For going on two decades now, no one has done female interiority quite like Curtis Sittenfeld. Her novels, each of which manages to straddle the line between serious literature and beach read, are masterful. Each reveals the fascinatingly ordinary humanity of girls and women who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.
Sittenfeld’s first novel, Prep (2005), was about a neurotic and self-involved but highly relatable teenager who journeys far from her Midwestern roots and family to attend a tony New England boarding school. Lee Fiora’s story is a simultaneously compassionate and critical first-person narrative, from the perspective of the protagonist as a late twenty or early thirty-something looking back on these adolescent experiences.
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