Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Yes, Trump gets name-checked, but what will stay with readers of You Think It, I’ll Say It, Curtis Sittenfeld’s new collection, is her brilliance at evoking the fallibility lurking in all of us. In the story that lends the book its title, Sittenfeld sharply describes the blandness and pain of midlife, but it will feel familiar to anyone whose heart has been shredded, whether in the stands at a peewee softball tournament or on social media. We talked to her about St. Louis, brevity, and the complexity of the Midwest.
Can you start by talking a little bit about being a Midwestern writer?
It’s no secret that the Midwest is often thought of and written about condescendingly (the term “flyover country” is the least of it). This condescension is annoying to me, but it also seems misguided. Complex and sophisticated people exist everywhere (and for that matter, all people are complex, even if ostensibly unsophisticated). Almost twenty years ago, when I was in graduate school in Iowa, a classmate of mine from New York told me she thought the protagonist of my story was “too sarcastic” to be from the Midwest. And I thought, wait, does sarcasm stop at, like, the Pennsylvania border?
All that said, I feel lucky to be a Midwestern writer. If you’re writing fiction set in New York, it’s a lot more difficult to make it feel fresh and original.
What are some good books you’ve read recently that handle our current political in a masterful or graceful way?
I’ve found that the work I read has to contain a greater urgency than normal, because real life has become so insane. A book I enjoyed lately, which contained this urgency, is “The Rules Do Not Apply” by Ariel Levy—a non-fiction memoir that’s brutally honest about marriage, ambition, and writing, among other topics. “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer is an excellent book that’s explicitly about the topic of how we arrived at this political moment.
Some fiction writers say that the short story is almost a completely different animal from the novel. Do you feel that’s true, or at least true for you, or no?
Someone somewhere said that a short story is like a date (or maybe a one-night stand?) and a novel is like a marriage. I think a story has to be sharper all the way through, instead of having soft sections. It allows the writer to take more risks and if the story doesn’t work out, you just set it aside without having spent years on it.
Did short stories sneak into your writing practice more recently, or are they something you’ve written all along?
Like many writers, I wrote short stories before I wrote novels—they were a kind of apprenticeship. I started writing them in grade school and continued to do so until I was in my mid-twenties, in graduate school. After the publication of my first novel, Prep, in 2005, I got away from them, and I wrote four more novels. But from 2005 to 2016, I was definitely carrying ideas for stories inside me, and I finally unleashed a few in 2016 and 2017. It felt great to get back to the form.
Can you talk about the fun parts, and maybe the more difficult parts, of figuring out how to sequence the stories, so the book flowed like a good mix tape?
I gave a huge amount of thought to this question. Readers will probably notice that the collection starts with a quasi-couple interacting against the backdrop of Trump’s presidential candidacy and ends with a different quasi-couple interacting against the backdrop of Trump’s election. Otherwise, my main goal was not to situate two similar stories next to each other—except if it seemed like I should do so. Several stories have almost twins or mirror images, where they overlap somehow, and I thought maybe I could structure the book like a double staircase, where the middle story is actually the top of the stairs. (Does this image make any sense outside my brain? Perhaps not.) But then I went from including eleven to ten stories, so the structure proved impossible. It might have proved impossible anyway.
How do you see this book, as compared to your novels?
I’d describe it as more distilled. If someone has never read my novels, I think it gives an accurate taste of them, and if someone has read my novels, I think it’s consistent with my novels’ themes and preoccupations: class, gender, social and sexual tension and awkwardness. You know, all the fun stuff!
There’s a lot of very funny (and devastating) writing here about kids and parenthood. Of course, you have kids yourself, so there’s a lot to draw on there, but it seems like there are lots of pitfalls when it comes to writing about that stuff. How do you approach that, what do you think you do that helps those stories/scenes ring true?
I’ve answered variations of this question before—why I do anything in particular in my writing—and I end up saying that it’s a bit like how any of us get dressed in the morning. I put on a shirt, and if something about it feels weird or wrong, I change. If it feels okay, I keep it on. I certainly do research on some topics, but in terms of writing about parenthood specifically, I’m usually writing more instinctively. And I’m not above occasionally borrowing from real life—my young niece made a very striking comment last summer that I wrote down to remember (I can’t share it because I’m saving it for fiction).
Because you were going on lots of different rides with very different characters, did you find it hard to let go of some of them, since the process was a bit shorter than when writing a novel? Were there characters that haunted you, that drove you up a wall, that you were bummed out to say goodbye too?
I suppose one way of answering your question is to say that I’m toying with writing another story about Nell from Gender Studies, the first story. So I feel as if the option to stay with certain characters exists. I also freely admit that several of the characters resemble one another—strong-willed, educated Midwestern women who are basically observing themselves act against their own best interests. I made the conscious decision to embrace my preoccupations with this collection rather than trying to make things varied for the sake of being varied.
Some of your favorite short story writers? Favorite short story collections?
My favorite writer is Alice Munro, who exclusively has written short stories. I love so many of her books, including Open Secrets, The Love of a Good Woman, and Friend of My Youth. I also admire Tessa Hadley a lot, especially Sunstroke and Other Stories. And there’s a collection called Spoiled by a woman named Caitlin Macy that’s really smart and has an edge in a good way.
Can you talk a little bit about writing in the domestic realm, about the process of transforming all the mundane objects and experiences we take for granted—the things that bore us about our day-to-day lives—and making them funny, or horrifying, or puzzling, or emotionally devastating?
This is an interesting question that’s hard for me to answer. I generally don’t subscribe to fairy dust theories about writing, but there is a certain alchemy to it. The reason I’m a writer is that I have this transforming impulse that I don’t totally understand and try not to overthink—it would be a bit like overthinking walking and thereby losing my ability to do it naturally.
Is there a peculiarly St. Louis landmark, cultural quirk, person or thing you have always wanted to integrate into a piece of fiction, and haven’t yet?
At the risk of being predictable, the Arch is totally fascinating to me. It has such a complicated back story (racially, economically, architecturally) in terms of how it came to be. I once had a novelist friend visiting from out of town and I told her the Arch is worthy of a true Arch-focused novel (it’s appeared in novels, including mine from 2013, Sisterland, but I’m not sure it’s starred in any) and she was skeptical. After we watched the film strip from the 60s in the museum area, she basically said, “Wait, are you going to write this? Because if you don’t, I might.”
Curtis Sittenfeld reads from You Think It, I'll Say It at the St. Louis County Library Headquarters on April 21. For further details, go to left-bank.com.
