"Taking the First Step," a review by Jared McCormack of "Help Yourself," by Curtis Sittenfeld

Taking the First Step

Jared McCormack Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld, Doubleday, 2020.

Since the publication of her first book, Prep, fifteen years ago, Curtis Sittenfeld has grown in renown, mostly on the strength of it and her other five novels. But during this period of welldeserved long-form praise, Sittenfeld’s excellent short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker and later released in a 2018 short story collection titled You Think It, I’ll Say It, were, on the whole, overshadowed. So it should come as no surprise that while the literary world spent much of 2020 talking about her highly-anticipated alternate history novel about former first lady and almost-president Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sittenfeld quietly released a short story collection in the UK titled Help Yourself. While one could argue the new novel, Rodham, came a few years too late, Help Yourself seems to have arrived right on time. In a political and historical moment in which our country becomes increasingly divided, Sittenfeld’s stories explore the worldviews of different groups of people and their shared inability to communicate with or understand each other.

In each of the three pieces in this slim short story collection, Sittenfeld presents characters whose perspectives have been shaped by differences in geography, economics, gender, and race, all of whom struggle to bridge these divides. In two of the stories, the production of art serves as the backdrop for

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this conversation. From the outset of “Creative Differences,” it’s clear that something beyond creative vision separates the narrator, Ben, a New Yorker and documentary film producer/ aspiring director, from Melissa, the young Wichita-based photographer who’s being documented. Much of the early pages are filled with Ben’s elitist observations of Melissa’s apartment (“an unremarkable one-bedroom—junky furniture, Indian tapestry bedspread”) and her body (“a trim torso and disproportionately big hips, ass and thighs . . . in a precursorof-frumpy-mom way”). When Melissa turns out to be more knowledgeable than expected, Ben and his famous director partner, Justin, only mock her further. What could this country bumpkin possibly know about art? And yet, it is Melissa who, in the end, stands up for herself and artistic integrity, saying, “My goal isn’t to find the biggest audience. It’s to be able to keep taking pictures and to find an audience who really appreciates what I do.” These characters, in the end, never learn how to talk to one another, but their short-lived yet memorable relationship leaves Ben, years later, wishing he could have.

There’s a similar retrospective nature to the story “Show Don’t Tell.” The narrator tells the story of her time as “a pupa, in the process of becoming” herself in a prestigious creative writing program. The main drama involves the narrator waiting to find out what fellowship she will receive from her school, a decision that she and her classmates believe will make or break their careers and lives. But like many Sittenfeld stories, this one has a second storyline that intersects with the main one. The narrator is simultaneously feuding with her grief-stricken, chain smoking downstairs neighbor. Told years later, the narrator often brings up “the difference between who I was then and who I am now,” alluding to her inability at the time to understand others or reckon with her own faults. At no point in the story

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is this more poignant than at the end when the narrator and her neighbor embrace each other but do so for wholly different reasons.

This inability or unwillingness to reckon with our own faults is present as well in the stellar “White Women LOL.” In it, Jill, a white woman, mistakenly asks a table of Black people to leave her friend’s party, not realizing they have every right to be there. The moment is recorded and goes viral, leaving Jill grappling to save face. Meanwhile, a neighbor’s dog has gone missing, and not only is that neighbor one of the most respected people in the neighborhood, she’s also the only Black woman who lives there. Jill believes that finding the dog will somehow absolve her of her sins. As the story progresses, Jill isn’t condemned by Sittenfeld and the readers so much for being racist as she is for being selfish, for caring more about saving face and avoiding consequences than reckoning with her own flaws and what it would take and cost to fix them. In the end, the narrator wonders whether finding the dog will “help her or if she will have to help herself.” In this moment, Sittenfeld seems to be speaking to the reader, saying, as the title of the collection suggests, that the first step towards understanding must be taken by each of us in the direction of one another.

The awe-inspiring verisimilitude of these stories is buoyed throughout by Sittenfeld’s trademark dialogue and characterbuilding that leave readers marveling at her ability to capture the modern human experience. In a year in which a divisive presidential election has caused the figurative gaps between people to grow ever wider at the same time that a global pandemic has forced people to literally put space between themselves, Sittenfeld asks her readers to consider how we might begin to overcome our differences and see each other again.

While the release of Sittenfeld’s novel about one of the more

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famous and polarizing figures in the modern history of our country may have overshadowed the release of this slim story collection about the things that make us different, Help Yourself has further established something we can all agree on: Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the best living short story writers in the U.S.