dark. 'I was going to call you up and say, 'Are you OK?'' he said. 'That's not a blurb for the paperback,' Ms. Sittenfeld replied. She and Mr. Faherty had become close through various book talks at her hometown library over the years. 'I did an event here in 2016 for 'Eligible,'' she said, referring to her modern-day retelling of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice," which she set in Cincinnati. 'John got everyone Skyline chili.' 'I was told you can do gender reveal parties at Skyline now,' she added, referring to the restaurant chain. 'Do they say 'boy' with a hot dog?' Mr. Faherty asked. 'I'm afraid to ask what's for a girl.' 'The absence of a hot dog?' Ms. Sittenfeld said with a laugh. She grabbed her phone and opened a text from her 15-year-old daughter. 'We watch 'Severance' as a family and she was like, 'Can I watch it by myself?'' Ms. Sittenfeld said. 'Say no and she'll watch it anyway,' Mr. Faherty suggested. The thrum of voices was getting louder as the crowd assembled. Ms. Sittenfeld swapped her normal New Balance sneakers for what she called her 'fancy sneakers,' which were almost identical but with blue floral decals. She went to the bathroom to apply makeup — 'just a little foundation,' she said. In the main room, Ms. Sittenfeld and Mr. Faherty sat perched in front of some 225 people, an audience that included Ms. Sittenfeld's 77-year-old mother. Ms. Sittenfeld described the sorts of questions that come up in her new book: If you eat a cup of sauerkraut with a dollop of Thousand Island dressing for lunch every day and your spouse finds that disgusting, is it his fault or yours? The audience tittered. An older woman in a lilac sweater buried her face in her hands, giggling. When Mr. Faherty seemed on the verge of giving away a plot point, a spoiler-averse audience member shouted, 'We haven't read the book yet!' In the front row, someone knocked over a cup of wine and then got on her hands and knees to mop it up. When Ms. Sittenfeld wrapped up her talk, readers rushed forward to ask for selfies and autographs. In Ms. Sittenfeld's books, her characters realize over and over again that there is no escaping the embarrassment of being alive; there's only finding somebody who will respond tenderly or, at least, with a good-natured laugh. The ache of that recognition filled the room. Readers toted copies of 'Prep' and 'American Wife' that looked as if they'd been through the washing machine. One declared she had driven three hours to get there; another boasted of a book club made up of Ms. Sittenfeld's devoted fans. Ms. Sittenfeld's third grade teacher, Bobbie Kuhn, sitting in the second row, said of her former student: 'She's just as authentic as she was.' It's the type of compliment Ms. Sittenfeld is used to receiving. 'People will be like, 'You're so authentic,' which probably means you're saying something wrong,' she said, laughing. 'It's like somebody saying you're brave. You're kind of like — oh no!'
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Book Review: Curtis Sittenfeld delivers tender, thought-provoking stories in 'Show Don't Tell'
With a wink to every writing teacher's favorite adage, Curtis Sittenfeld's 'Show Don't Tell' delivers a dozen short stories that will make you think, smile, and often nod your head in agreement. Featuring mostly middle-aged characters from the middle of the country, it's an assortment of stories focused on people either looking back and reconsidering formative moments in their lives, or in situations that force them to challenge their long-held beliefs. My favorite of the bunch was 'Creative Differences,' an 18-page gem about a photographer in Wichita, Kansas, who got Internet famous for a couple photo series she did and is now being interviewed by a freelance production crew on behalf of a conglomerate that sells a 72-year-old toothpaste. When she refuses to be filmed actually brushing her teeth, the story sets up a standoff between the corporate sponsor that flew a dozen people from the coasts to Wichita and our hero, Melissa, who tells them: 'All you care about is getting me to do whatever you've already decided I should do on camera.' 'Creative Differences,' and the other 11 stories in the collection, are heavy on inner monologues. Sittenfeld has a knack for getting inside her characters' heads and really articulating what makes them tick. Here's the narrator of 'Lost But Not Forgotten' thinking back on her failed marriage at her prep school's 30th anniversary: 'In a way, to describe that marriage is like describing having gone to boarding school. Is there an infinite amount to share, or does a sentence or two suffice? I guess it depends who you're telling the story to.' Sittenfeld fans will recognize the narrator as Lee Fiora, star of her 2005 novel 'Prep.' There are many other stories in the collection about friends connecting after a long time apart, with characters questioning their behavior from years ago or pondering what constitutes 'an enviable life.' It's thought-provoking stuff, delivered in short stories that are perfect for readers of a certain age, just before they turn off their bedside table lamp. ___ AP book reviews: Rob Merrill, The Associated Press
Associated Press
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Book Review: Curtis Sittenfeld delivers tender, thought-provoking stories in 'Show Don't Tell'
