Salon.com > Curtis Sittenfeld http://www.salon.com Wed, 03 Jul 2013 01:14:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 An excerpt from Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Sisterland” http://www.salon.com/2013/06/29/an_excerpt_from_curtis_sittenfelds_sisterland/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/29/an_excerpt_from_curtis_sittenfelds_sisterland/#comments Sat, 29 Jun 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13340525 September 2009
St. Louis, Missouri

The  shaking started  around three in the morning, and it happened that I was already awake because I’d nursed Owen at two and then, instead of going back to sleep, I’d lain there brooding about the fight I’d had at lunch with my sister, Vi. I’d driven with Owen and Rosie in the backseat to pick up Vi, and the four of us had gone to Hacienda. We’d finished eating and I was collecting Rosie’s  stray food from the tabletop—once I had imagined I wouldn’t be the kind of mother who ordered chicken tenders for her child off the menu at a Mexican restaurant—when Vi said, “So I have a date tomorrow.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Who is it?”

Casually, after running the tip of her tongue over her top teeth to check for food, Vi said, “She’s an IT consultant, which sounds boring, but she’s traveled a lot in South and Central America, so she couldn’t be a total snooze, right?”

I was being baited, but I tried to match Vi’s casual tone as I said, “Did you meet online?” Rosie, who was two and a half, had gotten up from the table, wandered over to a ficus plant in the corner, and was smelling the leaves. Beside me in the booth, buckled into his car seat, Owen, who was six months, grabbed at a little plush giraffe that hung from the car seat’s handle.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/29/an_excerpt_from_curtis_sittenfelds_sisterland/feed/ 0 Why critics of MFA programs have it wrong http://www.salon.com/2011/10/22/why_critics_of_mfa_programs_have_it_wrong/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/22/why_critics_of_mfa_programs_have_it_wrong/#comments Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10130672 Lan Samantha Chang was already one of literature's young stars -- the author of the acclaimed "Hunger: A Novella and Stories" and the novel "Inheritance" -- when she was tapped to succeed Frank Conroy as the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the most prestigious MFA program in American letters. Her latest novel, "All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost," now in paperback, is set within a writing program, and the Workshop celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, at a time when writers like Chad Harbach and Elif Batuman have written critiques of MFA culture. So we asked fellow Iowa graduate Curtis Sittenfeld, the bestselling author of "Prep" and "American Wife," to discuss what really happens at Iowa, the consequences of early literary stardom and whether any criticism of workshop culture and "the Iowa story" rings true.

We're having this conversation on the occasion of the paperback publication of "All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost," so I thought I’d start with a few questions about that. The first is a two-pronged question, and I’ll ask both prongs before you answer. One, what is it in human nature that makes us, as readers, want fiction to be autobiographical, or draw from real life? The second part of the question is what is your response to the people who want the writing program in your novel to be the Iowa Writers' Workshop?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/10/22/why_critics_of_mfa_programs_have_it_wrong/feed/ 45 “Big Girls Don’t Cry”: The election that changed everything for women http://www.salon.com/2010/09/12/traister_big_girls_dont_cry/ http://www.salon.com/2010/09/12/traister_big_girls_dont_cry/#comments Sun, 12 Sep 2010 18:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2010/09/12/traister_big_girls_dont_cry Rebecca Traister's extraordinary new book, "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women," draws on pieces she wrote for Salon during the 2008 election -- about Hillary and Palin and Michelle, about politics and gender and her own thorny relationships to each. But it is also the election as you've never read it before, a book that renders those now-familiar stories in a compulsively readable narrative and hammers home just how transformative the moment really was. (An excerpt from the book will run in Salon on Monday.)

To discuss the book, Salon asked Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the acclaimed novels "American Wife" (a compassionate, fictionalized history of Laura Bush) and "Prep" (a keenly observed coming-of-age tale), to interview Traister over the phone. A transcript of their conversation follows.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/09/12/traister_big_girls_dont_cry/feed/ 109 I know just the person for you! http://www.salon.com/2009/02/14/curtis_sittenfeld/ http://www.salon.com/2009/02/14/curtis_sittenfeld/#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2009/02/14/curtis_sittenfeld Of all the things I'm no good at, my favorite by far is matchmaking. I've tried to set up nearly a dozen couples, and with one notable exception, it's never worked. I've unsuccessfully introduced straight and gay people, old friends and new acquaintances, but the one thing they almost all have in common is an apparent aversion to each other. Remarkably, my lack of success hasn't dimmed my enthusiasm.

