Thank you to the lovely people at Random House for my copy of You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld.  All thoughts and images are my own.

THE DETAILS:

Title: You Think It, I’ll Say It
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Genre: Short stories
Pub date: April 24, 2018
Read if you like: Her Body and Other Parties and snarky thoughts about the state of our society.

Morgan’s thoughts:

I have a confession to make: I have become a complete short story addict.  This collection is just another genius group of stories to add to the list of incredible collections I’ve read this year: Her Body and Other Parties and All the Names They Used for God.  You Think It, I’ll Say It takes a more realistic, less horrific approach, but is no less entrancing.  

Sittenfeld’s stories are so clearly set right now – they engage with the most recent election and the rise of Instagram celebrities.  They are funny and biting and thoughtful.

Reading these stories felt like binge watching TV episodes.  I started these when we arrived at the Montreal airport and learned our flight back to the states was delayed.  When we arrived (hours later than we were supposed to thanks to a two hour delay, a plane de-icing, and having to circle JFK for 45 minutes before we could land), I had only one story left in the collection.  I hardly noticed the amount of time it took to get home; I’m not sure whether to chalk that up to the reading material or the company but I am very grateful for both. I never once felt bored – each time I finished a story, I immediately wanted to begin the next one.

Sittenfeld has a finger on the pulse of what is on my mind day in and day out in 2018.  I cannot recommend these stories highly enough.  Whether you’re an avid reader or you’ve been out of the reading groove and need something to draw you back in, this is the collection for you.

Synopsis: (as told by the back of the book)

With the bestselling novels Prep, American Wife, and Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld has established a reputation as a sharp chronicler of the modern age who humanizes her subjects even as she skewers them.  Now, with this first collection of short fiction, her “astonishing gifts for creating characters that take up residence in readers’ heads” (The Washington Post) is showcased like never before.

Throughout the ten stories in You Think It, I’ll Say It, Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships, and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided.  In “The World Has Many Butterflies,” married acquaintances play a strangely intimate game with devastating consequences. In “Vox Clamantis in Deserto,” a shy Ivy League student learns the truth about a classmate’s seemingly enviable life.  In “A Regular Couple,” a high-powered lawyer honeymooning with her husband is caught off guard by the appearance of the girl who tormented her in high school. And in “The Prairie Wife,” a suburban mother of two fantasizes about the downfall of an old friend whose wholesome lifestyle empire may or may not be built on a lie.

With moving insight and uncanny precision, Curtis Sittienfeld pinpoints the questionable decisions, missed connections, and sometimes extraordinary coincidences that make up a life.  Indeed, she writes what we’re all thinking – if only we could express it with the wit of a master satirist, the storytelling gifts of an old-fashioned raconteur, and the vision of an American original.