Bestselling fiction writer Curtis Sittenfeld joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about her new collection of stories, Show Don’t Tell. Sittenfeld discusses the title story, which depicts graduate students in creative writing competing for funding, and its connections to her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when that practice was common. She also considers how President Trump’s attacks on DEI reveal some people’s true natures, and what it means to write about “the hypocrisy of being a person.” Finally, she explains why she thinks of time as a plot twist, and reflects on returning to the protagonist of her debut novel, Prep, Lee Fiora, who reappears in the new collection’s final story, which features her thirtieth high school reunion. Sittenfeld reads from Show Don’t Tell.
Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel and our website.
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From the episode:
Curtis Sittenfeld
Show Don’t Tell (2025) • Romantic Comedy (2023) • Rodham (2021) • The Best American Short Stories 2020 (ed. with Heidi Pitlor) • You Think It, I’ll Say It (2019) • Eligible (2016) • Sisterland (2013) • American Wife (2008) • The Man of My Dreams (2006) • Prep (2005)
V.V. Ganeshananthan: And speaking of cultural change in your story, White Women LOL, which, if I’m remembering correctly, was originally in Oprah …
Curtis Sittenfeld: It was published on the website of Oprah Magazine.
VVG: The white narrator, Jill, is excoriated on Facebook for asking a table of Black diners to leave her friend Amy’s birthday party, and Jill is suspended from her job with pay. This seems like a completely familiar phenomenon. I can imagine, just a few years ago, identifying white women as Karen’s being a huge part of sort of social media, like these little snippets of people behaving in this way, kind of going viral, not viral-viral, as Jill would say, but even just within one’s small circles.
Now we’re six weeks into the Trump era, and Trump has placed all federal Diversity Equity and Inclusion employees on leave, and is pressuring private companies to eliminate the kinds of DEI programs and beliefs that led to the narrator being suspended. The Enola Gay was trending yesterday on Twitter because the Enola Gay was flagged for being called the Enola Gay. We live in Minneapolis, where Target has totally caved and is getting rid of all of the DEI-related things it was putting in its stores. Have you been surprised by how quickly things are shifting in this way during the first weeks of the Trump administration?
CS: I guess, I think yes and no. I don’t really think of it in terms of the pace of change, but I think more in terms of what’s inside people that I do or don’t know. When I was growing up— so I was born in 1975 and I think I didn’t recognize it as such, but I think that it was like my childhood coincided with, I think, the greatest racial integration of American schools in history. And, you know, I think about when there are people who, in 2025, very enthusiastically openly express racist views, I think was that in you all along, and maybe at an earlier moment you felt uncomfortable expressing it and now you’ve sort of been emboldened, or did some algorithm influence you so strongly that you went down a path of thinking you wouldn’t have otherwise gone down. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer to that is. I mean, I think that there’s data to suggest the latter, that people really are, you know, radicalized, obviously, by the Internet in all sorts of different ways, but yeah, I do think about social contagion, which can be positive and extraordinarily negative.
VVG: So in the story, there’s this moment when there’s this section where Jill is encountering people, maybe at the office after this incident has occurred, and one of them is a white man who says something like, “well, they’re really getting entitled, aren’t they?” And the way that you so accurately capture the ways people will speak in public, in private, and in that kind of gossipy space in between where people’s circles alter how they speak, is just, it’s just incredibly well done. And I remember reading the story when it was online, and to revisit it in the collection, it’s like, oh, I remember how this story kind of was, like its accuracy is so painful, actually.
CS: So the word that comes up a lot when people mention the story to me is cringe, which I think people mean as maybe a noun, a verb and an adjective. But yeah, I would even feel it when I would be proofreading the book. I think I would feel a little queasiness in anticipation of reading that story. We’re really doing a good job of selling the collection, aren’t we?
