A Compromised Life: On Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Show Don’t Tell”

A great mythos of American culture, itself entrenched as a literary tradition, is that anyone can become rich and famous, by way of talent, hard work, and grit. Sometimes, it can even happen accidentally—a trick of fate, the luck of the draw, met with envy, astonishment, and ultimately relief. This story, or delusion, becomes at once a useful sedative and source of motivation, shaping one’s desires and allegiances whether one is aware of it or not. But of course, celebrity is by no means a unified category. To be wealthy does not guarantee fame, and to possess fame does not mean one has secured wealth. While there is often overlap, the world of celebrity presents extreme paradoxes. It is nearly impossible not to talk about them, hypothesize their inner lives, and cast judgements on the level of the individual and as a larger diagnosis for culture and society at large. 

Curtis Sittenfeld has made a career of interrogating the world of celebrity: billionaires, politicians, influencers, micro-celebrities, mainstream self help gurus, famous writers, professionally successful and pioneering women, and those who’ve had brief brushes with extreme notoriety. Readers of Sittenfeld’s work will notice her fictions are overwhelmingly preoccupied with imagining their inner lives, as well as characters who come into contact with them through the entertainment industry. Many characters in her novels and her first story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, come from humble Midwestern origins and find themselves in elite institutional contexts as either a mildly self-loathing wallflower, who watches from a distance the lives they secretly covet or resent, or in the jaws of fame itself, unable to grasp the immensity and reach of their lives. The arc of many novels is one in which a seemingly entrenched social rule is subverted. She often does this by way of considering alternative futures and histories by way of the destabilizing power of love and limerence, along with the productive tensions between the public and private self. Often, her stories are told from the perspective of women—in two novels, the first lady of the US—whose ideas of and desire for love clash with the realities of imperfect coupledom and personal ambition.

“As with so much else, I tell myself. It is our positions that are being deferred to, that we are simply symbols; who we are as individuals hardly matters,” shares Alice Blackwell, the protagonist of Sittenfeld’s third novel, American Wife, about the thinly-veiled former first lady Laura Bush, who reflects on the magnitude of her life with uncomprehending regret and guilt. Her retrospective details her life from childhood to her rise in the White House, which includes her whirlwind romance with Charlie Blackwell (who is loosely based on George W. Bush). Like the real Bushes, Alice and Charlie marry within months of meeting each other, and the arc of their romance, replete with crises of faith, is meant to humanize them and offer depth, a true window into their souls. Though Alice believes their individuality hardly matters, Sittenfeld seeks to prove otherwise. Of course, then, the seduction of celebrity rests with their unfathomable visibility, flooded with sociocultural symbolic import, and their utter unknowability as everyday people. Unsurprisingly, this tension between surface and depth is perfect terrain for narrative fiction. 

Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, follows Lee Fiora, a young girl from South Bend, Indiana, who becomes perpetually gobsmacked at Ault, a fictional elite boarding school in Massachusetts. Prep is a glimpse into a world of adolescent angst at the intersections of casual privilege, quiet luxury, and petty snobbery. A guiding question for Lee seems to be: are people who are special to us aware of their own specialness and its power? And in this vein, if someone so special is to remain as they are, what will become of them in ten years? How will their lives evolve? Are we all set on performing certain scripts by way of the racial, social, and class positions we are born into? Of course not. Then, what happens to those who defy these seemingly intractable socioeconomic hierarchies? What happens if we examine them? In a way, Lee Fiora is Sittenfeld’s young fictional avatar, and Prep announced her core literary preoccupations that would follow her for the rest of her career.

Nevertheless, Sittenfeld has been subject to a slew of turbulent critical reception. After the success of her debut, Sittenfeld’s sophomore novel, The Man of My Dreams, was panned across several publications for her drab protagonist. Indeed, Sittenfeld’s characters are often painfully insecure, deeply ambivalent, and especially passive on their surface, circling the fathoms of their interior spirals, often unable to apprehend the fact that their feelings might similarly be felt by other people. Still, underneath that is a well of deep anger and resentment that pulses through her work, punctuated by surprising bursts of sharp humor. This is the animating force behind Prep and Man of My Dreams, and when nearly perfected, became the subtle exploration of one of the most famous women in the world in Sittenfeld’s third novel American Wife. Here, Alice Blackwell contends with what it means to be married to a man responsible for some of the most heinous war crimes of the 21st century. Alice seems to absolve herself: Ultimately it was the people who gave him power, she says. In this way, the political context of American Wife makes an argument for Charlie’s ascension to presidency as a larger allegory for the oppressive and patriarchal forces that condemn transgressive women, those who, like Alice, have gotten abortions, are anti-war and progressive. The only irony here is that Alice is a First Lady, perhaps one of the most influential figures in the world whose cultural capital is itself powerful political currency. 

