Welcome to the latest installment of ‘Wealthy People Fret over Wine,’ also known as Curtis Sittenfeld’s new collection, ‘Show Don't Tell.’ If you’ve ever felt the crushing weight of owning a professional-grade espresso machine while your soul slowly petrifies in a sexless marriage, this one’s for you.

Sittenfeld has carved out a lucrative niche as the primary chronicler of the ‘mildly inconvenienced elite.’ Her characters aren't worrying about the price of eggs or whether their healthcare covers a basic checkup; they’re navigating the treacherous, shark-infested waters of ‘uncomfortable privilege.’ You know the feeling—that slight twinge of guilt you get when the cleaning lady arrives while you’re still in your pajamas, which you then process by writing a sternly worded post in a private Facebook group for ‘conscious’ homeowners.

The collection dives deep into the abyss of middle-aged marriage, where the most visceral conflict is a passive-aggressive dispute over who forgot to schedule the gutter cleaning. It’s performative misery for the NPR crowd. We’re supposed to find it profound that these people are unhappy despite having everything they ever asked for. But let’s be honest: it’s not tragedy; it’s just the natural byproduct of boredom and a total lack of real problems. When you’ve reached the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, the only thing left to do is complain about the view.

What Sittenfeld is really selling here is validation. She’s telling her readers that their mundane, well-funded anxieties are actually ‘art.’ It’s a neat trick: turn your guilt into a plot point, sell it back to the very people you’re writing about, and wait for the literary establishment to call it ‘devastatingly honest.’

In the end, ‘Show Don't Tell’ is just another mirror held up to a demographic that spends half its life staring at its own reflection anyway. It’s sharp, sure. It’s well-written, definitely. But at the end of the day, it’s just more white noise for the suburbs—a soft, rhythmic thrum of discontent designed to help you drift off to sleep in your 800-thread-count sheets while you dream of a life where you actually had something to lose.