You Think It, I’ll Say It

Curtis Sittenfeld’s first short story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, brings together pieces that had appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere along with new work. The stories all sit in the territory she’s been mining since Prep. Smart, observant women navigating American life and noticing the quiet contradictions in their own behavior.

The title story is one of the strongest. A married woman attends a parenting conference and develops an obsession with a man she once knew, watching herself watch him without quite being able to stop.

Sittenfeld’s sentences are clean. Her humor is dry. Her endings tend not to wrap things up so much as drop the reader at the moment of recognition.

Readers who liked her novels but haven’t read her short fiction will find a tighter, sharper version of her voice here. Lorrie Moore fans will find familiar pleasures.