Minneapolis’s ‘Best-Selling Bard of Female Anxiety’

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

Curtis Sittenfeld Chats With the Times

For years, writes Emma Goldberg in this profile for the New York Times (gift link), Curtis Sittenfeld's books "have captured the concerns of a group that has lately become a cultural fixation, middle-aged women who wake up one day and realize their lives aren’t exactly what they’d planned."

The best-selling Minneapolis author's new short story collection, Show Don't Tell, is her latest exploration into the anxieties of women of a certain age; Goldberg calls Sittenfeld "the patron saint of women who wish the floor would open up and swallow them whole.” It's a charming profile if you count yourselves among those women or just know one, with the discussion ranging from eighth-grade faux pas to Sittenfeld's unimpressed teen daughters to the wonderful HBO series Somebody Somewhere.

“People will have very different reactions to my writing,” Sittenfeld tells the Times. “People will be like, ‘I felt so frustrated by this character—they were so neurotic or cringey, and I wanted to reach into the story and shake their shoulders.’ Or people will be like, ‘I felt like you were inside my brain.’”

And for our local angling purposes, there's a lot to love about this exchange:

Her two teenage daughters have made it clear that they’re not particularly impressed by her career. “They see me as kind of ridiculous,” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “My 15-year-old will sometimes be like, ‘I can’t believe you write books, you seem so apart from the world.”

It helps that she lives in Minneapolis, where her husband teaches media studies, and which feels so distant from the hothouse worlds of Brooklyn and Hollywood. “Sometimes in interviews people will say to me, ‘Do you feel a lot of pressure in writing your next book?’ And I’ll think, Who would I feel pressure from?” Ms. Sittenfeld said. “Nobody cares what I’m doing.”

Don't Bring Your Dating Show to Minnesota

In slightly less flattering national Minnesota attention, the Wall Street Journal's Inti Pacheco is happy to take everyone down a peg with The Problem With Hosting ‘Love Is Blind’ in Minnesota: Everything. (No WSJ account? No problem—that's a free link they shared in the LIB subreddit.)

"Peter Thibault was at a wedding last fall when someone at his table asked the others if they knew any cast members of the coming season of the Netflix hit Love Is Blind,” Pacheco's story begins. "Funny they should ask. Thibault’s second cousin, Molly Mullaney, was on it." So was his high school prom date, Sara Carton, and multiple people at the table knew cast member Ben Mezzenga. "The exchange foreshadowed what has become an undeniable reality for viewers of the latest season: Minnesota is a terrible place to host a dating show," Pacheco concludes. (Well, yeah, when you cast a bunch of North Loopers that's what happens!)

If you've caught any of the "drama" (a term we're using so very loosely here) from LIB Season 8, or if you've been reading Racket's recaps, then you already know this has been an unbearably tepid season of television. But hey, at least we made some meme-able memories along the way: Dave's weird obsession with his sister, "Family. Faith. Registered nurse. And Taco Bell," the Ibuprofen story, and... yeah, that's just about it. See you next season, everyone.

Duluth Musher Currently Crushing Iditarod

Emily Ford, a rookie Iditarod musher from Duluth, is making an "unexpected run" at the Alaska race's halfway point, writes Bob Timmons for the Star Tribune. After 582 miles and seven days, she's the top rookie in the standings and 14th of 27 mushers overall—six mushers, four of them rookies, have dropped out. “The whole team, including Emily, has positive energy,” her partner, Anna Hennessy, tells the Strib via text.

That story led me to this feature (gift link) Timmons wrote about Ford in February, with amazing photos and videos by Anthony Soufflé. In it, Ford says she wasn't doing the race with the expectations of being a champion: "I wanted to pair winter adventure with advocacy for the Boundary Waters, keeping mining at bay in the Boundary Waters, and then also pairing it with a remembrance of Black winter explorers, namely Matthew Henson, the first Black person—the first person, maybe—to the North Pole."

Help Out Twin Cities Music Great John Munson

Minnesota musician John Munson—bassist for Semisonic, Trip Shakespeare, and the New Standards—suffered a stroke last month, according to this GoFundMe for his family. "Although his prognosis is positive, he will be in acute rehabilitation for a length undetermined," the GoFundMe, which is currently 74% of the way to its $100,000 goal, explains.

For more on Munson, including the extravagant and very Minnesotan purchase he made with his first big royalty check, check out this 2023 profile from Mpls.St.Paul Mag.