My most glaring matchmaking failure was when my brother-in-law Dave brought a date to his date. I swear this is true. I'd arranged a double date in which Dave and a delightful woman I knew from growing up in Ohio would go to a movie and dinner with me and my then-boyfriend, now-husband. I feel confident that I was explicit about this plan to everyone involved. The Ohioan showed up at the movie theater looking cute and prepared to be a good sport. Dave then showed up at the movie theater with another delightful young woman. The only reason I've forgiven Dave for the awkward five-person evening that ensued is that the woman he brought subsequently became his girlfriend for the next year and a half -- that is to say, when he brought a date to a date, at least he was serious about her.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/02/14/curtis_sittenfeld/feed/ 32 Heaven, heartache and the power of deviled eggs http://www.salon.com/2008/05/24/trisha_yearwood/ http://www.salon.com/2008/05/24/trisha_yearwood/#comments Sat, 24 May 2008 11:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2008/05/24/trisha_yearwood Trisha Yearwood's fans, if those of us gathered at a Viking store and cooking school in a suburb outside Nashville, Tenn., are representative, are mostly Southern or Midwestern white women in our 30s and 40s, but some of us are men, some of us are gay, and at least one of us has a mohawk. What we have in common, besides that we love Yearwood, is that through local radio contests sponsored by Clear Channel Communications stations in various American cities, 34 of us have won a cooking lesson with the country singer to celebrate the publication of her bestselling new cookbook, "Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes From My Family to Yours." This is how we've found ourselves in the sort of mini-amphitheater where a college class might be held, except that instead of a professor standing in front of us, it's Yearwood, and instead of syllabuses waiting on the desks when we entered, there were deviled eggs.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/05/24/trisha_yearwood/feed/ 45 The whole world in her home http://www.salon.com/2006/09/12/fay_greene/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/12/fay_greene/#comments Tue, 12 Sep 2006 11:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2006/09/12/fay_greene For Melissa Fay Greene, the enormity of the AIDS orphan crisis in Africa became impossible to ignore one Sunday morning in August 2000. After reading an article in the New York Times estimating that more than 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa had lost parents to AIDS -- and that by 2010 those figures were expected to rise to between 25 million and 50 million -- Greene wondered who was going to raise 12 million children. Admitting that she and her attorney husband in Atlanta were being driven cheerfully "insane" by their five kids, Greene asked, "Who will offer grief counseling to 12, 15, 18, 36 million children? Who will help them avoid lives of servitude or prostitution? Who will pass on to them the traditions of culture and religion, of history and government, of craft and profession? Who will help them grow up, choose the right person to marry, find work, and learn to parent their own children?"

These questions sent Greene, now 53, on a journey as both an adoptive parent and a journalist. Since that Sunday morning, she and her husband have adopted two Ethiopian orphans, with two more on the way.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/09/12/fay_greene/feed/ 16 Happily ever after for Kathy Griffin http://www.salon.com/2005/12/06/griffin_5/ http://www.salon.com/2005/12/06/griffin_5/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2005 15:22:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2005/12/06/griffin For those of us despondent over the breakup of comedian Kathy Griffin and husband Matt Moline -- after their surprisingly sweet, down-to-earth marriage was captured on Bravo's "My Life on the D-List," Griffin filed for divorce on Sept. 23 -- there's good news: The two attended the classy-sounding Malibu Rum's "Light Up Your Holidays" event at Pig 'N Whistle in Los Angeles, where Griffin told a reporter, "Matt and I are like Pamela (Anderson) and Tommy Lee. We'll fuck pigs. We'll do anything. We're trying to make it work." Some straightforward marriage counseling might get better results than bestiality, but, hey -- whatever it takes!

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/12/06/griffin_5/feed/ 2 Divorce on the D-list http://www.salon.com/2005/11/22/griffin_4/ http://www.salon.com/2005/11/22/griffin_4/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2005 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2005/11/22/griffin You don't have to subscribe to Us Weekly -- although I do -- to know that 2005 has been a big year for celebrity divorces. It was, of course, the king and queen of Hollywood, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who kicked things off in January, and now it looks like the prince and princess, Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson, might be concluding it. In just the last few months, other splits have included Renie Zellweger and Kenny Chesney, Tori Spelling and actor-writer Charlie Shanian, Jamie-Lynn (aka Meadow Soprano) and A.J. DiScala, and "One Tree Hill's" Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray. A couple of these marriages lasted well under a year, which (let's be honest) is grimly satisfying, the subtext being that celebrities might be rich and good-looking but they sure don't have their shit together. Stars really are just like us!

