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Summary
Summary
"Every bit as smart, sensitive, funny, and genuine as her phenomenally popular novels,"* a dazzling collection from the New York Times bestselling author of Prep, American Wife, and Eligible
"I really loved all the characters in this book. They're so complex and interesting, and in every story, you'll find them going through these pivotal moments in their lives."--Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine Book Pick)
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PEOPLE AND USA TODAY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * NPR * Financial Times * San Francisco Chronicle * New York Public Library * Refinery29
A suburban mother of two fantasizes about the downfall of an old friend whose wholesome lifestyle empire may or may not be built on a lie. A high-powered lawyer honeymooning with her husband is caught off guard by the appearance of the girl who tormented her in high school. A shy Ivy League student learns the truth about a classmate's seemingly enviable life.
Curtis Sittenfeld has established a reputation as a sharp chronicler of the modern age who humanizes her subjects even as she skewers them. Now, with this first collection of short fiction, her "astonishing gift for creating characters that take up residence in readers' heads" ( The Washington Post ) is showcased like never before. Throughout the ten stories in You Think It, I'll Say It, Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships, and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided.
With moving insight and uncanny precision, Curtis Sittenfeld pinpoints the questionable decisions, missed connections, and sometimes extraordinary coincidences that make up a life. Indeed, she writes what we're all thinking--if only we could express it with the wit of a master satirist, the storytelling gifts of an old-fashioned raconteur, and the vision of an American original.
* Booklist (starred review)
LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION
"At once psychologically acute, deftly crafted and deeply pleasurable." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Witty and buoyant . . . Each deceptively simple and breezy story is masterfully paced and crafted." -- Chicago Tribune
"Perfectly paced, witty and laced with unexpected twists: Every story here sticks its landing. Whatever [Sittenfeld] writes, we'll read it." -- People
"Razor-sharp, often hilarious . . . [Curtis Sittenfeld] is a sharp observer of human nature and human relationships. . . . A witty, breezy, zeitgeist-y collection." --USA Today
Author Notes
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld was born August 23, 1975 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is an American writer. Her titles include: Prep, the tale of a Massachusetts prep school; The Man of My Dreams, a coming-of-age novel and an examination of romantic love; and American Wife, a fictional story loosely based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush.
Sittenfeld attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied Creative Writing. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 2018 she made the bestseller list with her title, You Think It, I'll Say It.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her thoroughly satisfying first collection, Sittenfeld (Eligible) spins magic out of the short story form. Bookended by tales concerning the election of Donald Trump, the collection comfortably situates itself in contemporary America, focusing on female protagonists navigating friendships, family, politics, and social media. In "A Regular Couple," a semifamous defense attorney reconsiders her past after she runs into a high school frenemy also honeymooning at the same resort. In "The Prairie Wife," a woman contemplates whether to make public a bombshell revelation that would ruin the image of a lifestyle celebrity she dated as a teen. Another celebrity story, "Off the Record," places a small-time interviewer in the home of an up-and-coming starlet, with explicit instructions to leave her appointment with juicy details on the starlet's recent breakup. And in "Volunteers Are Shining Stars," perhaps the collection's best entry, a young volunteer at a shelter for mothers and children in Washington, D.C., develops a hatred for a new, bubbly volunteer. As in her novels, Sittenfeld's characters are funny and insightful. Reading these consistently engrossing stories is a pleasure. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME Entertainment. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sittenfeld, author of five novels, including American Wife (2008) and Eligible (2016), shares 10 entertaining stories of everyday revelations of the human experience. Strongly voiced women and men try to gauge their place in the order of things and attempt to pin down others' perceptions of them, all in spite of the well-established unpredictability and utter unknowability of absolutely everyone, themselves included. A broke single mom is revived by the opportunity to reinterview a celebrity but not in the way she thought she'd be. In the brilliant The Prairie Wife, married mom Kirsten dedicates herself to hate-reading everything posted on social media by a very famous and very straight TV food celebrity, who happens to also have once been the teen lesbian who deflowered Kirsten while they were co-counselors at sleepaway camp all those years ago. The collection is bookended by consequential conversations between men and women featuring a Trump presidency. Masterfully plotted and often further gilded with mirthful twists, Sittenfeld's short-form works (half of which are published here for the first time) are every bit as smart, sensitive, funny, and genuine as her phenomenally popular novels. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Sittenfeld needs no introduction. Her first short story collection will be celebrated by loads of promotion and an author tour.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
