No matter what she says, Curtis Sittenfeld cannot convince certain readers that her debut novel, Prep, was really a work of fiction.
"You know how Tim Russert did that book about his father, Big Russ and Me?" asked the 30-year-old novelist recently. "And then he followed it up with all the letters he had received?
"I could do the same thing with the letters I have received from teenage girls."
Sittenfeld understands that this outpouring is actually a compliment—that belief is the coin of good fiction—and that there are reasons for the confusion. After all, Sittenfeld, like Prep's heroine, Lee Fiora, left the Midwest as a teenager and attended an elite boarding school.
Only Sittenfeld attended Groton, the alma matter of President John F. Kennedy, not the fictional Ault School. Sittenfeld's sarcastic heroine is outcast—in real life Sittenfeld was well-adjusted.
"It's a strange thing, though" says Sittenfeld, sitting in the living room of her red-brick townhouse in old Philadelphia. "I work really hard to make what I am writing sound convincing, and someone says to me, 'Wow, did that really happen?'" Sittenfeld pauses, then continues: "And I wonder: Did I make this too real?"
Sittenfeld's second novel, Man of My Dreams will probably only enhance the confusion. Landing just a year and a half after Prep, the book introduces Hannah Gavener, a similarly glum heroine who stumbles through the miserable trough of her 14th year, when her parents split up, onward to womanhood, snagging on one bad, one-way relationship after another.
Along the way, Hannah never stops obsessing over finding the perfect man. Some of the men she falls for are taken—like her cousin's boyfriend Henry—others are just losers. This fixation on love allows Hannah to hide from the fact that she doesn't know herself well enough to choose a mate in the first place.
"I don't think Man of My Dreams is a book about cads and male behavior," says Sittenfeld, referring to one of the mixed reviews the book received. "I mean, I think Hannah is very complicit in what happens to her."
Although it may seem a simple thing to write a novel about a well-to-do white woman looking for a man, Sittenfeld has written her way into a minefield, as the legacy of feminism has re-entered debate. While some older feminists feel like sexual liberation has gone too far—including, even, Erica Jong—the younger generation continues to believe that anything they do is empowering, much like the cast of Sex and the City.
Sittenfeld straddles this divide more or less gracefully. In addition to her novel-writing, she frequently pens magazine pieces. Several have made light of the new sexual pressures a woman feels. In one, Sittenfeld bemoaned her inability to find male groupies thanks to her oddly unflattering author photo. (She is much more attractive in person.)
"But where's the victory in getting people to love you because you're cute?" she asked in the piece. "Put on lipstick and a short skirt and, hell, you can get hit on without even going to the trouble of writing a book. But if I can show up for readings belching and reeking, arranging myself in unbecoming positions, and still manage to win adulation? Now that would be equality."
In Man of My Dreams, Hannah experiences these dilemmas at an age when, as Sittenfeld says, "your emotions are so much more intense than they were [as a child]." In one scene, she attends a party with some acquaintances, has a few drinks and then pretends to sleep while one of them has sex with a boy. Moments later the act is aborted when the girl throws up, and wakes Hannah for a ride home.
"He was creepy," the girl complains as they rush out the door. "If we'd have woken up together, he would have said he loved me."
Suddenly, it feels like we have wandered into an outtake from Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, where college has become a sexual jungle gym for the hormonally crazed.
The difference here is that, while Wolfe's novel felt directed at young womens' parents, The Man of My Dreams is clearly intended for "young women in their 20s and 30s," as Sittenfeld says.
Sittenfeld's mother is an art-history teacher, and her father an investments manager who only reads serious fiction. Neither of them would "pick up this book in a thousand years!" she cries.Chances are the only person in her immediate family who would naturally pick up her books is her young sister.
"I am one of those fiction writers who subscribe to the idea that fiction is truer than true," she says. So all those readers who read The Man of My Dreams and worry about Sittenfeld's self-esteem can go ahead and keep on fretting. She'll appreciate the compliment, sort of.