Review of "You Think It, I'll Say It" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Most of us spend a good deal of our lives seeking or preserving Connection: learning to communicate, to listen, to really see others. Not all of us achieve it. Sittenfeld gives us ten provocative examples of how we get it wrong, with refreshing sips of getting it right.
The stories are uncomfortable. The protagonists are for the most part unsympathetic: shallow, snobbish, self-absorbed, vapid -- and a large part of the discomfort is that many of us have been there, been those people. If we're lucky we get to grow up, and, thankfully, some of the characters do. “It would be easy for me to be horrified by who I was more than twenty years ago, how ignorant, but I don't see what purpose it would serve.”
All of the stories have similar elements of immaturity, mindreading, projection, snap judgments, misread signals, indecision, regret, loneliness, self-justification. All of them are …
Most of us spend a good deal of our lives seeking or preserving Connection: learning to communicate, to listen, to really see others. Not all of us achieve it. Sittenfeld gives us ten provocative examples of how we get it wrong, with refreshing sips of getting it right.
The stories are uncomfortable. The protagonists are for the most part unsympathetic: shallow, snobbish, self-absorbed, vapid -- and a large part of the discomfort is that many of us have been there, been those people. If we're lucky we get to grow up, and, thankfully, some of the characters do. “It would be easy for me to be horrified by who I was more than twenty years ago, how ignorant, but I don't see what purpose it would serve.”
All of the stories have similar elements of immaturity, mindreading, projection, snap judgments, misread signals, indecision, regret, loneliness, self-justification. All of them are cringingly White and privileged. Each story, though, is unique in insight and voice. This will be, I think, a book worth rereading.