VVG: I mean, it’s an amazing story. So when you’re writing a story that makes you feel queasy, makes me feel queasy, and also, I 100 percent couldn’t stop reading it, right? Can you talk a little about what made you want to write a story that you probably knew that was going to make you cringe?
CS: I mean, I think that I write stories about subjects that sort of preoccupy or confuse me. And certainly seeing these kinds of videos, and seeing white women sort of try to tell on other people or prevent people from accessing the spaces that are public spaces, or maybe are like private spaces, like an apartment building, and kind of saying, “no, you don’t belong here,” not knowing that person who tends to be a person of color does live there too, like, we both live there. I think I would kind of feel like, what is going on? The white women in these videos, would she be in agreement about how she’s coming across? Is it a factual misunderstanding, or do the facts actually not matter? What is the sort of mental state? And collectively how we decide what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, and then, in moments of that shifting, what does that all mean? Which I mean, who knows what it all means? But I think it can be examined through very specific situations.
Whitney Terrell: Jill is also, you know, she would consider herself a liberal, I think. I mean, she’s able to think through, like, what she did wrong and why she’s being criticized, and she doesn’t react to it as though she doesn’t—I mean, now she would have the option of turning in her boss for suspending her, you know? She could prosecute people under the Trump rules, but I noticed there’s a moment in the story where she has a friend who’s Black, and one of the subplots is that this friend has lost their dog and she keeps seeing it when she’s jogging, and they end up talking about it. And I wonder if you could talk about–I thought that maybe you were trying to get at this idea of the way the Internet creates a sort of public argument, and that’s different from what people do when they’re in private, because she is actually helping her friend. They have a good conversation, and then she asks, ‘did you see the video?’ And the friend just shuts down. I wondered if you could talk about your thinking in that scene.
CS: So I find myself often saying that people will kind of say— and I know you’re asking a more sophisticated question this than this— but people will kind of say, like, what’s the message of this story or this novel, and—
WT: The purpose of fiction is to say things that you can’t say.
CS: Yeah, if it could be boiled down, then I would have written an essay. So I think it is exploring some of the messiness and hypocrisy of being a person. And White Women LOL I think does that in a kind of extreme way, but I think a lot of my short stories do that. And also almost no person and almost no character in my fiction is only one thing. Jill is, I would say, clearly in the wrong but in the context of her community, before this, she’s never been a pariah. She’s not a clearly reprehensible person behaving reprehensibly. It’s like she’s an average person who commits a racist act, and then how does she square that away with her own self-identity?
I’m frank about the fact that I’m politically liberal, and there’s also a story about the so-called Mike Pence rule or Billy Graham rule that men and women shouldn’t be alone together, because they’ll accidentally have sex, which is obviously sexist, heteronormative, etc. But the protagonist in the story thinks that the rule is sexist and heteronormative, and then proceeds to act in a way that reminds the reader of why the rule exists. So, I mean, I don’t know if you guys find this, but I find it hard not to be hypocritical in life and I find it hard to be dignified.
VVG: I think you know on both counts that I, yes, I identify with this.
WT: One of the things that I noticed in your writing, in this book and everywhere, is your attention to what I call social norms as opposed to political beliefs, and political beliefs are what we argue about on the internet, I think, and social norms are undefined, you know, but they’re really important to novelists. I wonder how you would define the term social norm, for you as a writer, because you mentioned it in one of the stories, actually.
CS: I think that I would define social norms as just sort of the unspoken but seemingly agreed upon ways that a community behaves. Do you buy that? Does that seem convincing?
WT: Yeah, I totally do. I feel like they’re really important to writers. I would talk to my class like, if you’re a woman and you’re jogging in the park and I, a man, am running faster than you, and I catch up to you, but then I don’t pass you, how long does it take for you to feel uncomfortable. And everyone says five seconds, a second, but there’s no rule that I can’t run slowly behind you. But everyone knows you shouldn’t do that.
CS: Everyone does know that.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara. Photograph of Curtis Sittenfeld by Jenn Ackerman.