Sittenfeld tried to replicate this literary impulse in her 2020 novel Rodham, which could be described as an alternative history of Hillary Clinton if she became president. Whereas American Wife featured reimagined and differently named characters that hewed closely to the life of Laura and George Bush, in Rodham, key characters (Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Anita Hill, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Clarence Thomas, Carol Moseley Braun, and more) are given the same name as their real-life counterparts. Rodham is a bizarre book that produces a dizzying feeling of disbelief as one continues to read it. Clinton (or shall I say, Rodham?) is framed as a benevolent feminist hero, whose isolation and unlucky brushes with romance became the precise and formidable conditions through which she could become president. Rodham’s publication in 2020 before pandemic lockdown and that year’s presidential election offered a not-so subtle political statement: here’s an alternative history, and could it still be possible? 

Crucially, Rodham’s failure is that in its efforts to rewrite the past and, thus, the future, it jettisons reality and complication altogether, refusing to engage in any of Clinton’s more distasteful and racist track record. While American Wife attempts to offer a moral lesson in how one’s soul might be degraded by the cumulative effects of a kind of ongoing cognitive dissonance, Rodham seems to offer a prize if one stays steadfast to their moral compass. A more complicated novel might have taken to task the fact that whether Hillary married Clinton or not she is not an uncompromised political actor. What we’re left with, in effect, is a girlboss novel. 

The wide-ranging reviews, from positive to mixed to negative, has not dampened Sittenfeld’s career. She has written seven novels and two short story collections, which includes her recently published Show Don’t Tell. The title alone—a near-clichéd piece of writing advice one usually receives at the beginning of their writing journey—feels somewhat mischievous, a cheeky statement of her awareness of her own career—of what it means to write and be a writer. Unsurprisingly, Sittenfeld sets out to unsettle that standard. The titular story, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 2017, follows Ruthie, a young woman who attends a prestigious MFA program (which hews closely to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) in the late 90s and is awaiting to see if she’ll receive one of three highly-coveted financial packages that also functions as confirmation of one’s promise as a writer. She is the last person to receive her letter, and the story doesn’t conclude with her opening it in trepidation; rather, we barrel into the future, in which we discover that she hasn’t experienced the career or fame that she once aspired towards, and that her work has been relegated to the zone of women’s fiction. “To be clear, I’m mocking neither my readers or myself here—it took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.”

There’s something about Sittenfeld that is difficult to classify. She has been marketed as a writer of “chick lit,” which has been problematized by Adam O’ Fallon Price in The Paris Review. Yet, with several New Yorker publications, one might simply consider her a critical darling of middlebrow fiction, which distinguishes her from contemporaries like Taylor Reid Jenkins who share her same preoccupations. Like Sally Rooney, Sittenfeld occupies a sweet spot for any writer: her work has been picked up by many book clubs but still enjoys the prestige of critical acclaim. But one cannot ignore some of the gimmicky backdrops that have inspired some of her fictions: Eligible as part of HarperCollins’s “The Austen Project,”and her agreeing to write a beach read story as part of a contest with ChatGPT to see if readers could tell the difference. In any case, Sittenfeld writes novels and stories that you can’t help but read—even those works that feel like inane, pointless experiments. She captures the minutiae of gesture, the magnitude of one’s awkwardness in their body and in society, the anticipation and fulfillment of early romance, with such visceral sensitivity that it’s difficult to look away. 

