Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors

By Nick Healy

The time has arrived for the short story to make its comeback. Short stories are, after all, perfectly suited to the ways we live today, to our busy and fragmented schedules and to our diminished attention spans. They’re also well-suited to the ways we read now — especially when we read on our phones while, say, waiting in line for a bagel or a cup of coffee.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Despite the many good reasons modern readers might embrace the form, most of them don’t. For a decade at least, people have been predicting a resurgence of interest in short stories, but aside from a few exceptional authors who catch the eye of the reading public, today’s writers of short stories mostly work in obscurity and, for whatever reason, persist in their craft.

Curtis Sittenfeld could and should be one of those exceptions. She is best known as the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of several novels, including “Prep,” “American Wife” and “Eligible,” and in 2020, she published the much-discussed “Rodham,” a novel that imagines where Hillary Clinton’s life might’ve had headed if she’d decided to dump Bill back in their college days.

In her first collection of short stories, “You Think It, I’ll Say It,” Sittenfeld shows why her novels have been so successful. The 10 stories in the book, which was released in 2018 and is available in paperback, are absorbing, funny, and sometimes scorching. And each is a pleasure to read.

The main characters in some of the more memorable pieces are forced to confront unfinished business from their younger years, and witnessing their struggles can be a sort of catharsis for anyone who lives with some scars from coming of age.

In “A Regular Couple,” Maggie is a 30-something lawyer on her honeymoon, and she bumps into Ashley, a high school classmate she hadn’t seen in years and clearly hoped to never see again. Ashley behaves as if the two were old friends and suggests they and their spouses go hiking together. Cluelessly, Maggie’s husband agrees to the plan, and only later can Maggie explain to him Ashley’s particular aplomb as a mean girl. Recalling an incident from their time on the volleyball team, Maggie says, “She came over and said, ‘Will you tie my shoe?’ She put her foot on my thigh — I was wearing shorts, so the sole of her shoe was pressed against my skin — and I tied it, and she kind of smirked and walked out of the locker room.”

In “The Prairie Wife,” a suburban mom named Kirsten stews over the success, and perhaps hypocrisy, of her onetime friend Lucy, who has risen to fame as a multimedia personality and creator of a vast lifestyle brand. Watching Lucy affect a down-home manner on TV and hearing her speak in a put-on accent stirs in Kirsten “such rage at Lucy that it was almost like lust.” Kirsten knows a secret that could damage or destroy her old friend, but she can’t decide what to do with that knowledge. (Side note: You can get a sort of free sample of Sittenfeld’s short fiction via “The Writer’s Voice” podcast, which is produced by The New Yorker. The podcast has featured Sittenfeld reading several of her stories, including “The Prairie Wife.”)

A native of Cincinnati, Sittenfeld made her name long before relocating to the Twin Cities a few years ago, but she quickly embraced the area and its literary community. Minnesotans are, of course, glad to claim her. If you haven’t read her work, you might consider “You Think It, I’ll Say It” a gateway. Why not get a copy, read it, and pass it to a friend? You’ll almost certainly enjoy yourself, and even if you don’t, you’ll be striking a blow on behalf of short fiction, that perennially underappreciated and undervalued form.