While I've yet to shed a tear for the demise of, say, the five-month union of Bush and Murray, there's one celeb divorce that genuinely breaks my heart: Kathy Griffin's.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/11/22/griffin_4/feed/ 21 This girl’s life http://www.salon.com/2005/01/20/prep/ http://www.salon.com/2005/01/20/prep/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2005/01/20/prep I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up. Ancient History was my first class of the day, occurring after morning chapel and roll call, which was not actually roll call but a series of announcements that took place in an enormous room with twenty-foot-high Palladian windows, rows and rows of desks with hinged tops that you lifted to store your books inside, and mahogany panels on the walls -- one for each class since Ault's founding in 1882 -- engraved with the name of every person who had graduated from the school. The two senior prefects led roll call, standing at a desk on a platform and calling on the people who'd signed up ahead of time to make announcements. My own desk, assigned alphabetically, was near the platform, and because I didn't talk to my classmates who sat around me, I spent the lull before roll call listening to the prefects' exchanges with teachers or other students or each other. The prefects' names were Henry Thorpe and Gates Medkowski. It was my fourth week at the school, and I didn't know much about Ault, but I did know that Gates was the first girl in Ault's history to have been elected prefect.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/01/20/prep/feed/ 0 Short and sweet http://www.salon.com/2004/11/08/short_men/ http://www.salon.com/2004/11/08/short_men/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2004 17:58:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/11/08/short_men For a person scrolling through any of the major online dating Web sites, it would not be altogether unreasonable to come to the conclusion that the short man is, due to lack of breeding opportunities, in imminent danger of extinction. Take, for example, Salon's own Spring Street Networks, on which attractive women in multiple cities unabashedly express their height preferences: Tikigirl816 is 30 years old and 5-foot-6. She likes the Red Hot Chili Peppers, considers boxers sexy, and wants to date a man between 5-foot-10 and 7-foot-1. Nerfeli, 34 and 5-foot-7, wishes she were currently getting a massage on a beach in Indonesia, though not in the presence of a guy shorter than 6-foot-1. And TBirdieNYC, 28 and 5-foot-8, keeps a bamboo plant in her bedroom -- but if you're under 6 feet, you'll never lay eyes on it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/11/08/short_men/feed/ 0 Latte, tea or me? http://www.salon.com/2004/10/07/crush_4/ http://www.salon.com/2004/10/07/crush_4/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2004 16:21:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/10/07/crush If I were to pinpoint how it was that I found myself making out with the guy from the running shoe store, I'd say it had a lot to do with when we went outside so he could see me run. In jeans and a sweater, I jogged up the sidewalk as he figured out which shoes would fit me best. The guy was so laid-back and so nice that I felt only moderately dorky, plus he was really cute. Then it emerged -- be still my heart! -- that he was a competitive runner. What can I say? By the time he'd laced up my shoes and gently eased my feet into them, I was deep in the throes of a customer service crush.

The customer service crush can spring into existence just about anywhere: restaurants, banks, video rental stores, even airplanes. My personal favorite is the over-the-phone computer-help-desk guy. As your hard drive melts down, you're so vulnerable and emotional, and he's so clinical and competent -- how can you not become smitten? The customer service crush is the girl at the dry cleaner's with the French accent, the guy at Kinko's whose dirty, shaggy hair is dirty and shaggy in a good way. These people are extra friendly to us (or maybe alluringly unfriendly), and their place of employment can provide an automatic common interest: You drink coffee? Oh my God, I drink coffee, too! Or, as 29-year-old Rich, a Web content manager living in Boston, puts it about the Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) store employee who struck his fancy, "I think a lot of it was that she could talk about tents with great ease. Had I met her under other circumstances, it might not have prompted me to go back three times and leave a note."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/10/07/crush_4/feed/ 0 Is she really going out with him? http://www.salon.com/2004/06/22/cool_couples/ http://www.salon.com/2004/06/22/cool_couples/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/06/22/cool_couples Ah, June -- the kickoff of the wedding season, the time to raise a glass to your beloved friends while secretly pondering some of the enduring connubial mysteries: Why do bridesmaids exist anyway? Why does anyone think it's a good idea to write their own vows? And most important, why are you -- my clever, edgy, ambitious, kindhearted friend -- marrying this total dud?

