Politics & Power Quote by Curtis Sittenfeld

There is a quiet flex in this line: empathy not as a moral aspiration, but as a practiced skill. Sittenfeld’s phrasing sidesteps the pious version of “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” and replaces it with something cooler and more writerly - a claim about craft. “It’s never that hard for me” reads like a confession and a provocation, inviting admiration while daring you to call it naive. The specific pairing she chooses - “an American teenage girl” and “a Japanese octogenarian man” - is doing heavy cultural work. It’s not just age and gender; it’s nation, language, presumed social power, and the entire stereotype machinery those categories drag behind them.

The subtext is a debate about who gets to narrate whom. Contemporary fiction lives inside that argument: the hunger for imaginative freedom colliding with legitimate worries about appropriation, flattening, and speaking over. Sittenfeld’s sentence plants a flag on the side of imaginative trespass - not maliciously, but confidently. She’s suggesting that interiority is portable, that difference is not an impenetrable wall, and that the writer’s job is to cross it anyway.

Context matters: Sittenfeld is known for novels that dissect social codes, especially around class, gender, and the American performance of identity. This line frames her method as observational realism plus projection, the belief that the private self is legible if you pay enough attention. It’s an argument for fiction as a technology of intimacy - and a reminder that the boldest claims of empathy also come with a responsibility to get the details right.