I see what you did there. And I don't like it one bit. "The Prairie Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld set herself up a couple of tough tasks in her short story "The Prairie Wife," the 18th entry in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology.  There are two targets in the sights of this story: how social media affects us and how we can misjudge others. Neither is a new subject, but that's not the danger, since fiction always is approaching old themes in hopefully new ways. One hurdle the story has to get past is that with so many non-fiction sources telling us nowadays about the dangers of social media, it's hard to keep that part of the story from having an "after school special" kind of feel to it. It could, if not handled right, feel like the familiar warnings about social media transposed into fiction rather than an organic story that happens to have social media in it.

A second danger is that Sittenfeld is attempting a true surprise ending, a tactic that used to be standard for short stories but which is now generally shunned. Just last year, in the introduction to this same Best American Short Stories series, Amy Wolitzer warned against the dangers of the surprise ending:

But of course if everything is surprising, then nothing is. Because we had all been raised on the power of surprise, the short stories that my class wrote for the creative writing unit...sometimes attempted a cheap and lazy kind of mimicry of the kinds of fiction we'd already read. I recall more than more than one kid standing up and reading his or her own short story aloud; it was invariably full of action and suspense and a touch of Borges-like surrealism, and finally there came the last line, the kicker: "Then I woke up, and it was all a dream!"  

Those clever endings taught us not only what to want and expect, but also what not to want: an unearned surprise for a surprise's sake. 

Wolitzer goes on to say that as her tastes grew, she began to want more from a story than a shock ending. She learned to want "a whole story--not just the ending--(that) might itself take on what had been considered the function of the ending."

Does Sittenfeld's "The Prairie Wife" accomplish this? Is it enough of a surprise throughout that its surprise ending doesn't feel like a gimmick? Yes and no.

The set-up

Kirsten appears to be a heterosexual woman with a secret. She had a five-day fling with a girl named Lucy when they were both camp counselors as teens. Kirsten has learned, though, that Lucy is now a well-known celebrity cook/homemaker/individual-brand-celebrity-thing that exists nowadays. She's especially popular with heartland evangelical types. Kirsten is driven crazy by the hypocrisy of Lucy proclaiming her happy marriage and strong sexual attraction to her very male husband. Kirsten considers outing Lucy.

Meanwhile, Kirsten drives herself and her spouse Casey a little crazy obsessing over Lucy's social media. It makes Kirsten less focused at work, as a mom, and as a wife.

The two reveals

Big reveal one worked well for me. Turns out that Lucy's not a fake. Before Kirsten can get around to outing Lucy, Lucy outs herself. In her new cookbook, she confesses to having dated women before marrying her husband. On a talk show promoting the book, she explains she is bi-sexual, although she is a monogamous bi-sexual while married to her husband. She did this, in spite of the risk of alienating her heartland fans, because she wanted to let LGBT kids know they're not alone.

Reveal number two left me a little bit angry. Kirsten's spouse Casey is a woman. They're a lesbian couple raising two kids together. Suddenly, I as a reader realized that the story had carefully avoided using a pronoun with Casey prior to the reveal and let me fill in the gaps. I think the story wanted to pull off a layered surprise, one in which Kirsten is wrong about Lucy, but the reader is also wrong about her.

But it's actually a little more loaded than that. On the one hand, it's kind of like that old brain teaser they gave us in school where they tell you that the doctor can't operate on the patient because "he's my son," but also the doctor isn't the patient's father. So, if you're a boy growing up in 1982, it takes you a a minute to get past your own biases and realize that women are also doctors and the doctor is the boy's mother. In that puzzle, your own biases lead you astray.

Some stories, you're okay with a big twist at the end, and some it just feels like it's a little out-of-bounds. 

But in this story, many of the details also actively lead us astray. We are led to believe that Kirsten was really heterosexual. She is thinking about boys during most of her childhood tryst with Lucy: "...she was mostly preoccupied with the hotness of a counselor named Sean." Or again: "...because she was busy wondering if Sean and Renee would break up and, if they did, how she, Kirsten, would make her move." The hookups with Lucy "didn't strike her then as that meaningful," but were rather "arbitrary."

In other words, it seems like Kirsten is naturally more attracted to boys, and was just taking advantage of Lucy's attraction to her to have an exciting but otherwise meaningless experience while at camp. Kirsten seems "flaky and petty," as she describes herself, and therefore capable of receiving sexual gratification from someone she wasn't really attracted to. Because I read it the first time through as though Kirsten was truly heterosexual, I assumed Casey was a man. True, Casey was in the story before the past with Lucy was introduced, and I naturally assumed Casey to be a man, much like I naturally assumed a doctor was male in 1982 when I was nine. But the story is obviously trying to reinforce this assumption. Casey has a lot of traditionally male traits, like wanting her kids to develop "grit." According to the one site I just Googled and am not bothering to fact-check, 59% of people named Casey are men. And why would Kirsten's childhood tryst with a girl be her "most damning secret" if she's now married to a woman who already knows she's a lesbian?

Of course, I could see at the end that I assumed one reality when everything in the story could have been just as true with another reality in place. But I didn't realize while reading that this was something I ought to be on the alert for. It's just not a common thing in literary fiction to trick readers like that. Usually, the story is trying to get a lot of background to the reader right up front, so you can get oriented to the reality of the characters. This story played off that assumption. It revived the old O. Henry surprise ending, trusting that it would work exactly because nobody expects a surprise ending anymore.

I get that a lot of the point of the story is that I assumed Casey was a man because heterosexuality is still the default assumption in America. The story would like to point out that the normal lives of the characters are also the lives of people we don't think of as normal. Lesbians can be petty, too, and lesbians can struggle to keep affection alive in their marriages. Fine. But I still think I'm in my rights to call foul a little bit here. A fairly small percentage of women are lesbians. About 3.5% of adults in the U.S. are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. If a character in a story had some other characteristic that put them in the 96th percentile of something, I think the story should let me know that right up front. If a character is six-foot-seven, say, or makes a seven-figure income.

I ended up liking Lucy and mustering some reluctant sympathy for Kirsten. It turned out that when they met each other as teens, neither had figured out who they were yet, even though they both thought they knew. I also thought I had figured them out, but I hadn't. If ever there were a story where this kind of surprise ending was merited, it was here. I'm certainly a big fan of the message that we ought to be slow to judge others on who we think they are, because nobody's identity is as clear as it seems. But it also felt like I was being led toward a particular reading that was meant to make me feel guilty about my own biases, when in fact the story gave me more than a little coaching to bring those biases to life.

Life imitates art imitating life

I didn't know who Curtis Sittenfeld was before this story. What can I say? Literature is not my main profession. This is something I do in my spare time, and I was emphatically not reading literature in English for over a decade. Plus, I can't remember anyone's name. So I don't know everyone in literary fiction who's a somebody. I assumed Curtis Sittenfeld was a man. I didn't even know Curtis was a unisex name.

As a result, when reading this story about lesbians, I thought the writing about lesbian sex was typical of what I would expect a man to write about lesbian sex. Mrs. Heretic is always laughing about how men write sex scenes from a woman's point of view, and this story used some of the kinds of language she's always telling me no woman would ever write. Lines like:

- "She and Lucy rolled around a lot, and jammed their fingers up inside each other..."
- "...Lucy was lapping away at her..."
- "After Kirsten had basically spasmed in ecstasy into Lucy's face..."


So in the end, I not only fell for two traps the author set for me based on my own assumptions about gender and sexuality, but three traps, including one the author didn't mean to set.