STORY COLLECTIONS from novelists sometimes give readers the sense that the author has dug up several half-finished, long-abandoned works from graduate school, dusted them off, revived them, then cauterized them with an ending. This is not the case in "You Think It, I'll Say It," a new book of short fiction by Curtis Sittenfeld; but as if to dispatch even the possibility of that impression, the first story, "Gender Studies," is placed squarely in the context of the most recent presidential election. "There's no way Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president," Nell, an academic, tells a Kansas City cabdriver who is dropping her at her hotel. That misguided assumption turns out to be the first of many she makes over the course of the evening she ultimately spends with the driver: It takes longer than it should for her to realize she has both been misled and done some misleading of her own. Nell is sympathetic, insomuch as she is at least aware of her own smugness (which, at its worst, takes the form of bad faith). The characters in Sittenfeld's novels are often redeemed by their self-criticism; however flawed their behavior, they have the good sense to be riddled with selfdoubt about it. Her female characters in particular examine, worry over and question their own dispositions. "And underneath all the decorum, isn't most everyone judgmental and disappointed?" wonders Hannah Gravener, the judgmental and disappointed narrator of "The Man of My Dreams." "Or is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them - can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in?" Hannah is the kind of person who frets, while taking in the grandeur of Alaska, about the way that "thoughts about how small you are always feel small themselves." A psychic young mother who narrates Sittenfeld's "Sisterland" is uncomfortable with her powers, as if they were mostly a crippling embarrassment. In "Prep," Sittenfeld's blockbuster debut, she portrayed a middle-class young woman attending an elite boarding school, someone self-conscious about being self-conscious. Even the lovely but traumatized Alice Lindgren, a stand-in for Laura Bush in her novel "American Wife," observes with fascination her husband and his brother's crass bathroom humor, which betrays the privileged swagger of the blissfully oblivious. Especially in her earlier work, Sittenfeld's young women do not exactly resent the relative ease with which others - the beautiful, or the moneyed, or the innately, effortlessly good - seem to navigate the world; they study their ways, quixotically, tormented by those qualities or behaviors they don't understand. This collection is Sittenfeld's sixth book; the adolescents of her earlier work have grown up, with adulthood yielding decidedly mixed results. In "The World Has Many Butterflies," that type of young woman - the kind who cracks wise from a crouched position - is now a suburban Houston housewife who has fallen into a world of aspirational child rearing. Without an appreciative audience for the mostly damning asides of her internal monologues, she falls for the first man who seems attuned to them, confusing an open ear with erotic interest: "She was simultaneously shocked by the conversation, shocked to be having it with a man, shocked by its effortlessness, and not surprised at all; it was as if she'd been waiting to be recognized, as if she'd never sung in public, then someone had handed her a microphone and she'd opened her mouth and released a full-throated vibrato." In this collection, Sittenfeld occasionally swerves from the female point of view to the male who, elsewhere in her fiction, is usually the object of so much obsessive rumination. In "Do-Over," following Trump's election, a divorced financier resolves to apologize to an old female friend about a moment of sexism that gave him an unfair advantage over her in a student election back at boarding school. He is surprised when the woman, who had a crush on him as a teenager, does not forgive his late-tothe-game moral awakening. Over the course of a dinner out, she turns so hostile it is almost exhilarating, the good girl, the brainy girl, for once saying exactly what she thinks. (The story, like the first in the collection, summons the spirit of Lorrie Moore's perfect "You're Ugly, Too.") "Isn't it weird how I was tormented asa teenager by a person who grew up into a banker who talks incessantly about his Fitbit?" she asks her former classmate, who is mild, earnest and no longer smoking hot. "Did I offend you? ... I didn't mean to. I was trying to be factual." In the lives of Sittenfeld's characters, the lusts and disappointments of youth loom large well into middle age, as insistent as a gang of loud, showy teenagers taking up all the oxygen in the room. A married woman is obsessed with an ex-girlfriend from summer camp who became a wholesome megabrand known as "The Prairie Wife" (also the name of the story); in "A Regular Couple," a famous defense attorney who has just married is plagued by an encounter with the popular girl from her high school, who is also honeymooning at the same resort. Some of the stories grant the possibility that the characters have grown in the intervening years, and grown softer, more generous; others suggest, more spikily, that there is no hope of leaving behind what was painful, or of recovering what was good. These storytellers are, for the most part, a privileged, educated lot. Their trials, in the grand scheme of things, are manageable enough that they allow easily for comedy, which Sittenfeld is a pro at delivering in the details (the smug academic's cat is named Converse, "not for the shoe but for the political scientist"). But Sittenfeld doesn't shy away from poking at the soft spots of a person's psyche, the painful longings for something exquisite to cut through the ennui of even the most comfortable lives. In "Plausible Deniability," an eligible man who can't seem to form meaningful attachments grows reliant on daily emails from a woman conveying her thoughts on classical music: "Being in touch with her offered a cushioning to my days, an antidote to the tedium and indignity of being a person, the lack of accountability of my adulthood." She thinks they are having an emotional affair; he tells himself it is much less. The women of "You Think It, I'll Say It" are, as a group, a demanding breed. They often assume the worst in their imagined adversaries. Sometimes they are wrong, but they are right about just enough (and funny enough) that we forgive them. And, because they know they need absolution for their own worst motives, we forgive those, too. Clearly the lusts and disappointments of youth loom large well into middle age. SUSAN DOMINUS is a staff writer for The Times Magazine.
