Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld review – in a league of her own

After white midwesterner Jill attempts to eject five black people she mistakenly assumes have crashed her friend’s birthday party, a video of the tense exchange winds up on Facebook (Jill is captured protesting “this isn’t political” in response to the group’s chagrin). In White Women LOL, the most incendiary of the three short stories in Curtis Sittenfeld’s new collection, the online recoil comes hard and fast. Jill is labelled “idiotic garbage” on social media alongside comments such as “white privilege is a hell of a drug”.

From the 1980s elite girls school of her debut novel, Prep (2005), to the half-century counterfactual sweep of Rodham (2020), a reimagined life of Hillary Clinton, Sittenfeld often shows female characters navigating entrenched institutions and power structures. However, her short fiction, as in her previous collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It (2018), jabs more at cultural hot buttons.

So is Jill just an entitled white woman on the verge of deserved cancellation? Sittenfeld steers around easy answers in this deft collection. Having marched against racist police brutality, Jill is dismayed when her friends do not agree the party exchange was a “sincere misunderstanding”. Recalling past micro-aggressions against black people shunts her towards an epiphany of sorts. When she becomes fixated on finding the missing shih tzu of a local black celebrity, is Jill’s bid for redemption deluded, farcical or poignant? Hard to decide exactly, although while Jill is racked by self-recrimination, her snarky husband remains blase about her predicament.

The most compelling character in Creative Differences is not the jaded producer arriving in Wichita to shoot a documentary on American creativity but the subject of his film. He initially presumes Melissa, a young photographer whose series on black preschoolers went unexpectedly viral, is a docile hayseed. But when asked to clean her teeth on camera, Melissa shrewdly clocks she has been tricked into taking part in a veiled commercial for a personal care multinational. Her pushback against the manoeuvre gets grippingly pugnacious.

Help Yourself is a short collection, but its depiction of women wrestling honestly with self and society lends the stories real heft. In Show, Don’t Tell, a successful author of “women’s fiction” somewhat ruefully recollects her entanglements as a postgraduate student. The male cohort on her creative writing course were prone to spouting asininities such as “great literature has never been written by a beautiful woman”, but that didn’t stop her younger self from mooning after a guy who not only dumped her, but dismissed her stories with curt feedback. Male entitlement, evidently, is also “a hell of a drug”. By contrast, she scarcely dared believe herself in contention for a prestigious scholarship and her capacity for study was undermined by anxiety: “it was hard to focus when you were, like a pupa, in the process of becoming yourself”. When it comes to tracing the often arduous means by which women acquire self-knowledge, this collection confirms Sittenfeld is in a league of her own.

• Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld is published by Doubleday (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15