Ohio-born fiction writer, Sittenfeld has a gift for making daily events of regular people compelling moment by moment, and take the readers in from the start and make them want to keep turning pages. 

In “White Women LOL”, a woman urges a group of black restaurant patrons to take their drinks elsewhere, because they are crashing her friend’s birthday party in a private room – not realising that the period for which the room was rented has run out. The encounter is filmed which goes viral online, and tars the protagonist as a racist. She is also helping her friend find a lost dog.

In “The Richest Babysitter in the world”, a hard-up college student cares part-time for a couple’s three-year-old daughter while the mother finishes her dissertation and the father works at his tech start-up. The babysitter moves to another city with her not-really-boyfriend. In a single paragraph she goes from acquiring her own apartment after graduation to changing careers, getting a masters, teaching for five years, earning a doctorate, getting married and gaining tenure- in the span of 30 years. During the same time  the father’s tech start-up has ballooned into an Amazon look-alike. Having once babysat for an Elon Musk/ Jeff Bezos mash-up provides the protagonist constant opportunity for the ultimate name drop.  After learning that her old employers are divorcing, she can’t help but wonder if the seemingly ordinary life she lives, the one thing that billions of dollars definitely can’t buy- makes her the lucky one.

In “Follow-Up” a middle-aged woman gets unsettling mammogram results. The partially obscured mass in breasts that are “heterogeneously dense”, and Janie will require a follow-up ultra sound.  But what in this life, she wonders, is not hetrogeneously dense? Janie through to the ultra sound, while she texts her best friend but doesn’t share her anxiety with her son or husband.  Instead she recalls an intense sexual encounter before she married with a man who, she learns, has recently died. 

In “Lost But Not Forgotten” Sittenfeld  Prep a chance to see how our beloved character Lee Flora is doing twenty years later, when she returns for an awkward school reunion. In Pretzels are for Biting, a woman look up two best friends that she moved away from after her divorce, In “Creative differences”, a photographer from the mid-west quickly realises that the “documentary” she stars in is actually a commercial for multi-national corporation. And in Atomic Marriage,  a Hollywood producer falls for bestselling Christian self-help author while working on their film adaptation. In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age, a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “ A for Alone”,  a married artist embarks on a project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. 

In twelve dazzling stories, Sittenfeld peels back layer after layer of our inner lives and explores women’s lives at the intersection of sex, love, ambition and the entangled pursuit of a fulfilling life.

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld, Transworld £16.99 / Random House $28, 320 pages.