Show Don’t Tell Summary and Themes
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld is a rich, perceptive collection of short stories that explores the quiet, complicated dramas of contemporary life—particularly from the perspectives of women navigating relationships, careers, aging, and identity.
With wit, emotional depth, and razor-sharp observational detail, the book turns a keen eye toward the absurdities of social norms, ambition, and modern self-presentation. Each of the twelve stories stands alone but contributes to a broader mosaic of personal reinvention and emotional truth, often probing the tension between how people appear and who they really are. Sittenfeld’s characters are flawed, funny, and deeply human.
Summary
Show Don’t Tell
Set in a prestigious MFA creative writing program in the late 1990s, this story follows Ruthie Flaherty, a graduate student anxiously awaiting news about a fellowship that could shape her literary future.
The narrative explores power dynamics, ambition, relationships, and gender in a highly competitive, emotionally charged academic environment. Ruthie’s experience is shaped by subtle rivalries, perceived injustices in funding distribution, and a complicated breakup with a classmate.
Ultimately, she wins the prestigious Peaslee Fellowship, an affirmation of her talent, even though she later reflects on how her male peer with more acclaim ultimately garners greater critical recognition.
The Marriage Clock
Heather, a Hollywood film executive, flies to Alabama to persuade Brock Lewis, a Christian self-help author, to allow a gay couple in the film adaptation of his bestselling book The Marriage Clock.
The story unfolds through their surprisingly warm and candid dialogue during her visit to his Southern estate.
Despite their ideological differences—he’s conservative and religious, she’s progressive and secular—they connect over personal experiences and past heartbreaks. Although Heather fails to change his stance, the story leaves open the emotional complexity behind deeply held beliefs.
White Women LOL
A satire on racial microaggressions and social media performance, this story follows Veronica, a Black writer invited to speak at a liberal arts college.
She encounters well-meaning but clueless white students and faculty who tokenize her experience. The story crescendos with a viral video that frames her in a misleading light, questioning the balance between genuine expression and public perception in the age of social media.
The Richest Babysitter in the World
This light-hearted yet sharp story centers on a teenager, Sophie, who becomes a nanny for the eccentric family of a tech billionaire.
Despite the luxurious lifestyle and absurd demands—such as handling the child’s social media presence—Sophie reflects on the shallow values of the ultra-rich and her own aspirations. Her eventual decision to quit the job emphasizes a subtle moral stand over wealth and spectacle.
Creative Differences
This story dives into the reunion of two former TV collaborators—Sasha, a screenwriter who found modest success, and Phoebe, who skyrocketed to stardom with a hit streaming show.
They meet to discuss a possible project together. As they circle around the topic of creative control and the nature of fame, simmering tensions from their shared past surface. Sasha is torn between admiration and resentment for Phoebe’s fame, particularly because it distorts public perception and eclipses their shared contributions.
Follow-Up
A biting narrative about a woman named Dana, who receives an email from her former college boyfriend, now a minor celebrity.
The email, seemingly a casual check-in, spirals Dana into a psychological audit of their old relationship—its power imbalances, emotional gaslighting, and her lingering trauma. Through an eloquent, unsent reply, Dana reclaims her voice and finally articulates the harm he caused.
The Tomorrow Box
Centered on a suburban mother, Katie, and her teenage daughter Lila, the story unfolds as they prepare for Lila’s transition to college.
Katie offers Lila a box of mementos—letters, trinkets, and old photos—meant to preserve memory and legacy. However, their differences in values and emotional expression create conflict. The story is a quiet, poignant meditation on the intergenerational gap, maternal love, and the act of letting go.
A for Alone
Set during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, this story follows a recently divorced woman navigating solitude in lockdown.
As she engages in remote teaching and virtual social interactions, she wrestles with feelings of invisibility and longing.
A reconnection with an old flame through awkward, stilted texts rekindles some hope but also underscores her deeper emotional void.
The Patron Saints of Middle Age
This story follows Rachel, a Gen X academic reflecting on her middle-aged life and the societal invisibility that has crept in. She becomes fixated on a charismatic, much-younger female student who reminds her of her former self.
As Rachel tries to mentor her, she ends up projecting unresolved regrets and frustrations. A subtle critique of aging, desire, and female self-worth unfolds, especially within the constraints of academia and cultural expectations.
Giraffe and Flamingo
A story told through whimsical metaphor, centering on a long-term romantic relationship personified by two animals: Giraffe (reserved, logical) and Flamingo (expressive, flamboyant).
The tale deconstructs how mismatched temperaments struggle to coexist over time. It’s humorous but deeply insightful, capturing the complexities of long-term companionship, emotional communication, and mutual misunderstanding.
