Being a person is so weird: Curtis Sittenfeld on life, luck and middle age

March 4, 2025 journo

Writer Curtis Sittenfeld’s experience growing up at an elite boarding school inspired a novel, so it’s only fitting that her reunion with her classmates delivered the sequel.

“They’re kind of less intense than you think. I feel like the most intense part is my emotions before,” Sittenfeld, 49, says of the reunions with her former classmates at Massachusetts college Groton, as we talk over Zoom. “I feel like I am 15 and I feel very worked up, and then I go and it’s all these pleasant, middle-aged people chatting. It’s not emotionally dramatic.”

“I feel like being in your late 40s is wildly interesting,” says Curtis Sittenfeld.

But Sittenfeld is an undisputed master of turning the conversations of pleasant, middle-aged people into complex and compelling stories, as she does in the novella Lost But Not Forgotten, the sequel to her bestselling debut boarding school novel, Prep. The novella – long requested, much anticipated – is the perfect ending to her new collection of short stories, Show Don’t Tell.

Twenty-five years later, readers are reunited with Lee Fiora, the self-sabotaging, often unhappy, middle-class scholarship student they met in Prep, as she attends her reunion at the elite college Ault.

“It was more of a light, fun experience than I thought,” Sittenfeld says of returning to the territory that launched a publishing career now extending to famous fans, book club adoration and nine books, including American Wife, Rodham and Romantic Comedy. “The way I feel about any short story I write is that I’m just going to try this and see how it turns out, and I think that’s a way of not putting too much pressure on myself.”

Years ago, an editor warned Sittenfeld against writing a sequel, concerned that readers adored Prep and there were too many ways it could go wrong. But at her own 25th reunion, a spark for a story was lit. Five years later, at her 30th reunion, that spark turned into a fire. A novella felt less intense, she says, and she found slipping into Lee’s voice “weirdly easy”.

Part of the joy (and horror) of any reunion is discovering the adults that the adolescents have turned into; whether the perception you had of a person has been vindicated or shattered by time. But there is surely an added layer of complexity when the reunion you’re attending is for the school that informed a critical and commercial hit.

“I am sure there are people who don’t like Prep, but I don’t think they would say much to me,” Sittenfeld says. “To go to a reunion is a little bit of colliding selves. I used to be a teenager who cared a lot about the opinion of my peers. Now I am an adult writer, I’ve written nine books, of course I’ve gotten negative feedback. I’ve heard everything.”

Sittenfeld’s new collection is intensely interested in who people are when they’re young, and who they become. Or, as one character puts it, the question of: “How the f— did I arrive at this point?” There are sliding doors aplenty in these stories – meaningless encounters bestowed meaning through time. The what-ifs, the should-haves, the could-haves. There’s the white woman who goes viral after telling five black guests at a birthday party that it’s a private event; the unhappy wife who wonders if she should have turned her one-night stand with a barista into a lifetime; the emerging artist who refuses to take part in a toothpaste commercial that goes on to be viewed 52 million times on YouTube.

“I don’t think it’s a bad question,” says Sittenfeld. “Life is so weird, being a person is so weird. I think it might even be healthy to wonder that and to recognise that there is good luck, bad luck and arbitrariness. As you get older, you look around and think, ‘Who accumulated all this shit?’ There’s this disorienting aspect of being a person.”

This disorientation is rendered almost sublime in these stories, which Sittenfeld wrote over seven years. Her leads are usually white, privileged women in their middle age, navigating often ambiguous encounters that reveal larger themes of marriage, friendship and power. If that seems too serious, I promise you Sittenfeld is as wry on the page as in real life.

“I feel like being in your late 40s is wildly interesting,” Sittenfeld says. “There is crazy shit that happens. By the time you get to this age, crazy shit has happened in everyone’s life … If someone doesn’t want to read about middle age because they think it won’t be interesting, I think they might be underestimating middle age.”

There are frequent brushes with fame and fortune – a babysitter who refuses a job by her employer who later becomes a billionaire; a film producer who believes she is being seduced by a relationship guru; an unlikely classmate who becomes a renowned writer. In the Prep sequel, it’s Lee’s unexpected encounter with a rock star that propels the story.

While Sittenfeld jokes she’s not nearly as recognisable as “someone who’s been on half a season of reality TV”, her success has seen her brush shoulders with very famous people, including (I make her tell me) Michelle Obama, Reese Witherspoon, Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden. These encounters fascinate her, the tug-of-war between admiration and self-awareness.

“In my experience, most famous people are good-looking and charismatic, and it’s not by accident that they are famous,” she says. “They just have a little sparkle. That’s why I would never consider myself to be famous.

“I can see my hair looks frightful. I think all my friends are like, ‘Curtis, change out of your sports bra, we’re meeting for lunch.’ I don’t want to make myself disgusting, but my car has apple cores rolling around. That thing that celebrities have, I do not have.”

If there were a reunion between Curtis and her younger self on the eve of the publication of her first novel, what would her advice be? “Appreciate it and maybe worry a little bit less.”

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Penguin) is out now.

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