Review of Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

I am very proud to announce that for the first time in several months, I have read an entire book! Part of this may be that the last book I read, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, was so good I knew that anything else would not pique my interest for a while. My attention span has also been totally shot by social media, the internet, and currently, the political insanity that I just can’t drag my eyeballs away from. Like many formerly voracious readers, I feel extremely guilty about my lack of focus when it comes to books. A few months ago, I gave random stranger online a bit of advice about how to get back into reading. I suggested trying some short stories and to not be too hard on yourself. When I saw that Curtis Sittenfeld had a new collection of short stories titled Show Don’t Tell, I realized that perhaps I should be reading short stories too. Maybe it would jump start my reading mojo back into fiction. I put it on hold at the library, and a few weeks later, I picked it up.

I read Sittenfeld’s first book, Prep, a long time ago. It came out in 2005, but I probably read it a year or two later around the time that I took a young adult literature class in library school because I have confused plot details with a similar book that I read for that class called Vegan Virgin Valentine. Both were about smart, ambitious teenage girls struggling to fit in at school, although Prep takes place at the fictional boarding school called Ault. Sittenfeld’s book is also not really considered YA, although it easily could be. The only other book of hers I’ve read is American Wife, a fictionalized account of Laura Bush, which I thoroughly enjoyed as well.

I first heard about Sittenfeld when she was still largely unknown when I first moved to start graduate school in Iowa City in 2002. Around that time, I hung out a few times with a guy who was an alum of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He gave me a jade plant that he had acquired by helping a friend move. She didn’t want to take it with her, wherever she was going, and he didn’t want it either. Since I had just moved to town and did not have any houseplants yet, I happily took it home. I can’t tell you that he actually said, “Here’s a jade plant owned by my friend Curtis Sittenfeld, who by the way is a woman and has not yet published anything, but will someday become a bestselling author,” or anything akin to that. But later when I read Prep, I knew that she was the jade plant owner..

And what a fine jade plant it was! It was small but it grew quite a bit during my five years in Iowa City. It grew so much that I had to repot it. It was hearty and thick like all jade plants, although it did yellow a bit and drop some leaves every winter. I don’t remember now what happened to the Curtis Sittenfeld jade plant, but I have a feeling I also passed it on to someone else when I moved.

What does that jade plant have to do with Show Don’t Tell? The title story is the first one in the collection, and I was confused when I started to read it, thinking that it was a personal essay about Sittenfeld’s time at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Isn’t this supposed to be a collection of fictional short stories? I thought. It wasn’t until a few pages in when the main character’s name, Ruthie, appears, that I realized the story was indeed fiction. But like a lot of Sittenfeld’s work, I knew that this was autofiction. The story took me back to those first few months in Iowa City and all of the drama that seemed to always surround the Workshop crowd. Show Don’t Tell, the story, details the backstabbing competitiveness among Workshop students and the description of an alum’s visit for a reading sounded eerily like a cringeworthy David Foster Wallace experience. Looking back on the incidents from the story decades later, the fictional Ruthie sounds an awful lot like Sittenfeld: a very successful writer, and one of the only successful writers of her Workshop class who has made her bread and butter writing women’s domestic fiction, which is often denigrated by other Workshop students.

This is what I have always liked about Sittenfeld: she gives the people (women) what they want, literary laurels be damned. All of her novels and stories feature white upper-middle class women with elite educations, successful careers, and often dealing with light drama surrounding their husbands, ex-husbands, affair partners, sisters, or mothers. These are the kind of books I ate up starting in middle school and through college.

But I hardly ever read this genre after I started graduate school. Maybe it was because I was reading dense books about slavery, the Holocaust, the genocides of Indigenous people, and other topics that made the domestic drama of privileged white womanhood seem frivolous. I also started reading a lot more fiction by African American and indigenous people around that time as well.

Sittenfeld does dip her toes into some interesting social issues in these stories. In what I thought was the best story of the collection, White Women LOL, a rich white woman gets recorded and publicly shamed for a Karen-esque moment at a private party when she asks a group of black people what they’re doing in that part of the restaurant. Jill, the Karen in question, wants to redeem herself by finding the missing dog of her black neighbor and (maybe?) seems to understand that she will need to do more than this to earn back the trust of her friends and neighbors.

In The Richest Babysitter in the World, a babysitter for the fictionalized Bezos family comes to wonder decades later about the billionaire family she once knew before their company became so successful. The grown-up babysitter, now a professor, admits that the fictional company Pangea is “kind of bad” to her son, and wonders if the woman she once worked for, now a divorced billionaire, would be jealous of her own ordinary life.

I was excited to realize that the closer, Lost But Not Forgotten, is a follow up to Prep, and it takes place at the 30^th reunion of Lee Fiora’s Ault class. While I was happy to see that Lee ended up leading a nonprofit that provides art classes for the incarcerated, I was a bit disappointed that she hooks up with a classmate she barely knew who became finance guy, but at least he’s being guilted by his son into donating a lot of his money to progressive social causes.

Many of the stories involve women looking back at their ex-boyfriends or male acquaintances and wondering what could have been. I suppose these thoughts may weigh heavy on the minds of middle-aged white women. But like the third-person omniscient narrator of one of these stories, The Follow-Up, asks twice of why one character is dwelling on her ex, I also kept wondering, “What is this story about?”

This line, like Show Don’t Tell, sounds like something you’d hear in a writers’ workshop seminar, and perhaps Sittenfeld can’t get these clichéd workshop professor criticisms out of her head as she writes. Maybe she’s also struggling with a bigger question, what is the point of these stories? Or maybe that’s what I kept asking myself during the week that I read them. I had taken the week off from my usual slate of protests and political meetings and was feeling terribly guilty about it. Why was I spending my time reading this book when the world is on fire?

For ten years, I wrote book reviews in history and biography for Library Journal. I cranked these out like a machine, reading them quickly with a critical eye like I did in graduate school, and summing them up in a blunt 180-200 words with a sometimes damning VERDICT at the end. It’s kind of strange and freeing now to have unlimited space to say anything I want to about a book. It took me a little while to feel fully confident in my opinions in those reviews. It’s easy to be snarky, but having read some reviews of my own book, I’m familiar with how unnecessarily cruel and unhinged a lot of them can be.

So I don’t want to be too harsh on Show Don’t Tell. After all, these stories were written before the hell of 2025, although some were clearly written around 2020, mentioning the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests as mostly an annoyance to the characters. No writer, much less a fiction writer, should feel obligated to dive deep into the political insanity of the past few years, and no writer should be judged for what they don’t want to write about. Especially when there are so many millions of books to choose from that can suit a reader, why bother reading something you hate just to be gleefully critical? Why not embrace fiction as mindless escapism? I suppose we all need a break from real life sometimes.

Since I finished Show Don’t Tell, I’ve moved on to The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin, a New Yorker writer and biographer I got to meet at a biography writers conference years ago. It’s much more my speed and the kind of book that I seek out as a reader now. It’s a deep dive into one person’s short life, and it tackles the thorny issues concerning the way her celebrity has made her so many things to so many people, the way we remember the Holocaust and its heroes, and of course, the moral and ethical implications of publishing a dead person’s semi-private writings.

Maybe I’ll review it, and maybe I won’t. All I can say right now is that I’m beyond grateful that, for the present time anyway, I can still read books like this one, or like Show Don’t Tell, or whatever else strikes my fancy, and I can still write whatever I want about them. The deeper I get into The Many Lives of Anne Frank, I’m realizing that it’s the threat to these freedoms that will pull me back to books and end my reading funk with an urgency that I have never had before.