Curtis Sittenfeld, opening her talk on Tuesday night, sounded more like the insecure heroine of her first novel, Prep, than a best-selling author when sheepishly asked, “This is a really weird question, but do any of you know my brother?” Then again, only about two dozen Hoyas showed up to hear Sittenfeld speak—fewer than I would have expected for an enclave of prepdom like Georgetown.

But maybe that’s just because if you’ve lived it, you don’t need to hear someone else talk about it. In response to a question from a graduate of the Groton School, Sittenfeld’s own alma mater, she said, “I think if I read a book about Groton that someone else wrote, I would find it really distracting,” and compared it to reading a book by another author about your own family (”But Aunt Myrtle’s car isn’t blue!”).

Sittenfeld read aloud from Prep and from her upcoming third novel, mentioned that Noah Baumbach (who wrote and directed 2005’s brilliant The Squid and the Whale) will write the screenplay for the movie version of Prep and discussed the different reactions that the novel has gotten. She said that some people view the ending—in which the main character realizes that all of the people she had spent her high school experience obsessing about are totally inconsequential in the scheme of things—as a downer, while others read it as a triumph. For her part, Sittenfeld seems to have mixed feelings.

“The happy ending is the realization of how insignificant your high school experience is,” she said. “It’s so weird, it doesn’t matter [now] … I almost wished I cared as much as I did in high school … Enjoy the campus life, you know, where you turn a corner and you might see that person you love or hate.”

Ed note: The Voice ran an interview Sittenfeld last week about Prep and her upcoming visit.  You can read it here. 

Photo courtesy Flickr user Misoon *our page*

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