Features | January 13, 2026

A Conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld  

Michael Piafsky 

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of seven novels: Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, Eligible, Rodham, and Romantic Comedy, which was picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. Her first story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, was published in 2018 and also picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. Show Don’t Tell is her second story collection. Her books have been selected by the New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Esquire, and in the Best American Short Stories anthology, of which she was the 2020 guest editor. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, and Slate and on “This American Life.” A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Curtis has appeared as a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” CBS’s “Early Show,” and PBS’s Newshour; she has five times been a Jeopardy! answer and once been a Word Search puzzle. 

Michael Piafsky: So many of your characters have such trouble making friends, whether they’re teenagers in prep school or adults in lives of suburban desperation. To what do you attribute this difficulty?  

Curtis Sittenfeld: I think that a lot of situations that you can avoid, or you want to avoid, in life are good for fiction: conflict and awkwardness and loneliness. It really just arises from characters wanting greater connection than they have. That’s a story I return to often. There are lots of articles about the epidemic of loneliness. I mean, how many people over the age of twenty-one feel socially content?  

MP: And it dovetails into another thing, which is that if your female protagonists find a female friend, it lasts forever. If she finds a man, she ends the story three pages later, worse off than she was before.  

CS: That sounds like it should be carved in wood and, like, sold on Etsy. Or a birthday card. Exactly. A friend is forever. Yeah. Happy birthday. I’m glad we’re friends [laughs]. Okay, wait, so what’s the question?  

MP: Is that accurate? 

CS: I mean, obviously that’s not 100 percent accurate for all humans. But I do think, for plenty of people, friendships are more stable and deeply satisfying than romantic relationships. I don’t think that’s particularly unusual.  

MP: Is there something in terms of craft, where you can have a friendship be unalloyedly beneficial and positive, whereas if you have a happy marriage in a story, where do you go?  

CS: Yeah, maybe that’s part of it. I do think actually in Show Don’t Tell, there are a couple stories where the friendship is the plot, although you also could say there’s an external plot, and then the friendship is just very closely intertwined with that, whereas sometimes a romance essentially is the plot. So maybe there’s more pressure on a romantic relationship, you know, in fiction or in life, and more opportunity, therefore, for it to get derailed.