Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of January 26. I'm Emily Bazlon, one of the hosts of Slate's Political GabFest. I'm here today with Curtis Sittonfeld to talk about her book of short stories, show don't tell. Hi, Curtis. Hi, Emily. So maybe like a lot of you, I started reading Curtis's work

when she published the book Prep in 2005, which is such a memorable novel about adolescence

in boarding school and especially, I think, the inner life of girls. And Curtis is also the

author of two novels I love about American

women in politics. One of them is called American wife, and it's a character based on Laura Bush,

George W. Bush's wife. And the other book is called Rodham, and it's a kind of imagined story

about Hillary Rodham Clinton. This short story collection, I found to be like listening to an album of music where there were

distinctive hits, but also it seemed like you had put a lot of thought into the themes of the book.

And a lot of the narrators in this book, maybe all of them, are middle-aged people.

There's even a story that's called the patron saints of middle age in the middle of the book.

And one of the things that I kept thinking about was how time works and is present for these characters.

It seems like there are a lot of characters who are

in their middle age and mostly the book is in their present, but they are thinking a lot about

past times, sometimes their youth, but sometimes something more recent. And it's the reflection

on something important that happened to them before that drives the story,

either subtextually or directly.

And I wondered if you were thinking about playing with time when you chose all these middle-aged

characters.

The short answer is yes, I was.

I do, I think that the passage of time is a sort of fascinating plot where, you know, like,

if you haven't seen somebody that you once knew for 20 years or 30 years, it doesn't,

it doesn't have to be that like anything super dramatic or interesting happened in their life for it to be

...