In her ninth book, Curtis Sittenfeld gives us another collection of stories about the human experience, in all its varieties and with great comic effect. Imagine a gossip session with a close friend or even a well-meaning neighbor. That’s SHOW DON’T TELL, a bevy of stories about the messiness of living.

Sittenfeld has a way of depicting characters and drawing them out in such a fashion that they stay with you long after the story has ended. So to see the return of a beloved character from her debut, PREP, was a delight as we had been craving more from Lee Fiora. (Fear not, you don’t have to be familiar with PREP to enjoy the wrestling with love in the story. But do check out the novel at some point.)

"Imagine a gossip session with a close friend or even a well-meaning neighbor. That’s SHOW DON’T TELL, a bevy of stories about the messiness of living."

In “Lost but Not Forgotten,” we meet up with Lee at her 30-year boarding school reunion. In retrospect, she still thinks that she may not have been rich enough or privileged enough to attend the elite school. But she no longer feels the need to hide her discomfort or insecurities. Instead she finds herself sharing, perhaps oversharing, with alumni she barely knew as a student.

Other stories seem right out of the headlines. “White Women LOL” features Jill, a white woman who verges on unlikable. She dismisses a group of Black guests as party crashers at a birthday celebration, only to then try to redeem herself for her mistake when she realizes that she is being ghosted online. Needless to say, Jill isn’t the most woke of characters, and it’s easy to want to despise her, but Sittenfeld tries to portray her as someone we shouldn’t entirely dismiss. Jill questions if she has inherent biases that she isn’t aware of, and she goes out of her way to try to right her wrong.

The title story is about a graduate student named Ruthie, whose trajectory propels her through a career as a bestselling author. Brimming with promise but reliant on a fellowship, she suffers the plague of all students and writers: “Am I good enough?” Despite her success, she still finds herself at the mercy of youthful insecurities when years later she runs into her former student adversary, Bhadveer, a literary writer of some acclaim.

Being a middle-aged woman is a predominant theme. Rife with humor and irony, each of these heroines is traversing the reality that lies between retrospection and everyday current life. Curtis Sittenfeld excels at finding the intrigue in all her characters, no matter what their likability quotient is. And in the end, she reminds readers that there is something redeeming in just existing, making our way through the mundane, the exciting, the tragic and the comic, and coming out on the other end still breathing.