Being a person is so weird: Curtis Sittenfeld on life, luck and middle age

Sittenfeld’s new collection is intensely interested in who people are when they’re young, and who they become. Or, as one character puts it, the question of: “How the f— did I arrive at this point?” There are sliding doors aplenty in these stories – meaningless encounters bestowed meaning through time. The what-ifs, the should-haves, the could-haves. There’s the white woman who goes viral after telling five black guests at a birthday party that it’s a private event; the unhappy wife who wonders if she should have turned her one-night stand with a barista into a lifetime; the emerging artist who refuses to take part in a toothpaste commercial that goes on to be viewed 52 million times on YouTube.

“I don’t think it’s a bad question,” says Sittenfeld. “Life is so weird, being a person is so weird. I think it might even be healthy to wonder that and to recognise that there is good luck, bad luck and arbitrariness. As you get older, you look around and think, ‘Who accumulated all this shit?’ There’s this disorienting aspect of being a person.”

This disorientation is rendered almost sublime in these stories, which Sittenfeld wrote over seven years. Her leads are usually white, privileged women in their middle age, navigating often ambiguous encounters that reveal larger themes of marriage, friendship and power. If that seems too serious, I promise you Sittenfeld is as wry on the page as in real life.

“I feel like being in your late 40s is wildly interesting,” Sittenfeld says. “There is crazy shit that happens. By the time you get to this age, crazy shit has happened in everyone’s life … If someone doesn’t want to read about middle age because they think it won’t be interesting, I think they might be underestimating middle age.”

There are frequent brushes with fame and fortune – a babysitter who refuses a job by her employer who later becomes a billionaire; a film producer who believes she is being seduced by a relationship guru; an unlikely classmate who becomes a renowned writer. In the Prep sequel, it’s Lee’s unexpected encounter with a rock star that propels the story.

While Sittenfeld jokes she’s not nearly as recognisable as “someone who’s been on half a season of reality TV”, her success has seen her brush shoulders with very famous people, including (I make her tell me) Michelle Obama, Reese Witherspoon, Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden. These encounters fascinate her, the tug-of-war between admiration and self-awareness.

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“In my experience, most famous people are good-looking and charismatic, and it’s not by accident that they are famous,” she says. “They just have a little sparkle. That’s why I would never consider myself to be famous.

“I can see my hair looks frightful. I think all my friends are like, ‘Curtis, change out of your sports bra, we’re meeting for lunch.’ I don’t want to make myself disgusting, but my car has apple cores rolling around. That thing that celebrities have, I do not have.”

If there were a reunion between Curtis and her younger self on the eve of the publication of her first novel, what would her advice be? “Appreciate it and maybe worry a little bit less.”