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Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the finest novelists writing in America, best known for American Wife, in which she gazumped Laura Bush's life story. She talks to Hadley Freeman
Last spring, much to her friends' bafflement at best, horror at worst, the writer Curtis Sittenfeld hurried down to her local bookshop. It was the day a certain book was published and, always a keen reader anyway, she was especially eager to curl up with this one. Like her friends, the bookshop wasn't quite as enthusiastic as she was about this book and, in fact, had only, and with some reluctance, ordered it for her. It wasn't obscene, this book, but it wasn't really one that the bookshop wanted in its window: it was, of course, Spoken from the Heart, the autobiography of Laura Bush.
On the surface, Sittenfeld seems an unlikely fan. She's a 35-year-old Democrat and a loyal Obama supporter. She says things like, "I'm SO trying to give up meat" and, when asked at her local shop if she needs a plastic bag, she replies, guiltily, "Oh, yeah, I guess so – sorry." And most of all, Sittenfeld, in the 24 hours that we spend together, describes George Bush as a "terrible president" three times. It is doubtful that she was the reader Laura Bush had in mind when she wrote her autobiography.
Two years ago, however, Sittenfeld published a novel, American Wife, which is easily one of the best books written so far this century. It is honest, wonderful and smart as hell, the kind of book that you try to eke out to make it last as long as possible (none of which are qualities that anyone would ascribe to the Bush presidency). And – in a twist that is about as unlikely as the liberal Sittenfeld making her bookstore order for Spoken from the Heart – it is a fictionalised account of the life of Laura Bush, whom she calls Alice Blackwell.
In other words, Sittenfeld gazumped Bush on the telling of her life and told it not only better, but with surprising accuracy, considering she had never met her. Even aside from the inevitable repetition of scenes between the two books – killing her classmate in a car crash when she was in high school, her surprising admission to reporters that she is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage – the similarities in tone between are so strong that to read Spoken from the Heart was, Sittenfeld laughs over breakfast in her local diner in Iowa, "disorienting, interesting and strange. That self-restraint, I guess. There are times when I'd be reading it and I'd think, that's such an Alice Blackwell thing to say," she says with a smile that verges on fond.
Yet, as anyone who has read Spoken from the Heart knows, it is, considering the potential drama therein, very boring, without even the palpably nasty tone that helped to make her husband's recent contribution to the political autobiography genre news–worthy. It's Sittenfeld's richly imaginative details that make American Wife so compulsive, such as the cringe-inducing self-congratulatory way the Blackwells refer to one of the large guest houses on their enormous family estate as "Itty Bitty", and the dreams Alice has for the rest of her life about the boy that she killed in the car crash.
"It is not easy to write fiction inspired by current events, especially if those events involve politics . . . All too often political novels descend from satire into cheap farce," wrote Joe Klein, reviewing American Wife in Time magazine in 2008, with, it is safe to say, a certain amount of personal experience in the matter. "American Wife is something else entirely – the opposite of a political satire, in fact – with a languorous pace and a fierce literary integrity."
But by the time Klein's review ran, Sittenfeld – three books into her career – was used to surprising critics with her ability to break beyond the constriction of genres.
When her agent sent out her first novel, Prep – which was then reissued on the back of American Wife's success – to 15 publishers in 2005, 14 turned it down. It was, most of them agreed, a great book but "they said they didn't know how to market it," remembers Sittenfeld. And one can see what the editors meant, sort of: Prep tells the story of an awkward, prickly teenager, Lee Fiora, and her ultimately fruitless attempts to fit in at a smart New England boarding school, Ault. It has all the soapiness that one would hope for in a book set in a boarding school (who is secretly sleeping with whom, who gets voted class president, etc), but it is written with astonishing precision and intelligence, as though Gossip Girl was set in Middlemarch.
But most publishers went to the same school as most film studio heads, the one that teaches them that if a novel or movie is successful, they should just keep remaking that same story, watered down, with decreasing quality. After all, surely the public only wants the same thing over and over as opposed to anything smart enough to be original. So no wonder those 14 publishers turned down a book that was about teenagers, but doesn't feel like it was written by someone with half the brains of one. Yet, funnily enough, when Prep eventually was published by the 15th publisher on the list, it was a massive bestseller.
