Show Don’t Tell is a slyly ironic title for the latest story collection by Curtis Sittenfeld, a writer who luxuriates in the telling. We speak of a writer’s “voice” – Sittenfeld’s is the kind you could pick out from the opposite end of a noisy, overcrowded room. (She sounded fully formed from the first line of her superb debut novel, Prep: “I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up.”)
There is an oral quality to her work: Sittenfeld’s narrators and principal characters tell the reader directly how they feel and give voice to their inner monologues. The narrative may be interrupted by chatty emails or text exchanges. Characters are self-conscious about whether or how to “tell” their stories, or which words to choose when they speak. “Is there an infinite amount to share, or does a sentence or two suffice?” a character thinks in Show Don’t Tell. “I guess it depends who you’re telling the story to.” Another begins “composing in my head a new email to my landlord. I would, I decided, use the word ‘carcinogenic’”.
Reading Sittenfeld can feel like listening to your wittiest, most observant friend telling a very detailed, frequently self-deprecating, and always compelling anecdote. If this sounds dismissive, perhaps it’s because her subtlety and dexterousness, her ability to capture the unspoken resonances of everyday interactions, can be glossed over by the “readability” of her fiction: her books are, unfailingly, great fun. As Sittenfeld puts it, “I don’t think that it hurts your brain to read my fiction… I almost feel like making your writing readable is good manners.”
Perhaps it is this quality that has led Sittenfeld to be categorised as a writer of “women’s fiction” – something she wryly comments on in this collection’s title story. A writer reflects on her years at grad school, where a fellow student “said in seminar that everything I wrote gave off the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party”. In the following 20 years, the writer has published several bestsellers. “As it happens, my novels are considered ‘women’s fiction’. This is an actual term used by both publishers and bookstores, and means something only slightly different from ‘gives off the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party’.”
Her “readability” is also thanks to the immediate, sometimes zeitgeisty, nature of her work: Sittenfeld’s world is familiar, the people in it instantly recognisable, and she draws on news media, pop culture and celebrity gossip. (An unlikely percentage of her characters are famous, and half the stories in this collection feature a regular person in a charged conversation with some sort of celebrity.) The 12 stories in Show Don’t Tell – which mostly revolve around intelligent, liberal Midwestern women, who are often unhappily married and searching for something more in life, preoccupied by questions of “what if” – are all compulsively readable. Nine have been previously published in recent years, and some already feel like time capsules, laden with references to micro-aggressions, pandemic-induced introspection and the spectre of the former US vice-president Mike Pence.
Pence appears in “A for Alone”, which revolves around the Republican politician’s rule to never be alone with a woman who is not his wife. Irene begins an art project that will question the seeming absurdity of the rule. She invites men to have lunch, without explanation, then asks them to fill out a questionnaire about the meeting and the rule. She ends up having an affair. “Does all of this officially vindicate Billy Graham and Mike Pence?” she asks a friend, who replies: “It’s so odd that you’ve decided Mike Pence either does or doesn’t get to tell you how to live.”
There’s “The Richest Babysitter in the World”, about a college student named Kit who, in 1997, begins earning the inconceivable rate of ten dollars an hour to look after a toddler for young couple Bryan and Diane. Years later, the pair become billionaires when Bryan’s online bookshop Pangaea becomes the biggest shopping platform in the US, thanks to its hyper-convenient next-day delivery options and exploitative work practices. Pangaea is clearly modelled on Amazon; Bryan (“now shaved bald and visibly muscular”) and Diane (“In the divorce [she] received $40bn dollars, which she has been giving away with notable efficiency”) stand-ins for Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott. Reflecting on the tender times she spent babysitting, Kit thinks about Diane, and wonders “if my life of department meetings and strip-mall takeout and a mortgage – my ordinary life – would make her jealous”.
