'I'm trying to examine what it's like to be a person': Author Curtis Sittenfeld on her new book, 'Show Don't Tell'

As bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld launches her new book, short story collection Show Don't Tell, she sits down with Wallpaper* to talk plot, unlikeable characters and where she will go from here.

Wallpaper*: Hi Curtis. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you start writing? When was your first book published?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Those are actually two really different questions. I was 29 when my first novel, Prep, was published in 2005 - almost exactly 20 years ago. I started writing when I was probably about six. When I started writing fiction and when I was a published writer were many years apart.

W*: It was something you always knew you wanted to do?

CS: I don't think I had a realistic handle on how it worked. It’s an incredible privilege to be a full time fiction writer, and I don't think I ever expected to be able to do it, but I did always love reading and writing, and I always hoped that they would be a central part of my life.

W*: The very different worlds you create in your books are so detailed, from being on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton to behind the scenes at Saturday Night Live. How do you choose what world you're going to bring to life next?

CS: If I'm writing a novel, I have to feel like it's a big subject that I am obsessed with, something that will hold my interest for two or three years while I write it. And if it's a short story, it can be more of an intriguing or juicy moment. It doesn't have to feel huge. It has to feel interesting, but it can be fleeting.

W*: What informs it, research, or experience, or a mix of both?

CS: When I was in college, at about 20 years old, I interned at the American magazine The Atlantic. They ran a short story and physically sent me to the library to do some fact checking about the ticks which were featured in it - I mean actually the insect. And at the time, it sort of blew my mind that you would do fact checking for fiction. Because I thought, well, it doesn't matter. You could just make up, you know, quote, unquote, facts about insects or about anything else. But then I started thinking about it, and I thought, Well, maybe it's more responsible or more interesting to do fact checking, even if it's fiction. And then I realised gradually that every time I did research, it made the fiction more interesting because I didn't know what I didn't know. So, jumping ahead many years, if I read a bunch of books about Hillary Clinton, because I'm writing a novel, that's a kind of alternate history of Hillary Clinton. There will be all these wild tidbits, or they'll be these scenes or moments in history. And I might not even use those exact things, but it just makes me more fluent in the subject, and maybe gives me ideas for fiction. I think it makes the fiction so much stronger, and I want to write the best work that I can.

W*: The characters are also rooted in reality, and not necessarily always likeable.

CS: I aspire to create realistic characters rather than likeable characters. All humans are a combination of likeable and unlikable. We all have unattractive traits. Some of us conceal them, some of the time, some of us don't. I'm trying to examine what it's like to be a person. I don't think I'm trying to create a female character who will be considered as endearing as possible by as wide a range of readers as possible.

W*: Why have you decided to return to short stories again, with this new book?

CS: It felt like these stories were timely - I don't think I wrote them to be timely, but some of them feel like they engage with the present or the recent past in a way that made me think, why not let them be published now? There's 12 stories, nine have been published before, but of the nine, most are behind pay walls or just totally inaccessible. So even if you sat down and wanted to read them, you couldn't get that. I feel proud of these stories. I feel like they speak to the moment we're in.

W*: They’re very moving and all quite open-ended, often in ambiguous ways.

CS: I think life is very ambiguous. We often don't really know what the people closest to us think, and sometimes we don't even know what we think about the people closest to us. I'm 49, and I feel like if I had written a story collection in my 20s, I would have made the stories more different from each other for the sake of being different from each other, to prove that I was capable of that. And actually, I feel like both my first short story collection and this one embrace. There's definitely thematic preoccupations or obsessions, and the protagonists are fairly similar to each other. Most of them are middle-aged, educated American women. They often live in the Midwest, not on the coasts. It often turns out that they're wrong about something. They're sort of emotionally raw. And I think - let this collection be the most intense version of what it is. And then, when the reader thinks, I would like to read about something other than middle-aged women being neurotic, just find a different book. There’s lots out there.

W*: I love the everyday moments that run through them, those little things that define a life.

CS: I try to be realistic, and most of us don't go through the day thinking, what are my hopes and dreams? It's all, what am I going to eat for lunch, what time am I going to remember to return that phone call, why is that person I know so annoying? A lot of us have smaller thoughts on our mind a lot of the time.

W*: Why do you think a book by a woman, for women, dealing with traditionally feminine concerns, is still received so differently?

CS: It’s funny, because I think 20 years ago, when I started publishing books, most books that were nominated for prizes were by men, and I would say most books that are nominated for prizes now are by women. I mean, I myself have not really won prizes, I have a little bit, but not really. So I don't know. It's hard to quantify being taken seriously.

W*: Were you drawing on your experience for the short story in the collection, Show Don’t Tell, which pits a critically successful author against a well-loved one?

CS: That's the oldest story in the collection. I wrote it in 2017, and it's funny because that was eight years ago, and the protagonist's career seems more similar to mine now than it did then. I mean, I perceive that protagonist to be more of a successful writer than I am. But, she talks about speaking to auditoriums of 500 people and I feel like I never would. I would struggle to fill an auditorium on a panel by myself, I would need to be on a panel with three others who were super famous.

W*: I doubt that’s true. Would you ever write anything more autobiographical, like a memoir?

CS: It's funny but the older I get, the more I have trouble writing non fiction or writing essays. I think it's because I like to delve into not autobiographical subject matter in fiction, but into very personal subject matter. And so I think that I almost liberate myself to do that by thinking I am not going to specifically talk about what's true or what's not true. I'm just not going to get into that level of specificity. And very quickly, if you write personal essays, you start to get into a level of specificity. So I kind of do feel like my non fiction muscles are atrophied. There is a particular episode in my life that I can see myself writing a memoir about. But I think that would be an exception. If I did that I would certainly still primarily consider myself a fiction writer, and I think I always will be.

W* And when you’re plotting out your fiction, where does it begin?

CS: The plot is probably the most important, which can be about very plausible, mundane, daily experiences. But I really do think about stories in terms of what happens. And in a scene, I think about what I am trying to achieve. What is different at the end of the scene in comparison to when the scene started? That's kind of the engine, and I think character grows out of that, and observations about life grow out of that. But I do really think in terms of plot - I think in terms of plot in fiction, and I think in terms of logistics in life. So I'm like, if today is Monday, what time am I doing this interview? And then what time is my next phone call? And what time do I need to go get my child at school? What are we having for dinner? And then along the way, I'm feeling my feelings and thinking my thoughts, and they really colour the logistical experiences. But I do think structurally.

W*: What’s next for you?

CS: I have started another novel. I have this dream of writing a really satisfying, 200 page novel. We'll see if I can continue. Because there's something special and fun about a novel that you can easily read in one day, and you can enter that world, immerse yourself in it, and then leave it. It's almost like a long, short story. I'm too superstitious to be really specific, but it has a very different structure than everything else I've written. I've wanted to do this for a while, and I think, maybe I can pull it off. Maybe I've cracked the code, but we'll see.

Show Don't Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld, is released on 27 February and published by Transworld

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