Kirkus Review
Ten stories by bestselling novelist Sittenfeld (Eligible, 2016, etc.) probe the fissures beneath the surfaces of comfortable lives.Donald Trump bookends the collection, as an alarming candidate in "Gender Studies" and an upset victor in "Do-Over." His unexpected election suits the characters' sense of the ground shifting underneath them, often due to false assumptions. Sometimes the mistaken ideas are deeply humiliating: The discontented wife in "The World Has Many Butterflies" discovers that the man with whom she's been sharing bitchy assessments of fellow members of their affluent Houston social set is not the soul mate she thought and has been judging her by the conventional standards she believed they both despised. Sometimes they're oddly liberating, as when the annoyingly perky wife and mother in "Bad Latch" proves to have some gumption to back up her chipper proclamations. But even the most positive stories have an undercurrent of unease. The protagonists of "Off the Record" and "The Prairie Wife" feel overwhelmed by the demands of parenthood; it's probably not a coincidence that both are also grappling with mixed feelings about celebrities whose lives seem so much more exciting and important than theirs. Sittenfeld adroitly threads themes of disenchantment and perplexity through a group of stories whose characters, despite their reasonably secure middle-class professional status, share a feeling that their lives haven't turned out the way they expected. Occasionally the plotting can be a little pat. The predictable unmasking of the narrator's secret texting correspondent in "Plausible Deniability" somewhat mars a sad self-portrait of a man painfully aware of his inability to sustain meaningful personal relationships. But in the collection's best stories, such as "Volunteers Are Shining Stars," even a slightly lurid denouement feels true to the protagonist's fierce resistance to points of view that challenge her own closed-off perspective. Sittenfeld's own perspective throughout is compassionate without being sentimental, hopeful without being nave.The way we live now, assessed with rue and grace. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Sittenfeld's (Eligible) first short story collection is comprised of ten compelling and unique stories that will draw listeners in with deeply flawed and deeply human characters. From honeymooners and an unhappy housewife to a young volunteer and married acquaintances, Sittenfeld humanizes the seemingly mundane everyday lives of her characters, making them fallible and relatable. The collection is exquisitely narrated by Emily Rankin and Mark Deakins, whose strong, engaging voices perfectly capture the many different personae. Rankin especially exudes charm and vulnerability, making the players even more real and accessible. VERDICT A superbly narrated, standout collection of short stories with mass appeal. ["In crisp, surprising language, these ten stories from novelist Sittenfeld put couples' foibles under the spotlight": LJ 1/18 starred review of the Random hc.]-Erin Cataldi, Johnson Cty. P.L., Franklin, IN © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
"The Prairie Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld, excerpted from You Think It, I'll Say It The understanding is that, after Casey's iPhone alarm goes off at 6:15 a . m ., Kirsten wakes the boys, nudges them to get dressed, and herds them downstairs, all while Casey is showering. The four of them eat breakfast as a family, deal with teeth-brushing and backpacks, and Casey, who is the principal of the middle school in the same district as the elementary school Jack and Ian attend, drives the boys to drop-off. Kirsten then takes her shower in the newly quiet house before leaving for work. The reality is that, at 6:17, as soon as Casey shuts the bathroom door, Kirsten grabs her own iPhone from her nightstand and looks at Lucy Headrick's Twitter feed. Clearly, Kirsten is not alone: Lucy has 3.1 million followers. (She follows a mere five hundred and thirty-three accounts, many of which belong to fellow-celebrities.) Almost all of Lucy's vast social-media empire, which of course is an extension of her life-style-brand empire (whatever the fuck a life-style brand is), drives Kirsten crazy. Its content is fake and pandering and boring and repetitive--how many times will Lucy post variations on the same recipe for buttermilk biscuits?--and Kirsten devours all of it, every day: Facebook and Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, the blog, the vlog, the TV show. Every night, Kirsten swears that she won't devote another minute to Lucy, and every day she squanders hours. The reason that things go wrong so early in the morning, she has realized, is this: she's pretty sure Twitter is the only place where real, actual Lucy is posting, Lucy whom Kirsten once knew. Lucy has insomnia, and, while all the other posts on all the other sites might be written by Lucy's minions, Kirsten is certain that it was Lucy herself who, at 1:22 a . m ., wrote, "Watching Splash on cable, oops I forgot to name one of my daughters Madison!" Or, at 3:14 a . m ., accompanied by a photo of an organic candy bar: "Hmm could