In both The Prairie Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld and What Got Into Us by Jacob Guajardo the narrator jumps back and forth in time. What Got Into Us uses this device in a slightly more subtle way, sliding between times with very little indication of the switch, whereas The Prairie Wife gives indicators such as for the first switch, “In 1994, the summer after her freshman year of college.” 

This strategy of blending past and present for these characters serves to emphasize both the ‘why’ of the story, and what connects the two timelines. In The Prairie Wife, this is connecting past to present, in What Got Into Us, present to past. 

The Prairie Wife lives mostly in the present. The protagonist, Kirsten, recalls moments of the past in order to make the present of the story make sense, make it relevant to the reader so we can understand her present reactions and experiences.

“Kirsten hates Lucy Headrick because she’s a hypocrite. …Kirsten and Lucy were counselors at a camp in northern Minnesota…Lucy weighed probably twenty-five pounds more than she does now, had very short light-brown hair, and had affixed a triangle-shaped rainbow pin to her backpack…and Lucy was the first peer she’d heard use the word ‘lesbian’ other than as a slur.”

On the other hand, What Got Into Us is a deep reflection of the narrator’s past, with the present as a voice of reason and experience from which to approach the past.

“We take things that do not belong to us….We are monsters….When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child I will wonder what had gotten into us that summer and hope my child is not a monster.” 

This is the first mention of the present, or at least a point after the past the story lives in.

One other main difference in the way these two stories use this device, is in how the story ends. This is tied into what time the stories live in, though. The Prairie Wife ends in the present, with a sort of resolution, and What Got Into Us ends in the past, with something a little more open-ended. 

These two stories make use of the same element of craft in very different ways, and to serve remarkably different purposes, but also shared purposes of clarifying the story being told, and why it is being told.  

“The Prairie Wife” appears in The New Yorker and “What Got Into Us” in The Best American Short Stories 2018.