Elsewhere, in “The Marriage Clock”, a high-powered producer named Heather visits the potentially homophobic author of a bestselling marital self-help book to persuade him to allow a gay couple in the film adaptation, and finds herself attracted to him. In “White Women LOL”, a woman finds herself going viral for a thoughtlessly racist interaction. In “The Hug”, a married couple are entangled in an argument over whether the wife should hug her ex-boyfriend during lockdown.
Sittenfeld shows her working – you can infer the news item or other starting point of her stories, which tends to date them to a very specific moment in time. They function best not as cultural commentary but in effortlessly capturing small, ordinary moments of significance, such as when Heather texts her husband to say she’s landed and his reply “is the thumbs-up emoji. There was a time when he would have asked How is it, then there was a time when he wouldn’t have asked but Heather still would have been surprised that he hadn’t, and now she’d be surprised if he did.” Or when Kit is watching TV with her college room-mate, and he:
clambered knees-first onto the futon, lay on his back, and settled his head against one of my two pillows. At his approach, I’d instinctively scooted a few inches away, which I regretted within seconds. But scooting in again felt too obvious. So I stayed where I was but turned on my side, curling my body toward his as I fast-forwarded to the next episode… It often occurred to me that the way our bodies angled complementarily in each other’s direction without touching at any point was similar to the Earth’s continents. If pushed together, I thought, our contours would fit perfectly, as if, like the ancient supercontinent Pangaea, we’d previously been attached.
A high moment of the collection is also one of its quietest: “Follow-Up” is about a woman named Janie who has an appointment about a mass found in her breast. She texts with her best friend Pippa about it, while reflecting on a past encounter with a lover, and acknowledging the loveless state of her marriage. The intimacy of Janie and Pippa’s long-distance relationship, conducted over regular messages throughout each day, is beautifully captured, as is Janie’s relationship with her teenage son. There is not much plot here, and yet so much life. As Janie asks herself: “What is this a story about?… Is it a story about the randomness of good and bad fortune?… About how foolish a person would have to be to marry someone she never really enjoyed kissing? Or perhaps it’s a story about how precious it is to deeply adore two people in the world, even if neither of them is your spouse, and to share part of every day with them? Isn’t this, after all, two more people than anyone is guaranteed?”
The most anticipated story in Show Don’t Tell is “Lost But Not Forgotten”, which follows the protagonist of Prep – the watchful misfit Lee Fiora, a student at the prestigious boarding school Ault – at her 30-year school reunion. Prep was, as so much of Sittenfeld’s work is, written from a subtly retrospective view, with Fiora reflecting on her four years at boarding school more than a decade after graduating (at the end of the novel, she lets us know “how everyone turns out”). Now, Fiora is in her early fifties, with a career teaching art in prisons, and she switches between recalling the reunion, where she reconnects with a handsome former student, and “the one boarding school story I’d never told”. I was a little disappointed to find that the story involves another celebrity: 15-year-old Fiora has an encounter in her dorm with a pop singer who used to go to the school (she lives in his old room). There’s simply no way Fiora would have been able to resist recounting this in the novel, despite the attempts here to explain away the omission. But it’s undeniably a great pleasure to be back at Ault, in Fiora’s company, again.
The strongest spiritual successor to Prep is “Giraffe and Flamingo”, in which a mother of two children, aged eight and ten, reflects on her habit of telling stories, an inherited trait. “There was a tiny kind of story my mother told when I was growing up, less a narrative than a few colourful facts.” She decides to tell them about the guy in college who tormented her by monitoring her visits to the toilet: realising she was getting up early to use the shared bathroom, so she might shit in private, he started getting up early too, standing outside the stall making comments about the smell. It’s a wonderfully specific yet utterly believable dynamic. When her children recognise his actions as a cruel power game, she is relieved. “How strange it was to realise that this topic was not unspeakable, though I’d never have guessed, when it was happening, how long it would take me to speak of it or in whom I’d ultimately confide.” The meaning, it seems, is found in the telling.
Show Don’t Tell
Curtis Sittenfeld
Doubleday, 320pp, £16.99
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: Why we’re stuck in Ancient Rome]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World