Life According to Curtis Sittenfeld

Bestselling American writer Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld was born in Cincinnati Ohio on 23rd August 1975. Sittenfeld attended High School at Groton Massachusetts where in 1992 she won her first writing prize, “Seventeen” magazine’s fiction contest. She later studied Creative Writing at Stanford University in California where she wrote articles for and edited the college newspaper.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s first novel “Prep”, which took 3 years to write was published in 2005. She likes to write in the morning from 10.00 until 1 pm but says she often gets distracted with emails and websites, so ends up having a late lunch at 2 or 3 pm.

To date Sittenfeld has published 5 novels “Prep” (2005), “The Man of My Dreams” (2006), “American Wife” (2008), “Sisterland” (2013) and “Eligible” (2016), her latest release is a collection of short stories, “You Think It, I’ll Say It” which has been selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club.

“I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.”

“The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can’t or won’t treat you as well as you’re accustomed.”

“I feel like a lot of life is distasteful and embarrassing. And you just push through it. You fix what you can, and you let time pass.”

“We all make mistakes, don’t we? But if you can’t forgive yourself, you’ll always be an exile in your own life.”

“To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.”

“I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”

“Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose–what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?–and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.”