I'm listening to an interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, while sitting in the library writing on my work laptop. Curtis is about 2 years younger than me, since she won a Seventeen short story contest in 1992 when she was 16.
This title is a very ironic title, but I bought this book on the day that Dave proposed to me, which was a bit bizarre.
We were in Mendocino shopping at a bookstore and I saw the book - it is her 2nd novel after her debut, Prep, about a girl from Ohio who goes to an East Coast prep school.
So I bought it, but Dave thought I already suspected that he was going to propose that night and that's why I picked it. I didn't even think about the title of the book until after Dave had proposed and he pointed this out.
The Christmas weekend was very romantic and I already wrote about it in a more private journal.
But this book is really awesome, the character has a lot of similarities to me in having low self-esteem, not believing that the words "Hannah's boyfriend" are real. (she feels like it is an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp).
And Curtis apparently is constantly having the reporter question of whether or not the events in Prep and in this book are autobiographical. She basically points out that now that the two characters are out, there are a lot of differences between them so they can't both be autobiographical...
(Oh she is saying in the interview that Ethan Canin, who is a doctor and a alumnus of the Iowa Writers Program, was one of her teachers in graduate school there in Iowa).
Curtis is a Stanford English major grad also, and there are various scenes in this book, especially in the college years, where I see a lot of stuff coming from my memories of Stanford (Hannah doesn't go to a cappella and improv shows as a freshman because she thinks they're kind of stupid, but then realizes all the bonding and socializing happening at these shows).
Also Hannah didn't like eating alone in the cafeteria and has a very similar relationship with her therapist - she has this idealized notion of the therapist's normal life which is similar to mine.