Yes, with 2.3 million marriages occurring in the United States every year, there are bound to be some mismatches. But we're not talking here about slightly imbalanced couples, where she's lively and he's quiet, or he's a great cook and she can't boil spaghetti to save her life. We're talking about really cool individuals -- our closest friends -- and the pathologically lame men and women they date, have relationships with and even marry.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/06/22/cool_couples/feed/ 0 Why “Dirty Dancing” is the best girl movie ever http://www.salon.com/2004/02/27/dirty_dancing/ http://www.salon.com/2004/02/27/dirty_dancing/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2004 18:50:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/02/27/dirty_dancing There are other reasons why "Dirty Dancing" is the best girl movie ever made, and other reasons why its fans are so passionate, but the defining one is this: "Dirty Dancing's" basic proposition is that it's entirely reasonable for a moderately attractive young woman to find love with a smolderingly hot man. Go ahead and make jokes about Patrick Swayze in, well, pretty much any other role he's ever played. But as Johnny Castle, goy dance instructor at a Jewish resort in 1963, he's a swoon-inducing heartthrob.

This is why seeing Swayze in "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," the "Dirty Dancing" remake out today nationwide, is so depressing. Swayze's face looks both bloated and stringy, and because he wears similar clothes and plays a similar, if much less significant, role -- this time, he's the dance instructor at a swanky Havana hotel in 1958 -- it's as if ever since he mouthed "And I owe it all to you" in the last scene of the original, he's been preserved in formaldehyde. If Swayze embraced his age, it would be fine, possibly even sexy. But in the new movie, he's meant to be a kind of ageless, sexless dance Buddha who dispenses hollow psychobabble about "moving though your fear" to the main character Katey Miller (Romola Garai). He's so aggressively terrible that it's as if every minute he appears onscreen reduces his hotness in the original "Dirty Dancing" by 1%; luckily, he appears for only about ten minutes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/02/27/dirty_dancing/feed/ 0 Why I love Laura Bush http://www.salon.com/2004/01/29/laura_2/ http://www.salon.com/2004/01/29/laura_2/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2004 11:49:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2004/01/29/laura I'm a 28-year-old woman, a registered Democrat, and a staunch enough liberal that I take would-be epithets such as "flaming," "knee-jerk" and "bleeding-heart" as compliments. I believe that George Bush's policies are at best misguided and at worst evil. And yet I love Laura Bush. In fact, there is no public figure I admire more.

Looking back, I can see that the love that dare not speak its name came over me gradually. In January 2001, I found watching George W. Bush's inauguration on television so surreal and horrifying that I had to call a friend, and the two of us just sat there in our separate apartments, not really talking except to say, "I can't believe this. Can you believe this?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/01/29/laura_2/feed/ 0 “If we haven’t found anyone else by 40, let’s get hitched!” http://www.salon.com/2003/11/19/marriage_pacts/ http://www.salon.com/2003/11/19/marriage_pacts/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2003 00:42:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2003/11/18/marriage_pacts Christine and Max made the pact in their late 20s, while on vacation in Mexico: If neither of them was married by the age of 40, they'd marry each other. Though they'd never been an official couple, their friendship had, over the course of five years, resembled something awfully close. As Christine explains it, in addition to traveling to romantic destinations such as Mexico, "We saw sunsets and held hands and did karaoke and met people together and went to weddings together."

Christine and Max (all names except those of experts have been changed) were both living in New York when they met on the set of a short film. Initially, there had been a reason for them not to become involved -- they'd both just been through painful breakups. Then, after time passed, Christine actually valued Max too much to date him. "I never wanted Max to be an ex-boyfriend," she explains. "It was way more fun to just have a really close good friend that I could count on for anything -- to know what I loved, to remember my birthday."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/11/19/marriage_pacts/feed/ 0 The wedding boyfriend http://www.salon.com/2003/11/04/wedding_boyfriend/ http://www.salon.com/2003/11/04/wedding_boyfriend/#comments Tue, 04 Nov 2003 12:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2003/11/04/wedding_boyfriend I am, according to my friend Susanna, a wedding ho. In the last five years, I've gone to every wedding I've been invited to -- 12 in total. My so-called wedding vow started after two college classmates married each other in the summer of 1997. I decided not to go to the wedding because it was across the country, because my then-boss didn't want me to take time off, and because I had grown apart from the friends I'd once shared with the bride and groom. And since it was going to be a Mormon wedding, it wasn't even like the awkwardness could be smoothed over with booze.

