Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the new novel Eligible, a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice (due out April 2016) as well as the bestselling novels Sister land, American Wife, Prep, and The Man of My Dreams, which have been translated into twenty-five languages.
Curtis's writing has appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time, Slate, Glamour, and on public radio's This American Life.
A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently lives in St. Louis, MO.
Interviews
Curtis Sittenfeld, interview: 'I’ve always been willing to follow my characters into the bathroom'
Curtis Sittenfeld takes a bite of her goats’ curd salad, leans in conspiratorially and drawls. “I feel like I’m having this passionate affair”. Her lover? The short story. “If you said to me, in this moment, you have to choose between short stories and novels for the rest of your career, I would choose stories.”
The Ohio-born writer, 42, whose five novels include American Wife and Prep, has just published her first collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It. A ridiculously enjoyable crop, it includes tales about a woman who imagines she is having an affair with a friend of her husband, a journalist who has a fraught encounter with a Hollywood celebrity and a woman who is obsessed by the fact that an old school crush has become a social media phenomenon.
There are tales of college girls and new mothers, honeymooners and singletons, Clinton and Trump. A handful have appeared in print before - in the New Yorker and the Washington Post - but the rest “gushed out” of Sittenfeld when she sat down to write them when she was feeling “grouchy” after touring her last novel, Eligible, an updating of Pride and Prejudice to her native Cincinnati, in 2016.
"Sometimes I feel as if talking about my own writing is like describing your own personality. You’re the least credible source"
The stories thrum with the zeitgeist (‘The Prairie Wife’, for example, contains this painfully accurate description of hate-scrolling through someone’s social media feed: “This made Kirsten feel such rage at Lucy it almost felt like lust”) and universal truths about being a woman in the world today.
They are also jampacked with awkwardness. I cringed frequently. Sittenfeld looks thrilled and whips out her phone. “My own sister, my flesh and blood, sent me a congratulations-on-your-stories-being-published letter that said”, she shows me a picture of it. “‘So thrilled for you even if reading them makes me cringe and shiver.’ That’s my sister!”
The stories have already been picked up for television by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, with Kristen Wiig in the starring role. Sittenfeld, who is as laidback and charming as her protagonists are often tense and trying, has no qualms about seeing her work adapted by another writer.
“I’m really uptight about my fiction. If a word or a comma is out of place, it bothers me. But if someone wants to do something else with it, that’s a separate entity.” She waves her fork around and rolls her eyes. “Sometimes I feel as if talking about my own writing is like describing your own personality. You’re the least credible source. You’re like, ‘I’m a really kind person’… Well, you hope you are,” she laughs quietly.
The collection’s title comes from the story ‘The World Has Many Butterflies’, in which two married friends start a game where one voices the unpalatable truths they believe the other is thinking at social events. One of Sittenfeld’s friends pointed out that it’s exactly what she does as a writer. “And the title became irresistible to me,” she says.
"We pretend that we’re all the selves that are sitting here right now - fully dressed, eating salad. And that’s not who people really are"
“In the fiction that I read, I would rather that it goes too far in depicting the range of physical and emotional human experience than not going far enough. I want to feel what the characters feel. If you cringe, you’re really there with the character. “It’s true that Sittenfeld goes to places other writers might politely avoid.
Her protagonists vomit in people’s laps, their breasts leak and throb, their mouths, frequently, run away with them. “My over-riding goal is to try to write stories that are lifelike, or realistic. Life on a daily basis is cringe-inducing and really funny and really sad. I’ve always been a writer who is willing to follow their characters into the bathroom, while they’re sitting on the toilet.
“If you were to follow the most ordinary person with a camera for a week, there are probably parts of their life that would seem like the crudest, most scatological Farrell Brothers movie. There are probably parts of their life that seem pornographic. We almost pretend that we’re all the selves that are sitting here right now - fully dressed, eating salad.
And that’s not who people really are. “Unsurprisingly, she has no time for writing conventionally “likeable” heroines. “If what I really wanted was to write a book where people would say ‘I just wanted to be best friends with the character’, I could do that. I just feel like I would be writing someone who is not that interesting.”
Politics cast a long shadow over the collection. It opens with “The Nominee” in which we see a viscerally difficult newspaper interview with Hillary Clinton from her point of view, and closes with “The Do Over”, in which a reunion of old schoolmates rehashes the gender politics of the 2016 election. In between, there is “Gender Studies”, about professor of women’s studies who leaves her driving license in a cab ("That's a stressful situation.
There's drama there.") then has a one-night stand with the driver, a Trump supporter, when he returns it.“Some stories arise from my feeling of ‘what in god’s name is going on?’ Politically, I mean,” says Sittenfeld. “ I don’t think I set out to write about Trump and Hillary.
But I also wasn’t trying not to do that. When I was in graduate school in Iowa, the director of my programmed, Frank Conroy, would say ‘Writing fiction is a combination of knowing what you’re doing and not knowing what you’re doing.’”
Short stories are enjoying a boom. Last year in the UK collections enjoyed their highest sales for seven years, up by 45 per cent on 2016. New volumes by Lionel Shriver, Jeffrey Eugenides, Elizabeth Strout, JoJo Moyes,
Tom Hanks and the viral success of Kristen Rupelian’s “Cat Person” have all boosted the form. In these attention-grabbing times, perhaps it’s not surprising that readers have turned to a short, sharp hit of storytelling.
“Real life feels very urgent. The urgency of a novel can pale in comparison to that. If you pick up the wrong novel and it lacks urgency, it really lacks urgency right now. I do feel like even some of my own standards of reading are a little bit higher than they have been,” agrees Sittenfeld.“I read Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply and I remember thinking, this is a book that has that urgency that you can read it during the Trump presidency and you don’t need to interrupt yourself to look at your phone.”
Sittenfeld is perhaps best known for American Wife, her fictionalised retelling of the life of former First Lady, Laura Bush. Her next novel, she tells me, will be about the Clintons, starting with their meeting at Yale Law School in the 70s. “In real life Bill proposed to Hillary several times and she said no - what if she had ultimately still refused to marry him?”
She did not want to write about the 2016 election - “That would be so depressing”. Instead the novel will grapple with the issues it raised; one character will be missing though.
“People keep saying ‘why don’t your write about Melania?’ And I feel like I guess would rather spend my days with imaginary Hillary, than imaginary Melania. Someone can but I don’t feel that person needs to be me.”
"After American Wife came out, for years I’d have these dreams about Laura Bush"
She has never met Clinton - though she was “within two foot of her” when she and Chelsea Clinton toured her university, Stanford, in 1997. She’s not sure she would like to meet her properly.
“After American Wife came out, for years I’d have these dreams about Laura Bush. Sometimes in the dreams, I would meet her and I would know that she thought I had done something distasteful but she had such good manners that she would just not remark on it.”
What does she think Clinton will make of the finished novel? “I fundamentally really admire and respect Hillary Clinton - and I think she’s perceived in a strangely un-nuanced way. The fact that she’s a really smart, informed person who does her homework is seen as an irritating quality.
‘She’s such a know-it-all.’ Why did we not want a President who is a know-it-all?” she says.“But I also don’t think that I’m writing a book that she is going to want to curl up with for pleasure on a rainy afternoon.”