Yet, an unsettling feeling emerges when one reads too much of her fiction. Often, it feels that the seduction of her work rests with a keen sense of wish fulfillment. Her characters are part of the upper middle class if not uber-wealthy, who live mostly frictionless lives haunted by adolescent scars, while grappling with a growing sense of dissatisfaction in their lives. Don’t get me wrong: this is great terrain for narrative fiction and indeed, some of the greatest fiction of human history grapples with these precise conditions of ennui and dissonance. Sittenfeld, however, is often unable to dive into the underbelly of such feeling. She reimagines worlds where racism and other –isms and phobias, for instance, exist, but are relegated to the realm of a comedy of manners: misunderstanding, faux paus, slight social ostracism. (As seen in her story “White Women LOL,” among others.) The ramifications for any of the characters never feels quite significant, precisely because they are not treated with any sense of gravity beyond uncomprehending, individual annoyance and irritation. Yet, each story leaves an impression that we are meant to learn something crucial and fundamental about the human condition and what it means to be alive; while stories might end predictably with stated considerations of one’s own moral ambivalence, they have a tendency to feel pat and convenient. 

While the dominant affective register of Sittenfeld’s first story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, is fury, anger, and resentment (in part a response to Trump’s first presidency), the register of Show Don’t Tell seems that of resignation and deferral. (Interestingly, most of these stories were published during Trump’s first presidency.) On the surface, this makes sense for a collection preoccupied by the disappointments of unfulfilled promise and desire over the span of a character’s life. However, the sense of resignation and deferral are integral to the narrative structure itself. 

Take the story, “The Richest Babysitter In the World,” as a representative example, where we meet Kit who recounts the time when she was a babysitter for two characters, Bryan and Diane, who are loosely based on Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos before they became billionaires. Kit becomes their babysitter during her senior year of college when she seems on the precipice of the rest of her life. Every decision and every moment feels critical and meaningful, with the potential to change her life forever. She is grappling with a longstanding crush with whom she is in love and who also invited her to move across the country and live together, as she navigates the intimate scenes of domesticity for a family she hardly knows. As is the typical narrative strategy in a Sittenfeld story, the narrative leaps into the future, where we meet an older Kit, who has learned that Diane and Bryan have separated. Even more, we learn that things weren’t quite what they seemed when she was in her early twenties: the move didn’t turn out the way she had imagined, the boy she loved was gay, and she found her passion in a PhD program. The story finds its conclusion with Kit’s consideration of her own moral compass given that she still shops at Bryan’s Amazon-like company, Pangea, and her belief Diane would covet her life—her ordinary, stable, quiet life.

In this way, Show Don’t Tell is a continuation of her larger preoccupations. (Indeed, the last story of the collection is an epilogue of her debut novel, Prep.) But the emotional arcs of her stories are often unsatisfying, perhaps because celebrity in Sittenfeld’s fictional worlds has a sanding effect: instead of offering the grounds to interrogate power, it merely becomes the means through which she rehearses existential anxieties of what it means of living a life compromised by decisions that have long-term consequences we can’t foresee in an unpredictable, brutal, and lonesome world. Her response to this narrative choice gets at the root of her vision of the world: that living would be made bearable if we could all find someone to love and some stability. Still, these conclusions overwhelmingly involve the unthinking recuperation of the nuclear family, heteronormativity, and marriage. 

In other words, the figure of celebrity in Sittenfeld’s is a tool to manage ambivalence. The celebrities in her worlds are victims and arbiters of their own fate. They are often figured as powerless to the oppressive density of the wider public—at once condemned and valorized, sapped of their personhood. But in no way, in her fiction, are celebrities, especially those that exert unfounded levels of power and influence (politicians, entrepreneurs, billionaires), figured as malevolent, capable, if not responsible, for heinous forms of harm.

Sittenfeld’s work fails to move away from mere representational politics and trite models of empathy, mobilizing sanitized characters in service to larger surface-level allegories about our current political moment. Writing speculative and alternative fictional stories about powerful figures is, indeed, a rich literary tradition that has been increasingly void of its political and radical potential. Think: William Shakesperare’s history plays, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Colm Toibin’s The Master, Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Perhaps one way to revive it is to invest oneself in making a greater focus on fiction that clarifies and problematizes power differentials instead of merely reproducing them, that focuses on the public and examines failure in addition to ambivalence. In the end, perhaps one does have to show instead of tell. 

FICTION
Show Don’t Tell
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House
Published February 25, 2025