The Hug
In this touching and humorous tale, an affluent woman named Julia pays for a professional cuddle session in a suburban office park.
Initially skeptical and self-conscious, she’s surprised by how profoundly therapeutic the experience becomes. The story explores modern loneliness and the ways we search for intimacy, even in commercialized or artificial settings.
Lost but Not Forgotten
A poignant final story that revolves around a woman discovering her deceased mother’s suitcase at a storage unit. Inside are personal items, some expected, others surprising, that force her to reframe memories and understand the woman her mother really was.
It’s a story about grief, inherited memory, and the sometimes unbridgeable gap between who our loved ones were and who we imagined them to be.
Themes
The Subtleties of Social Hierarchy Within Ostensibly Egalitarian Spaces
Despite many of the settings—writing workshops, liberal arts colleges, creative industries, academic institutions—being culturally aligned with values of equality and intellectual freedom, Sittenfeld’s stories excavate the hidden hierarchies that govern behavior, reward systems, and recognition.
In “Show Don’t Tell,” Ruthie’s elite writing program is a crucible of implicit status rankings, where fellowships, romantic entanglements, and even style of dress become instruments of power.
Similarly, in “White Women LOL,” the protagonist navigates an academic environment that outwardly welcomes diversity but continuously fails to engage her as a fully complex human being, instead flattening her into a consumable representation of Blackness.
This theme extends to professional settings in “Creative Differences” and “The Marriage Clock,” where the unspoken rules of access, influence, and legitimacy are in constant negotiation, often reinforcing exclusion under the guise of meritocracy.
Emotional Legibility as a Currency in Female Identity Construction
Across the collection, Sittenfeld repeatedly interrogates how women are expected to make their emotions comprehensible and palatable, particularly to men and institutions. Characters who withhold feelings are punished or misunderstood, while those who over-disclose risk being diminished or ridiculed.
“Follow-Up” masterfully captures this tension, as Dana rewrites a history of emotional abuse in response to a polite, seemingly innocuous email, discovering her narrative power while grappling with how much truth the world is willing to accept.
“A for Alone” magnifies the weight of female solitude when it’s not validated through relational proximity. Sittenfeld refuses to offer tidy resolutions—her protagonists live in a liminal zone where emotion, though often abundant, is mediated by internalized codes of acceptability, productivity, and performance.
The Disorientation of Moral Relativism in the Age of Performative Virtue
Several stories portray characters grappling with the dissonance between declared values and actual behaviors, especially when filtered through social media, politics, or progressive optics.
In “White Women LOL,” a well-intentioned environment masks pervasive microaggressions and racial tokenism.
“The Hug” and “Giraffe and Flamingo” present intimacy as a commodified or stylized performance—one that can be rehearsed but still leave emotional needs unmet. Sittenfeld’s characters often find themselves caught in moral mazes: they want to be ethical, to be good citizens or partners, but the yardsticks by which such virtue is measured have become unstable, especially in class-privileged, aesthetically liberal spaces.
As a result, characters engage in elaborate internal negotiations, measuring their own hypocrisy even as they judge others’.
The Emotional Afterlife of Female Ambition in Middle Age
In stories such as “The Patron Saints of Middle Age” and “Lost but Not Forgotten,” Sittenfeld explores what happens when women reach the middle of their lives and must reconcile past ambition with present compromises.
These women are not failed or tragic—they are self-aware, discerning, and often accomplished—but they inhabit a cultural terrain that no longer validates their drive in the same way.
The world no longer responds to their visibility with the same heat. Instead, their narrative arcs are shaped by quiet reckonings: a disillusioned academic confronted with her former idealism, or a daughter uncovering the emotional truth of a long-deceased mother.
These characters resist erasure by turning inward and re-narrating the meaning of their lives, even as the external markers of success recede or shift.
Romantic Partnership as a Mirror of Class, Gender, and Cultural Anxiety
Rather than treat romantic love as an isolated emotional experience, Sittenfeld uses it as a prism through which class differences, gender scripts, and social neuroses are refracted.
“The Richest Babysitter in the World” juxtaposes a teenager’s moral clarity against the self-importance of the wealthy elite, while “The Marriage Clock” investigates how ideology—religious, political, cultural—becomes embedded in a seemingly simple debate over a film character’s sexuality.
In “Show Don’t Tell,” romantic failure is tethered to the power dynamics of literary prestige. Even “The Hug,” ostensibly about platonic contact, draws its potency from the absence of romantic or erotic fulfillment.
Sittenfeld masterfully demonstrates how the couple, whether real or imagined, serves not only as a site of intimacy but as a barometer of larger cultural pressures and unspoken social codes.