“This was the one boarding school story I’d never told,” teases Lee Fiora in the opening paragraphs of “Lost but Not Forgotten,” the last of a dozen stories in Curtis Sittenfeld’s new short story collection Show Don’t Tell. It’s a juicy opener, one that prompted me to arrange an interview with Sittenfeld over Zoom, ostensibly to ask her about the collection and her favorite Minneapolis bookstores. At least, that’s what I told Sittenfeld’s Random House marketing team. But I also wanted to investigate my strong attachment to Prep. I imprinted hard on Lee in my mid-twenties. Her first-person narration as the protagonist in Sittenfeld’s 2005 debut novel so accurately articulated my own private obsessions and insecurities that she became nearly real to me, my own literary Velveteen Rabbit. So I wanted to find out why I was more excited to see Lee on paper than any sentient old friends in real life. Why did Lee’s unobtrusive return to the page, like a bunny scampering on the edges of a yard at twilight, delight me more than any other recurring character? And how did Sittenfeld decide to wedge Lee at the end of the story collection like an impulse endcap item perched on top of a shopping cart, not so much as an afterthought; rather, as a spontaneous, affordable luxury?
But first, the other stories. When I flubbed one of my first interview questions, mixing up the title of one story for another, Sittenfeld self-deprecatingly acknowledged that many of the stories contain seemingly interchangeable characters: “a neurotic kind of privileged woman.” Lee and the other characters in Show Don’t Tell live in Midwestern places like Wichita, St. Louis, and Elm Grove, WI. I recognized my Minneapolis neighborhood and the post-George Floyd online social justice contortions of my neighbors in “White Women LOL,” a story set in an unnamed, subzero, historically segregated city with a narrator compensating for a viral video that exposed her unconscious bias with a madcap chase after her only Black friend’s lost dog. A lot of the stories are like this. The characters go through deep, existential struggles: they fabricate sexual tension, compare themselves to more successful peers, and grapple with the inherently unethical ethics of wealth accumulation. Then their issues manifest in funny, often humiliating, scenarios. In my favorite of the stories that doesn’t star Lee, a woman organizes a performance art project to disprove the absurd conservative Christian rule against men and women dining together, only to embark on an extramarital affair with one of her platonic lunch date pals.
Sittenfeld sees the stories relating to one another in pairs. “A lot of the stories have a kind of twin, where two stories are both about a certain topic but approach it from a different angle. The person you knew in your youth who grew up to be outrageously famous, being really awkward on a campus, and friendships across race.” The most obviously paired plots include the collection’s titular story, which is about an MFA cohort awaiting their university’s funding decisions, with flashes to a future that shows which of them achieved fame and fortune. Sittenfeld said that the story, originally published in The New Yorker in 2017, sparked an emotional reaction among readers, especially “people who identify as writers and maybe haven’t published in the way that they hoped to.” In its twin, “The Tomorrow Book,” a downwardly mobile English teacher meets up with a best-selling, award-winning classmate.
Professional disappointment and awkward interpersonal communications plague Sittenfeld’s middle-aged characters in their Midwestern cities. Reading about different variations of their privileged, provincial problems has the effect of sitting in the same room with a suncatcher crystal in the window over the course of an afternoon, watching light refract off of glass facets onto different walls from slightly varied angles. Which is to say that Show Don’t Tell offers a completely enjoyable, if not groundbreaking, reading experience. Sittenfeld said that she deliberately wrote recursive stories, “If I had published a story collection in my twenties, I probably would have written stories that were different from each other in setting and protagonist just to prove that I could.” Sittenfeld’s first short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It was published in 2018 when she was already an acclaimed novelist in her forties. “Now I embrace a story collection where the stories are thematically similar. I just let the story collection be obsessive in its themes. The reader can walk into that sensibility and if they get tired of it, [they can] just read a different book.” I, for one, didn’t tire of Show Don’t Tell. I raced through the collection, partly entranced by Sittenfeld’s playful writing style, wry plots, well-drawn characters, subversive ruminations on topics outside the boundaries of polite conversation, and the guileless scenes that capture the particular humiliation that accompanies defecating in public restrooms.
I also read quickly to get to Lee. I told Sittenfeld how thrilling I found this once-in-midlife encounter with my fictional bestie and asked what inspired Lee’s return. Sittenfeld said, “At first I thought I would write a lost chapter of Lee as a teenager. At my twenty-five-year boarding school reunion, I had the idea for the Bryce Finley storyline, and then at my thirty-year reunion, I had the idea for the reunion storyline. I thought it would be more interesting if it showed her as an adult, too.” When Sittenfeld decided to try writing the story, “It felt fun and Lee’s voice felt very accessible.”
