Show Don't Tell

by Curtis Sittenfeld

He’s the kind of writer, I trust, about whom current students in the program have heated opinions; I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery. To be clear, I’m mocking neither my readers nor myself here—it took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.

One of the surprises of adulthood 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.

Why did five of us need an eight-bedroom house? If that guy outside the grocery store was asking for money, and I had money in my wallet, why wouldn’t I give him some? Why did his mother and I donate to the symphony instead of to people who needed housing? I’d give reflexive answers, but the thing is, when he pressed me, he was often right. I’d wondered these things, too, when I was his age, and then I’d gotten on the track I’d gotten on and just become busy enough getting through each day to ignore the existential questions.”

I think one of my problems at Ault was that I tried too hard to learn lessons. I didn’t recognize how much of the time life is just random. And often the lesson I thought I was learning was the wrong one.