Show Don't Tell

by Curtis Sittenfeld

That instead she admitted the truth—isn’t that, in its way, a form of women’s leadership?

hit particularly among women; apparently it was the wife of the Parkington CEO who suggested Melissa for inclusion in the toothpaste campaign.

“Oh, yeah,” Justin says. “Your Mary Poppins gig.

But during none of the exchanges did Ben see evidence of this abrasive streak.

“Five hundred dollars,” she says. “You’re paying me five hundred dollars to make a commercial for a huge corporation.”

In many contexts of her job, Janie finds herself asking the same essential question: What is this a story about? Not what do its participants believe, but what meaning can be ascribed to the events that demonstrably happened? Do they meet the requirements of a cognizable legal claim? And is there a discrepancy between the story the participants are telling and the actual meaning?

But also the Silas interlude was just confusing. What was it a story about?

There was, of course, a general psychological recognition between us or else he could never have played this game with me. He couldn’t have played it with a girl who didn’t already, at a certain level, consider herself disgusting.

became aware of a blooming internal admiration for myself for not feeling glee, and, really, I wasn’t so sure this self-regard was any less reprehensible.

But I’d failed to anticipate how calamitous the standard erosion of affection over time could be when you started with a modicum as opposed to an abundance.

Formica Dream,

To win people over, as I’d learned as a teenager by doing the opposite, you just had to be easygoing and mostly upbeat, to not complain (unless wittily), to not overly care or reveal, to roll with where a conversation went. It was helpful to ask questions but not intrusive or meaningful ones. It also was helpful to know when to stop asking questions.

He was just so distant and impenetrable, and I’d had such an appetite for so many years for boys and men who weren’t particularly kind or warm or interested in me, but at last I saw this for the waste that it was. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that I was married by then to a man who was somewhat kind and warm and interested, which had been the most I’d believed I could ask for or expect.