In “Lost but Not Forgotten,” Lee’s in her early fifties, an amicably divorced mom of two kids with a fulfilling job as the director of an art nonprofit that she founded. Lee harbors a secret memory about a nighttime encounter with an older, expelled Ault student-turned-celebrity. On the eve of her thirty-year Ault reunion, she contemplates whether or not to share the story with her friends in classic Lee form: “I wanted this to be private and I wanted everyone to hear about it.” At the same time, in what I read as a satisfying Ault romantic comeuppance that makes up for Cross Sugarman’s devastating secret girlfriend treatment of Lee in Prep, Lee begins a romantic dalliance with a former classmate and minor Prep character.
Why a short story instead of a sequel? Partly because, Sittenfeld said, “A long story buried in a collection isn’t a cash grab.” When Sittenfeld proposed a Prep sequel a decade ago, her editor said that there were too many ways for a sequel to go wrong, that readers likely wouldn’t receive it well because Prep was so singularly special. “A lot of times people are cynical about a sequel.” Sittenfeld thought, instead, that someday “there could be a lost story or a lost chapter.”
Seven of Sittenfeld’s eight books have been optioned at least once. “Nothing has made it to the screen. I don’t think my life would change tremendously if one of my books was made into a movie, but it would be a lark,” she said. Prep has been optioned and developed three times, but never made it to a movie or a television show.
I suspect that Lee’s long absence, the unassuming brevity of her short story return, and the twenty-year pause in between are the reasons why this story feels like such a literary treat to Sittenfeld superfans like me. But there’s something else at work, I think, something ineffable, something to do with Sittenfeld’s nonchalance, the way she leaves room for reader interpretation. For example, at the beginning of our interview, I asked about the pronunciation of Lee’s last name, and Sittenfeld said it was up to me. Then, Sittenfeld coyly described how she handles other readers’ questions about Lee with a hands-off, benevolent god approach. “People have said to me, ‘What happened to Lee?’ And I’m like, ‘What do you want to happen to Lee?’ It’s open-ended.”
I meant to ask Sittenfeld about her authorial relationship with Lee and her characters, something like, does she think of herself as their creator, or their therapist, or do they live in her head like imaginary friends? I tried to phrase this in a smart question but ended up blabbering to Sittenfeld an incoherent, fangirl monologue about what Lee meant to me. How I wondered how Sittenfeld, through Lee, so exquisitely described my innermost shames and desires. How I read Prep at an impressionable age: finished with college, but still recovering from a couple of summer jobs where I lived in close quarters with people who hailed from a higher American caste than I did. How welcome I found Sittenfeld’s dissection of the fallacy of American meritocracy through the eyes of 14-year-old Lee. I thought of the Lee line, “My fascination with celebrities was so intrinsic to my identity that it was like my spleen”, as I wasted several Zoom minutes prattling on to my main literary hero.
Sittenfeld understood that I was trying to get at the charming liminality that Lee inhabits, and graciously reassured me that the not-belonging is a well-known human condition-type novelistic fodder. “I sometimes feel like I’m too East Coast for the Midwest and I’m way too Midwestern for the East Coast. And Lee has some of that tension, too,” she said. “That feeling of entering a situation where you feel much less sophisticated than the people around you and you feel like they’re speaking in code. Then you feel yourself maybe turning against your family or friends from home and then you’re in a no man’s land. That’s a relatively widespread experience, even though comparatively few people go to boarding school.”
I felt sheepish, then, for going to all of the interview trouble, making Sittenfeld spell out how easy it is to relate to a character who’s alienated by her surroundings. But it was also a perfect Lee-ish moment, in a way. As I investigated my parasocial bond with my favorite Sittenfeld book character while talking to Sittenfeld herself, I behaved like a muddling, self-defeating Show Don’t Tell character, which, while embarrassing, also felt satisfying. I can’t actually meet Lee IRL, but I got to momentarily, inadvertently tuck myself into the Sitten-verse.
Before our time was up, I asked if Sittenfeld had any fictional friends of her own. She gave me a dignified answer: “I don’t reread that much because there’s so much I want to read. Because I’m a fiction writer I can see how the writer did it. And I like it when the writer tricks me in a really straightforward way. I can see what they’re doing but I’m still amazed they can pull it off. I felt that way about Trust by Hernan Diaz.” So no Lee Fiora for her? Sittenfeld said, “I’m not sure if I feel that way about characters, but I do feel that way about books.”
