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There really was a woman who photocopied her butt at a workplace in the 1980s.
Curtis Sittenfeld heard about the incident when she was a girl and filed it away. Four decades later, the Great Butt Xeroxing makes an appearance in her new short story collection, “Show Don’t Tell.”
She mentioned it one day last week when she met up with her oldest childhood friend, Anne Morriss, in Cincinnati, where they had both grown up. Ms. Sittenfeld, who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters, was back in town while on tour for her latest book. Ms. Morriss, a leadership coach in Boston, was there to celebrate her mother’s 83rd birthday.
The story of the woman who photocopied her butt has stayed with Ms. Sittenfeld, and it has influenced her writing. “People will have very different reactions to my writing,” she said. “People will be like, ‘I felt so frustrated by this character — they were so neurotic or cringey, and I wanted to reach into the story and shake their shoulders.’ Or people will be like, ‘I felt like you were inside my brain.'”
I think about it all the time, and it’s all I think about, she added.
The two friends lined up behind a gaggle of schoolgirls at Graeter’s Ice Cream, a local favorite. They ordered cups of mocha chip (for Ms. Sittenfeld) and chocolate chip (for Ms. Morriss) and strolled to a park, taking advantage of the unseasonably warm day.
They sat on a bench and watched a group of middle-school-age girls in Uggs and leggings who were making a video of themselves doing a TikTok dance. The girls ran to their phones to watch the recording, deleted it, and did the dance again.
Ms. Sittenfeld, who was wearing New Balance sneakers and a blue heathered sweater, and Ms. Morriss, with her Hillary Clinton bob and silk scarf, didn’t look like they had inspired the haughty queen-bee characters in “Prep.” But Ms. Morriss insisted they had been “mean girls” back in middle school.
In “Prep,” Ms. Sittenfeld focused on a girl who pinballs between a hunger to be noticed and a desire to disappear. In the eight books she has published since, she has mined the terrain of female self-consciousness and status anxiety across all life stages.
In her new collection, the story that opens her new collection, she examines the unspoken rivalry between a pair of students, a woman and a man, at a top graduate writing program. When they meet up at a hotel bar nearly 20 years later, the woman is the author of five best-sellers and the man is the winner of prestigious literary prizes.
The woman, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions, and I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery.
But here’s the thing about American women recovering from knee surgery: They are shaping the country’s political, social, and cultural debates. Pundits want to know why a majority of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. Documentaries tell cautionary tales of affluent women who fall down social media rabbit holes leading to wellness influencers promoting dubious health regimens. Ms. Sittenfeld chronicles this demographic from within, not as an impartial observer.
I’m not an ornithologist — I’m a bird, she said, quoting Saul Bellow. And she isn’t bothered by fancy male critics who might be inclined to dismiss the people and subject matter at the heart of her work. If I have an opinion, I should write a 1,000-word essay, she said. If I want to explore the messiness of life, I should write fiction.
For years her books have captured the concerns of a group that has lately become a cultural fixation, middle-aged women who wake up one day and realize their lives aren’t exactly what they’d planned. After reading “All Fours” by Miranda July or watching Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” some are having frank conversations about sex and marriage; others are simply spiraling.
Ms. Sittenfeld’s heroines seem to want more than they should while bumping up against the limiting forces of age or wilted ambition. She has explored such women in best-sellers and two works selected for Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Hollywood executives who optioned her books have suggested casting stars like Anne Hathaway and Naomi Watts.
Her two teenage daughters have made it clear that they’re not particularly impressed by her career. They see me as kind of ridiculous, Ms. Sittenfeld said. My 15-year-old will sometimes be like, “I can’t believe you write books — you seem so apart from the world.”
It helps that she lives in Minneapolis, where her husband teaches media studies, and which feels so distant from the hothouse worlds of Brooklyn and Hollywood. Sometimes in interviews people will say to me, “Do you feel a lot of pressure in writing your next book?” And I’ll think, Who would I feel pressure from? Nobody cares what I’m doing.
Still, the older Ms. Sittenfeld gets, the clearer she feels about what she wants to do in her work.
Are you watching “Somebody Somewhere”? she asked Ms. Morriss, referring to the HBO show starring Bridget Everett as a woman who returns to her hometown in Kansas. There’s a moment in the show, Ms. Sittenfeld recalled, in which the main character and her petite sister are talking about “the pencil test.”
You put a pencil under your breast, and if it falls out it means you have perky breasts, Ms. Sittenfeld said. Then Bridget Everett’s character takes a big salad dressing bottle and wedges it under her enormous boobs. That is the tone of the storytelling I want to do. It’s not the person with the pencil falling out, but the person with the salad dressing bottle staying under her boobs.
She added, Isn’t it so weird and undignified to be a person?
For a long time, Ms. Sittenfeld felt pressure to be a certain kind of writer, to be a certain kind of person. But as she grew older, she realized that the only thing she had to do was be herself. And that was authentic, she said. So authentic.
Now, in the main room, Ms. Sittenfeld and Mr. Faherty sat perched in front of some 225 people, an audience that included Ms. Sittenfeld’s 77-year-old mother. The thrum of voices was getting louder as the crowd assembled.
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