Opening a Curtis Sittenfeld story is the beginning of a delicious endeavour. Her flawed female protagonists are constantly navigating a quagmire of life’s hot button topics, delivering moments of satire and social criticism, self-analysis and character assassinations.

Whether it’s an inner-city hipster getting ‘cancelled’ when she mistakes a couple of black guests at a party as gate-crashers, or a successful lawyer who crosses her high school bully while on holidays, Sittenfeld’s hilarious and awkward short story collections Help Yourself and You Think It, I’ll Say It are fantastic entry point to her world view.

In novel American Wife, Sittenfeld writes of a first lady torn by the contradictions of her personal beliefs and her public persona. Alternatively, Rodham is a revisionist historical fiction that poses the question, what if Hillary Rodham had never married Bill Clinton and blazed her own trail in politics?

Elsewhere Prep and The Man Of My Dreams are satirical yet sweet novels about the awkward, formative years of adolescence, in love and in competition for it, and how you can’t blame them for all your adult failings, while Eligible is Sittenfeld retelling of Pride & Prejudice.   

Sittenfeld has also been published in the New York Times Magazine, Salon and with This American Life.

All this is to prepare you for the author’s new book, Romantic Comedy: A Novel, set in the world of comedy TV writing, due out in April 2023.