habit of eating chocolate in middle of night be part of reason I can't sleep LOL!" Morning, therefore, is when there's new, genuine Lucy sustenance. So how can Kirsten resist? And then the day is Lucy-contaminated already, and there's little incentive for Kirsten not to keep polluting it for the sixteen hours until she goes to bed with the bullshitty folksiness in Lucy's life: the acquisition of an Alpine goat, the canning of green beans, the baby shower that Lucy is planning for her young friend Jocelyn, who lives on a neighboring farm. As it happens, Lucy has written (or "written"? Right? There's no way) a memoir, with recipes--"Dishin' with the Prairie Wife"--that is being published today, so Kirsten's latest vow is that she'll buy the book (she tried to reserve it from the library and learned that she was three hundred and fifth in line), read it, and then be done with Lucy. Completely. Forever. The memoir has been "embargoed"--as if Lucy is, like, Henry Kissinger--and, to promote it, Lucy travelled yesterday from her farm in Missouri to Los Angeles. (As she told Twitter, "BUMMM-PEE flyin over the mountains!!") Today, she will appear on a hugely popular TV talk show on which she has been a guest more than once. Among last night's tweets, posted while Kirsten was sleeping, was the following: "Omigosh you guys I'm so nervous + excited for Mariana!!! Wonder what she will ask . . ." The pseudo-nervousness, along with the "Omigosh"--never "Omigod," or even "OMG"--galls Kirsten. Twenty years ago, Lucy swore like a normal person; but the Lucy of now, Kirsten thinks, resembles Casey, who, when their sons were younger, respectfully asked Kirsten to stop cursing in front of them. Indeed, the Lucy of now--beloved by evangelicals, homeschooler of her three daughters, wife of a man she refers to as the Stud in Overalls, who is a deacon in their church--uses such substitutes as "Jiminy Crickets!" and "Fudge Nuggets!" Once, while making a custard on-air, Lucy dropped a bit of eggshell into the mix and exclaimed, "Shnookerdookies!" Kirsten assumed that it was staged, or maybe not originally staged but definitely not edited out when it could have been. This made Kirsten feel such rage at Lucy that it was almost like lust. Kirsten sees that, last night, Lucy, as she usually does, replied to a few dozen tweets sent to her by nobodies: Nicole in Seattle, who has thirty-one followers; Tara in Jacksonville, who's a mom of two awesome boys. (Aren't we all? Kirsten thinks.) Most of the fans' tweets say some variation of "You're so great!" or "It's my birthday pretty please wish me a happy birthday?!" Most of Lucy's responses say some variation of "Thank you for the kind words!" or "Happy Birthday!" Kirsten has never tweeted at Lucy; in fact, Kirsten has never tweeted. Her Twitter handle is not her name but "Minneap" plus the last three digits of her Zip Code, and, instead of uploading a photo of herself, she's kept the generic egg avatar. She has three followers, all of whom appear to be bots. Through the bathroom door, Kirsten can hear the shower running, and the minute that Casey turns it off--by this point, Kirsten is, as she also does daily, reading an article about how smartphones are destroying people's ability to concentrate--she springs from bed, flicking on light switches in the master bedroom, the hall, and the boys' rooms. When Casey appears, wet hair combed, completely dressed, and finds Ian still under the covers and Kirsten standing by his bureau, Kirsten frowns and says that both boys seem really tired this morning. Casey nods sombrely, even though it's what Kirsten says every morning. Is Casey clueless, inordinately patient, or both? At breakfast, Jack, who is six, asks, "Do doctors ever get sick?" "Of course," Casey says. "Everyone gets sick." While packing the boys' lunches, Kirsten says to Ian, who is nine, "I'm giving you Oreos again today, but you need to eat your cucumber slices, and if they're still in your lunchbox when you come home you don't get Oreos tomorrow." She kisses the three of them goodbye, and as soon as the door closes, even before she climbs the stairs, Kirsten knows that she's going to get herself off using the handheld showerhead. She doesn't consider getting herself off using the handheld showerhead morally problematic, but it presents two logistical complications, the first of which is that, the more often she does it, the more difficult it is for Casey to bring her to orgasm on the occasions when they're feeling ambitious enough to have sex. The second complication is that it makes her late for work. If Kirsten leaves the house at 7:45, she has a fifteen-minute drive; if she leaves at or after 7:55, the drive is twice as long. But, seriously, what else is she supposed to do with her Lucy rage? Previously excerpted from The New Yorker . February 2017 Excerpted from You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Gender Studies | p. 3 |
| The World Has Many Butterflies | p. 20 |
| Vox Clamantis in Deserto | p. 40 |
| Bad Latch | p. 61 |
| Plausible Deniability | p. 69 |
| A Regular Couple | p. 91 |
| Off the Record | p. 124 |
| The Prairie Wife | p. 146 |
| Volunteers Are Shining Stars | p. 170 |
| Do-Over | p. 201 |