With a wink to every writing teacher's favorite adage, Curtis Sittenfeld's 'Show Don't Tell' delivers a dozen short stories that will make you think, smile, and often nod your head in agreement. Featuring mostly middle-aged characters from the middle of the country, it's an assortment of stories focused on people either looking back and reconsidering formative moments in their lives, or in situations that force them to challenge their long-held beliefs. My favorite of the bunch was 'Creative Differences,' an 18-page gem about a photographer in Wichita, Kansas, who got Internet famous for a couple photo series she did and is now being interviewed by a freelance production crew on behalf of a conglomerate that sells a 72-year-old toothpaste. When she refuses to be filmed actually brushing her teeth, the story sets up a standoff between the corporate sponsor that flew a dozen people from the coasts to Wichita and our hero, Melissa, who tells them: 'All you care about is getting me to do whatever you've already decided I should do on camera.' 'Creative Differences,' and the other 11 stories in the collection, are heavy on inner monologues. Sittenfeld has a knack for getting inside her characters' heads and really articulating what makes them tick. Here's the narrator of 'Lost But Not Forgotten' thinking back on her failed marriage at her prep school's 30th anniversary: 'In a way, to describe that marriage is like describing having gone to boarding school. Is there an infinite amount to share, or does a sentence or two suffice? I guess it depends who you're telling the story to.' Sittenfeld fans will recognize the narrator as Lee Fiora, star of her 2005 novel 'Prep.' There are many other stories in the collection about friends connecting after a long time apart, with characters questioning their behavior from years ago or pondering what constitutes 'an enviable life.' It's thought-provoking stuff, delivered in short stories that are perfect for readers of a certain age, just before they turn off their bedside table lamp. ___
New York Times
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Curtis Sittenfeld's New Stories Revel in Life's Delicious Mess
There seems to be a largely held belief (one easily argued against, and yet, it persists) that at some point in our lives, perhaps around middle age, whenever that is, we'll have figured it all out. We will have accrued the proper things to make ourselves at least reasonably content (relationships, jobs, homes, children; all the stuff that makes a life); we will have done the due diligence of coming to terms with who we are, and we will forge ahead, no more questions asked, for all has been settled. Done and dusted; there's nothing to see here. Luckily, we have Curtis Sittenfeld to disabuse us of that rather stupid notion. 'Show Don't Tell' — her ninth book and second story collection — proves that there is always something to see … or to be told, if you prefer. In contradiction to the advice of its title, there's lots of telling in this book. Sittenfeld frequently opens with a character who seems to speak directly to the reader, often recapping a critical event that occurred in the past before bringing us back to the present to see how it all makes sense (or purposefully doesn't). In this way, reading 'Show Don't Tell' is a bit like sitting down with a good friend who's about to dish on some major life business. The stories are messy, delicious, spun through with bits of quotable wisdom ('If I'd still be me with Botox, why bother with the Botox?') and complete with endings that will make you sit and think. Sittenfeld's headline-adjacent musings don't shy from addressing biases and assumptions of all stripes, nor does she fear a character who brings the cringe. And although you may see certain twists coming, most of them land with a satisfyingly unpredictable punch. In 'The Richest Babysitter in the World,' Kit reflects upon her time spent caring for the child of a Jeff-Bezos-like character before he became a famous billionaire. In 'White Women LOL,' Jill, a white woman, tries to redeem herself after she's canceled online for telling a group of Black people who she believes are gate-crashers to leave a friend's birthday party. And in 'Lost but Not Forgotten,' Sittenfeld brings back the character of Lee Fiora from her debut novel, 'Prep' — now at her 30-year school reunion, reflecting on her past while grappling with her future and a potential new love. 'Show, don't tell' is a supposedly golden rule in creative writing, another largely held belief that comes down to quite a few assumptions about how things should be. In using the edict as her collection's title but then willfully disobeying it — and making it all so much darn fun — Sittenfeld is saying a lot about the constraints we, and particularly middle-aged women, have come to accept. Showcasing the glory of her characters' complicated lives and allowing them to speak with voices all their own is a kind of rebellion, and it's exhilarating. In the title story, we meet Ruthie Flaherty, a 25-year-old nearing the end of her first year of a graduate writing program, waiting for the letter that will notify her of her second-year funding, which will define her next steps as a person in the world. The many distractions she faces swirl through the story: Among them, she wants to win back the affections of her classmate Doug; get her 50-year-old grad student neighbor to stop smoking in her apartment; and figure out how to respond to Bhadveer, a male classmate who insists beautiful women can't write great literature. Of course, what Ruthie is really trying to figure out is who she will be. And, by the completion of the story, has she succeeded? Twenty years later, she's a best-selling author — 'as it happens, my novels are considered 'women's fiction,'' she explains — and meeting Bhadveer, 'who has attained the status we all believed ourselves to be aspiring to back then,' for a drink. Once there, Bhadveer insists on naming the classmates who aren't 'writers,' and it's not until months later that Ruthie figures out how she wishes she'd responded: 'Yes, you can say whether people have published books,' she thinks. 'But you don't get to say whether they're writers. … The way they inhabit the world, the way they observe it — of course they're writers.' You may wonder, particularly after this story, how much of Sittenfeld's own life is in the book, but don't be distracted; 'Show Don't Tell' raises bigger and more important questions. Like, what if life was never about figuring it all out, but instead about simply living it, the best we can? As Lee Fiora says, 'If I'm right that all this is ordinary, I'm enormously grateful for it; our ordinary life, our closeness, is thrilling to me.'