Sittenfeld's trick is that she smartens up literary genres that are traditionally somewhat limited. So with Prep she took on the teenage boarding school novel and turned it into something that sensitive teenagers and bright adults enjoy. With her second novel, Man of My Dreams, she took the traditional chick-lit plot – young girl dreams that having a boyfriend will solve all of her problems – and turned it into something far more clever and honest than one finds in any book between hot pink covers (Unfortunately, the publishers didn't quite get it this time and gave the book a chicklit-ish cover that turned away readers who would avoid that genre and repelled readers of traditional romantic fiction. Happily, it, too, is being reissued and, Sittenfeld says, "there won't be a frog with a crown on the cover this time".)
And then with American Wife, she did something even harder than applying intelligence to chick lit: she took her longstanding fascination with Laura Bush ("my friends think the Republican party planted a chip in my brain) and not only explained it, but made the Bushes seem human.
"I just write the books that I think I would want to read," Sittenfeld says as she gives me a tour of the crisp, pretty town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she is currently teaching at the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her husband, a university professor in communications, whom Sittenfeld married two years ago, looks after their 18-month-old daughter while we talk. The couple are expecting their second child in January ("We're not going to keep producing at this rate," says Sittenfeld, dryly). It was at the workshop, in fact, as a student that she first began writing Prep when she was studying under teachers such as Marilynne Robinson, author of Home and Gilead, which at least partly explains the sense of calm wisdom that her books radiate.
But it also clearly comes from her. Just as Prep combines a maturity of narratorial tone and a jittery teenage protagonist, so Sittenfeld is an intriguing mix of self-deprecation and self-confidence. Even after three books, she talks about how she is currently working on another novel in audibly ironic quotation marks, as though she still feels, as she puts it when it is pointed out to her, "something of a fake". Yet the occasional nerviness belies some steely self-belief. We met the week of the so-called Franzenfreude debate, when writer Jennifer Weiner claimed a book by a woman would never attract the kind of attention Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom has received.
Sittenfeld shifts a little uncomfortably when I bring it up. But only at first: "I think sometimes books are taken a bit less seriously if they have a more female – um, you know what I mean? And," she says, palpably beginning to warm up and calm down, "I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women. But I also think that novels being taken seriously is kind of a nebulous concept. I mean, what does that mean? Getting multiple reviews in the New York Times? Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist."
Sittenfeld was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Even though the families in Sittenfeld's books are generally fraught or distant, she herself is very close to both her three siblings and her parents, who would often read books to their children when they were growing up, such as the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. Sittenfeld is already looking forward to doing the same with her daughter, and has been saving the Harry Potter books for when she can read them with her children.
Although it was only after American Wife that Sittenfeld stopped telling herself that she would give up the "ridiculously self-indulgent" job of writing and go into "something like social work", she was writing from a young age and, when she was 17, won Seventeen magazine's fiction-writing prize.
She also went to the very smart boarding school Groton and has had to expend a lot of energy ever since insisting that, while Ault in Prep "without a doubt resembles the school I went to, the story is not autobiographical". ("Is it so easy to believe that I have no imagination and I can't invent dialogue or those scenarios?" she asked in an interview with the New York Times when Prep was first published, and judging from the sceptical headline that topped that piece – "Although She Wrote What She Knew She Says She Isn't What She Wrote" – the answer would seem to be in the affirmative.)
In fact, she says, of all of her books, American Wife is probably her most autobiographical: there's the husband who makes her watch sports, there's the fondness for reading classic children's books, and, most of all, there's the main character's sense of confidence beneath the quiet exterior.
"I think, when I wrote American Wife, there was definitely a sense of satisfaction in overturning people's expectations of what I write," she says. "Of course, there will always be a special place in my heart for teen angst but it's not the only thing I'm interested in and it's nice to surprise people."
That's such an Alice Blackwell thing to say.
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