Curtis Sittenfeld Quote

Far in the future, Hannah will have a boyfriend named Mike with whom she'll talk about her father. She'll say she isn't sorry about her upbringing before the divorce, that she thinks in a lot of ways it was useful. Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which, in Hannah's observation, is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises, when they occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you live under the shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to an opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o' clock--these are enough. They are gifts.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Far in the future, Hannah will have a boyfriend named Mike with whom she'll talk about her father. She'll say she isn't sorry about her upbringing before the divorce, that she thinks in a lot of ways it was useful. Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which, in Hannah's observation, is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises, when they occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you live under the shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to an opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o' clock--these are enough. They are gifts.

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About Curtis Sittenfeld

Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld (born August 23, 1975) is an American writer. She is the author of a collection of short stories, You Think it, I’ll Say It (2018), as well as seven novels: Prep (2005), the story of students at a Massachusetts prep school; The Man of My Dreams (2006), a coming-of-age novel and an examination of romantic love; American Wife (2008), a fictional story loosely based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush; Sisterland (2013), which tells the story of identical twins with psychic powers; Eligible (2016), a modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice; Rodham (2020), an alternate history political novel about the life of Hillary Clinton; and Romantic Comedy (2023), a romance between a comedy writer and a pop star.