But afterward, after I hadn't gone, I regretted it. Even though weddings are in many ways ridiculous -- people spend vast sums of money to act out corny and antiquated rituals in a frenzied setting -- they still mean something. They're an act of optimism, a time when people come together for happy rather than unhappy reasons. And I hadn't been there.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/11/04/wedding_boyfriend/feed/ 0 Too young, too pretty, too successful http://www.salon.com/2003/09/04/freudenberger/ http://www.salon.com/2003/09/04/freudenberger/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2003 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/09/04/freudenberger First, the facts: In its 2001 "Summer Fiction Issue" the New Yorker printed four stories by "debut writers," a title defined by the magazine as "young writers who have not yet published a book." Among the four was Nell Freudenberger, then age 26; her contributor's note mentioned both that she was an editorial assistant at the New Yorker and that her piece, which was called "Lucky Girls," was her first published story. Author photos accompanied all the debut stories, and the three other writers had been photographed at, respectively, a park, a restaurant and a marina. Freudenberger had been photographed in her apartment, shot from above while sitting on what appeared to be a shiny, velvety mauve and silver bedspread. She had pale skin and shoulder-length dark hair; she wore a serious expression; it would be overstating it, but not by much, to say that you could see down her shirt.

On the June day the magazine appeared in my mailbox, I set aside what I was doing, which was, if I remember correctly, nothing (I had just graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was still living in Iowa City) and read much of the issue, including the story by Freudenberger. I think I liked the story, though it's hard to say now -- a bit like having been given a hamburger by a man at a picnic and only later, after finding out the man was Ray Kroc, trying to evaluate that hamburger. What I do remember is thinking Freudenberger looked kind of awkward, but in an endearing way.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/09/04/freudenberger/feed/ 0 Traumas in adolescent life http://www.salon.com/1999/02/17/feature_377/ http://www.salon.com/1999/02/17/feature_377/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1999/02/17/feature | Like everyone else, I have no idea what women want (and I, despite my name, actually am a woman). But I do know what adolescent girls care about. How? Last spring, I served as one of five judges in Seventeen magazine's annual fiction contest, an institution whose former winners include Sylvia Plath, Lorrie Moore and the dread Joyce Maynard. Among the 400-plus pieces I read, I ended up picking both the first- and third-place winners. I also ended up being highly entertained and unexpectedly charmed by all the stories that the teenage writers chose to tell.
I'll be honest: I didn't enter into being a judge anticipating that I'd learn much. For one thing, at the age of 23, I am myself not that far removed from adolescence. And for another, I had won this same contest six years earlier. When I won, in 1992, it was the summer before my senior year in high school, and the judge who selected me as the winner (I submitted eight stories -- you know, just to be safe) was Jennifer Egan, who went on to write the novel "The Invisible Circus" and the story collection "Emerald City." In the years since then, I have had both fiction and nonfiction in Seventeen several times, and I've been receiving what seems to be a lifetime subscription to the magazine -- its appearance first in my college dorms and now in my apartment is a source of both confusion and amusement to visitors. They're even more surprised when I tell them that I actually read it.
This is all just to say that before serving as a judge, I already believed I had more than a passing familiarity with the world of girls. But there was something about hearing (or reading) so many of their voices -- in the aggregate, unedited, as they chose to present themselves instead of as someone else, like Time magazine or the WB, chose to present them -- that was both surprising and endearing. The stories came from nearly every state in the country -- Arvada, Colo., and Niceville, Fla., and Ypsilanti, Miss. -- as well as India, France and the Philippines. Their authors were named Brandi and Aimee, LaKeisha and Prudence, Willow, Meredith, Denise, Desiree, Abby and Melissa. Often, the handwriting in the notes that accompanied stories was big and bubbly. "I spilled my guts out for you and I hope you enjoy it," wrote one girl. Another signed her letter "your eternal reader" (addressed, obviously, to Seventeen and not to me). Several authors included class pictures, which I simultaneously had no idea what to do with and felt unable to throw away.

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