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.”
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