Down with love

Sitting in a Philadelphia bar, Curtis Sittenfeld certainly looks preppy with her vodka tonic and her simple-chic haircut. But the 30-year-old has had it up to here, in her very polite way, with being compared to the boarding-schooled protagonist of her first novel, Prep. In the 16 months since that book emerged as a commercial and critical hit, people have repeatedly asked Sittenfeld just how autobiographical it is. “It’s a question that comes up in every interview and at every reading,” she says. “I don’t know that I can outrun it.”

With any luck, the appearance of Sittenfeld’s second book, The Man of My Dreams, will mark her acceptance as a major fiction writer, as opposed to a mere pseudomemoirist with a deft comic touch. The episodic novel tracks its heroine, Hannah Gavener, through a privileged girlhood smashed by divorce, and on to the weird indignities of college and of working life in the rude world. “It’s kind of an ironic title,” Sittenfeld says. Check: The main subject is Hannah’s persistent romantic confusion, and it’s treated with more sophistication than you’ll see in almost anything labeled chick lit. The book sprang from an identically titled short story the author wrote years ago as an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa. “There’s maybe three sentences of that story that are still in this,” she says. “But I kept writing about this same person in different situations, and a lot of them, maybe all of them, were Hannah trying to figure herself out in relation to men.”

When Prep began its run up the best-seller lists, Sittenfeld was a part-time teacher and “desperate freelancer” living in Washington, D.C. Now she doesn’t need the teaching gig, finds editors notably more receptive to her pitches and is a proud resident of Philly, where her boyfriend is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s a bit in the dark about where the proposed film version of Prep stands: “I think that Noah Baumbach—you know, he did The Squid and the Whale—was working on a script, but I don’t really know.” Sittenfeld may not have dreams of walking the red carpet, but The Man of My Dreams could make her a star in her own right.

The Man of My Dreams (Random House, $22.95) is out May 16.