Curtis Sittenfeld
Curtis Sittenfeld
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeldis an American writer. She is author of five novels: Prep, the tale of a Massachusetts prep school; The Man of My Dreams, a coming-of-age novel and an examination of romantic love; American Wife, a fictional story loosely based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush; Sisterland, which tells the story of identical twins with psychic powers; and the forthcoming Eligible, which is a contemporary retelling of Pride and Prejudice, as well as a number of short...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.
It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man
I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.
If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait around for him.
I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.
Of course, I didn't imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified.
I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer.
But I never thought of who he wasn't, I never had to explain or defend him to myself, I didn't even care what we talked about.
Of course a magazine is usually more interesting than a conversation, because so much more time and preparation has gone into it.
I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.
... it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.
I feel like as I've gotten older I've unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.