Show Don’t Tell

Curtis Sittenfeld fans rejoice, Sittenfeld is back with her signature wit, impeccable prose and acute insight. In Show Don’t Tell, a collection of perfectly polished short stories, Sittenfeld delves below the equally polished veneers of her mainly white, middle-class, middle-aged female characters, to explore the ideas of ambition, success, female friendship, marriage, power dynamics and white privilege. I feel like this book could equally be called Write What You Know.

Sittenfeld and her audience have aged with her characters and these are issues that will strike a chord with many. If this sounds boring to you, it is not. The stories are sharp, sincere and linger: from the movie exec who must travel to middle America to convince a conservative Christian author to include a gay couple in his film adaptation, only to be thrown off guard by their sexual chemistry, to the woman juggling her job, her marriage and her teenager while waiting for a follow-up mammogram – all the while texting her best friend who lives miles away for support. Or the woman meeting an ex at the height of the pandemic and deciding she’ll hug him. It is with small details that these stories are built. The details almost seem mundane, but they sink in and stick.

These stories are intimate and challenging, holding up a mirror to the mid-life abyss. Sittenfeld writes character and dialogue so well that I did more than once check if the story correlated to her own life (it did not). In Show Don’t Tell, she is exploring the idea of what makes a good and meaningful life, in all its mess and glory. And for the die-hard fans (of which there are rightly plenty), Lee Fiora, from Sittenfeld’s 2005 debut novel, Prep, returns in ‘Lost But Not Forgotten’, with a visit to Ault for her 30-year reunion.