Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld (born 1975) is an American writer. She is the author of a collection of short stories, You Think it, I’ll Say It (2018), as well as six novels: Prep (2005), the story of students at a Massachusetts prep school; The Man of My Dreams (2006), a coming-of-age novel and an examination of romantic love; American Wife (2008), a fictional story loosely based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush; Sisterland (2013), which tells the story of identical twins with psychic powers, Eligible (2016), a modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice, and Rodham (2020), an alternate history political novel about the life of Hillary Clinton. Life and education Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld was born August 23, 1975, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the second of four children (three girls and a boy) born to Elizabeth "Betsy" Curtis (née Bascom) and Paul George Sittenfeld (d. 2021). Her mother is an art history teacher and librarian at Seven Hills School, a private school in Cincinnati, and her father was an investment adviser. Her younger brother, P.G. Sittenfeld, is a former member of the Cincinnati City Council. Her mother is Catholic and her father was Jewish. She attended Seven Hills School through the eighth grade, then attended high school at Groton School, a boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1993. In 1992, the summer before her senior year, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. She attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied creative writing, wrote articles for the college newspaper, and edited that paper's weekly arts magazine. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamourʼs College Women of the Year. She went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 2008, she married Matt Carlson. They have two daughters. Career Prep Her first novel, Prep, which took her three years to write, was published in 2005 and concerns a girl, Lee Fiora, from South Bend, Indiana, who goes to Ault School, an elite boarding school near Boston, Massachusetts. Elissa Schappell, who wrote in The New York Times Review of Books: "Sittenfeld's dialogue is so convincing that one wonders if she didn't wear a wire under her hockey kilt." The New York Times named Prep one of their top five works of fiction for 2005.<ref>The Ten Best