In her second story collection, Show Don’t Tell, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, Romantic Comedy) mines midlife—the cringey moments and also the unexpected shifts in perspective. “One of the surprises of adulthood for me has been that, as the years pass, it has become less rather than more clear to me whether I’m a good or bad person,” a character muses, in “Giraffe and Flamingo.” Many of Show Don’t Tell’s characters are similarly taking stock, in sharp portraits of mostly (though not entirely) middle-aged women and their long friendships, floundering marriages and postdivorce lives.
Some of the stories trace a brief encounter with a celebrity and the surprises that result. In “The Marriage Clock,” movie executive Heather tries to persuade a Christian marriage expert to cede his creative approval rights for a film adaptation of his mega-bestselling self-help book. And “The Richest Babysitter in the World” recounts Kit’s year of babysitting for a young Seattle family; the dad has founded a startup that, decades later, will become an Amazon-like behemoth. In “The Tomorrow Box,” Andy, a teacher, reconnects with a college classmate who’s made an unlikely fortune as an influencer peddling total honesty.
Other stories push a character and a cultural moment together. The cringe-inducing story “White Women LOL” details the aftermath of a viral video. Jill, a white Midwestern mom, is caught on camera behaving in an undeniably racist way, and in trying to get out from under the weight of the incident, digs herself into a deeper hole. In “A for Alone,” Irene, an artist, aims to create a conceptual artwork out of the Mike Pence rule (do not meet with anyone of a different sex who’s not your spouse). As Irene blunders through this project, setting up lunches with various men, often to hilarious effect, she unfortunately proves the merit of the Mike Pence rule.
Longtime Sittenfeld fans will be pleased to encounter Lee Fiora, the main character from Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep, in “Lost But Not Forgotten.” Lee, now 48, returns to the tony Massachusetts boarding school where she once felt so out of place for her 30th reunion. As with the collection’s other stories, “Lost But Not Forgotten” excels in its close observation of characters—a gesture that reveals a class detail, or the performative small talk of a reunion—though the story’s real strength is in revealing Lee’s shift in perspective over time. Likewise, “Show Don’t Tell” focuses on one night at the Iowa Writers Workshop, before zooming forward 20 years to reckon with the unpredictability of which writers succeed and what kind of people the classmates have become. This telescoping of time gives these stories the feel of tiny novels.
If some of Show Don’t Tell’s stories are more slice of life than big drama, that’s OK. It’s a cohesive, often dryly funny, occasionally heartbreaking set of stories, and a satisfying report from the front lines of middle age.
