Sittenfeld defies her 'Prep' image

It's raining, but Curtis Sittenfeld carries no umbrella and walks right past Starbucks on Nassau Street, where she has agreed to meet me. Surely, I think, getting lost and soaked is exactly the type of thing that Lee Fiora, Sittenfeld's intensely awkward but likeable fictional protagonist, would do.

Okay, I admit it. I am looking for similarities between the author and her heroine. How could I not? Ever since "Prep", Sittenfeld's debut novel, hit the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for nine weeks, critics have spent about equal time effusively praising her candid portrait of the narrator she describes as "neurotic" and speculating that much of the book is autobiographical.

But when Sittenfeld finally arrives, her blunt-cut hair neat and dry, I already have my doubts. She sits down across from me, apologizes for being late and laughs at herself. Handling a minor gaffe so neatly is something the obsessive Lee could never do.

Sittenfeld is utterly at ease and even charming. She is not, I note, awkward at all.

It's easy to see Sittenfeld as the person who wrote the incisive, uncannily accurate observations about young people that are at the heart of "Prep's" appeal. As one New York Times reviewer observed, "Sittenfeld's dialogue is so convincing that one wonders if she didn't wear a wire under her hockey kilt."

That's not the only thing underneath Sittenfeld's hockey kilt that reviewers have wondered about. Speculation abounds about the basis for Lee's big romance – or lack thereof – with golden boy basketball player Cross Sugarman, who sneaks into her room at night for sex but hardly says hello during the day. On page 314, Lee's self-analysis goes into overdrive as she gives Cross what may very well be contemporary fiction's most awkward and well-publicized blow job.

Sittenfeld's next book, "The Man of My Dreams", due out in May, tells the story of another lovelorn young woman, struggling to find a happy medium in her own life between her parents' deteriorating marriage and the celebrity weddings she reads about.

I ask Curtis if a foray into the battle of the sexes is just a byproduct of writing about teenage girls. She tells me her books have no intentional moral message, but that social issues sometimes bubble up from realistic writing.

"Fiction allows you to explore how complicated people are," she says.

Lee Fiora's complexities are ultimately what make her so engaging. Socially awkward and a scholarship student at Ault, the fictional boarding school at which the book is set, she does not fit in with her classmates, the "bank boys" and blond girls who summer on Nantucket. A Newsweek reviewer compared Fiora to Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald '17's "The Great Gatsby", "an obsessive observer of the very rich."

A keen analyst and critic of her classmates' elite world, Fiora also wants desperately to be a part of it. She embodies teenage self-consciousness and uncertainty but also, as the adult narrator, has perspective on it.

Fiora certainly follows in a tradition of perceptive outsider narrators like Holden Caulfield. But Sittenfeld not only shies away from the comparison that some reviewers have drawn between her work and J.D. Salinger's, she is also self-deprecating about "Prep" in general.

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"I think I believed myself to be writing a more unconventional, experimental book than I was. Sometimes I thought, 'Whooo, I'm going so far inside Lee's head, this is craaazy," she says, mocking herself gently.

Working in what she describes as writing "binges," Sittenfeld began "Prep" while at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. After getting her MFA, she continued writing fiction while freelancing for Salon and other publications. She was not always convinced, she says, that "Prep" would ever see the inside of a bookstore.

"I was kind of kidding myself," she says. "I was almost pretending I wasn't writing a novel, while writing a novel."

Sittenfeld says that once she decided to complete "Prep", her background as a business reporter influenced her fiction writing positively, because it got her used to working on deadlines and having her work edited.

"I think some people who have a more 'creative' background feel almost like they're being physically abused when their words are edited on the page," she jokes. "I don't always love it, but I'm used to it."

Even with all her success, Curtis says she just feels lucky to be able to support herself in doing what she loves most. For her, it's the process itself, not just the bestselling product, that is satisfying.

"The best part of writing is probably when you feel really immersed in it while you're doing it and you sort of lose a sense of time," she says. "I feel like myself in that moment, sort of like the best version of myself."

As we leave Starbucks, I ask Sittenfeld whom she would cast as Lee if Paramount Pictures (which recently optioned the film rights to "Prep") follows through on the project. "I would like it to be an unknown. If it were Lindsay Lohan, I actually think that would be really hilarious," she deadpans. But ideally, it would be "someone who could be plausibly, genuinely awkward." It doesn't sound as though Sittenfeld is planning to star.