Book Review: "Show Don't Tell" by Curtis Sittenfeld

In 2005, I was working at a bookstore and one of my colleagues told me to read a book called Prep. It was excellent, despite my never having gone to a prep school, and that book launched my love of Curtis Sittenfeld’s storytelling.

Now, 20 years later, I’ve read all of her books, including her newest one, which is a collection of short stories. For me, as much as I love short stories, collections are often uneven, but this book was uniformly excellent. Sittenfeld’s writing is sharp and funny and emotional, and her stories are all so much more complex than they seem at first.

The story that has gotten the most attention is “Lost But Not Forgotten.” It follows Lee, the main character of Prep, as she attends her 30-year reunion. She also recalls an encounter with perhaps the school’s most famous alumnus. (It’s okay if you’ve never read or don’t remember Prep.)

So many of the other stories in the book really wowed me. In “The Richest Babysitter in the World,” a woman remembers working as a babysitter for a Jeff Bezos-like character on the cusp of Amazon’s creation. “White Women LOL” follows a suburban wife and mother whose social blunder (is she or isn’t she a racist) goes viral. “Creative Differences” is about a documentary crew’s travel to Wichita, Kansas, and the trouble that ensues when a subject feels misled.

Other stories I enjoyed were “The Marriage Clock,” about a filmmaker who meets the author of a relationship manual—and is surprised by her visit; “The Hug,” which takes place during the pandemic and deals with the underlying anxiety about encounters; and the title story, in which a woman remembers being in graduate school and waiting to find out if she won a prestigious fellowship.

This was one of the books I was eagerly anticipating this year, and it definitely exceeded my expectations. Sittenfeld is definitely an auto-buy author for me, and I’ll continue to get excited when I learn she has a new book out!