Nostalgia

One thing that I don't recommend when you're reading a fictional memoir about high school is to receive several boxes of childhood stuff from your parents who are moving. This past Monday, somewhere in the middle of Lee's (from Prep, see last entry) sophomore year, my dad appeared with a box of dance trophies, a pile of random school papers, certificates, and diplomas, assorted other stuff, and all four of my high school yearbooks. I spent part of the evening with the book from my senior year, finding all the pictures of me, marvelling again at my classmates who were votes "most popular," "best hair," etc. (I didn't even remember quite a few of them), and wondering about all of the ways my high school experience was both wonderful and terrible. How much I could identify with Lee (and could identify the popular perfect people at TOHS who had their counterparts in Prep). How much I have grown since then, and how much I cherish that growth, but yet can still miss how much I felt part of that community.

In the end, I felt that it allowed me to finish reading Prep in a different way; it complicated the novel a lot. You can both love and hate high school, and I think that Sittenfeld should have emphasized that more. She should have teased out more of how some people only belong to a community when they are physically removed from it. Above all, though, I wish she hadn't ended with a little "where are they now?" about some of her main characters, although thankfully she spared us her protagonist's future.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the book. It was a fun read, replete with all the secondhand discomfort and recognition of the embarrassing things that you did when you were a teenager. It'll be interesting to see what Sittenfeld - currently teaching at a private school in DC, just up the street from my old apartment - takes on next, and how she grows (or doesn't) as a writer.