A Year in Reading: Curtis Sittenfeld
You know how sometimes you meet a person, they tell you about their job, you don’t exactly understand it, and by the time you’re true friends, it feels like it’s been much too late for quite a while to ask them to clarify what they do? I thought of this phenomenon after not reading my friend Erin O. White’s 2018 book Given Up for You: A Memoir of Love, Belonging and Belief until 2022.
I’d actually met Erin back in 2004 through a mutual friend; we had lunch at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and Erin was radiantly pregnant. Then we didn’t see each other again until 2019, after we’d both moved to Minneapolis for our spouses’ jobs, and the baby Erin had been pregnant with was in high school. I bought , a chronicle of when, in her early twenties, Erin simultaneously found Catholicism and fell in love with a woman for the first time. I proceeded to lose the book inside my house for two-plus years (a fact that’s unsurprising if you’ve ever visited me), then I found it again in
