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.[1] Her younger brother, P.G. Sittenfeld, is a former member of the Cincinnati City Council. Her mother is Catholic and her father was Jewish.[2]
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.
Sittenfeld 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.[3][4][5] She went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.[6]
In 2008, she married Matt Carlson.[7] They have two daughters.[8][9]
