Show Don't Tell

by Curtis Sittenfeld

shook his head. He said, “Clarice Lispector was nothing

“Are you familiar with the narcissism of small differences?” “I can probably infer what it is, but no.” “Freud stole the concept from an English anthropologist named Ernest Crawley. It explains the infighting among groups whose members have far more in common than not.

(Let’s say it’s Stage 4—in that case, she wants to be one of those parents who writes exquisite letters for their kid to posthumously open every year on their birthday. Will she need to quit her job to write these letters? Will she need to quit her job anyway? If it’s a lesser stage, will she not need to quit her job, but maybe she just should?)

Or perhaps it’s a story about how precious it is to deeply adore two people in the world, even if neither of them is your spouse, and to share part of every day with them? Isn’t this, after all, two more people than anyone is guaranteed?

Even if it takes a month to get through a novel, the ritual still anchors me, the access to lives I’ll never live.

In the real version of all our days, as opposed to the version we publicly present, there are many undignified moments.

The circumstances that distress you and the circumstances that distress someone else might not overlap in the slightest.

In a way, to describe that marriage is like describing having gone to boarding school. Is there an infinite amount to share, or does a sentence or two suffice? I guess it depends who you’re telling the story to.

“Do you think we should tell them?” “Tell them what?” Dede asked. I said, “That they’ll blink and thirty years will pass? That even though most of them probably feel like underdogs, they’re not, and that even though all of them probably feel like their lives haven’t started, they’ll look back on Ault as this singularly intense time and place?”