Throughout the ten stories in You Think It, Ill 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 classmates 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-brand empire may or may not be built on a lie.
With moving insight and uncanny precision, Curtis Sittenfeld pinpoints the questionable decisions, missed connections, and sometimes extraordinary coincidences that make up a life. Indeed, she writes what were all thinkingif 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.