Teenage Dream

Let's take a dusty walk down memory lane and talk about being 16

Hi all!

I can’t stop writing about teenagers. Other People We Married? Teenagers. Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures? Teenagers. The Vacationers? Teenagers. Modern Lovers? Teenagers. All Adults Here? Teenagers. This Time Tomorrow? Teenagers. I don’t know if it’s because I loved being a teenager myself (which I did in equal measure to hating it, of course), or because it was when I was a teenager that I really began to see myself as the person I wanted to become, or if it’s because I always loved John Hughes movies so much. Teenagers are always going to be fascinating to me, like boy bands, and cats, and writing letters, and movie stars.

I always had a dramatic, romantic self-image, even before I was a teenager. See below, though the book in fact only contains portraits of characters from The Secret Garden. No matter! Life and Loves it is!

Yesterday, my assistant and I (shout-out to Crystal, keeping me from double-booking myself in 2022!) went through some very large, dusty boxes that had been squatting in my office for an ungodly amount of time, and I unearthed some relics. I have always kept diaries, and when I say I kept diaries, I mean, oh baby, I kept them.

Inside these bins, there are about a hundred of these. Remember these? Every single one is overflowing with heartbreak and desperation and embarrassing slang and notes to my friends and people’s phone numbers and addresses. Looking through them makes me want to throw my phone into the East River, and to send my children to a Waldorf school, and to only project movies onto the wall on Sunday nights while we all share a giant bowl of popcorn dusted with Nutritional Yeast. The internet-y world is garbage! I wrote so many pages every single day, on the subway to and from school, in my room at night, in the middle of science class. Some of it is a little terrifying to read but mostly I just feel impressed that I poured my feelings into something so concrete. Were there times when I walked into the student center and saw a cool older girl reading from my diary? Yes, there were! Did that stop me? No! I always imagined myself the record-taker, the secret-keeper. I wrote it all down.

There are also about a million of these. Instagram did not invent poetry and photography, nor their sway over sixteen year old girls.

Look at this sweet baby. There are other boxes in the garage that are full of my candid photos—thousands of photographs of parties and beautiful, drunken teenaged faces. How could anyone not love teenagers? There was a report card in one of the boxes from the Bennington July Program (lol, pause here and go listen to Lili’s podcast if you haven’t yet) from my Beat Poetry class (true LOL, as if it could get more on the nose), and it remarked that while I was occasionally engaged in the material, sometimes I just lay my head down on the desk, or stared out the window. I was fifteen, and had just finished my freshman year in high school. It was the middle of the summer. I was smoking two packs of Newport Lights every single day, and madly in love with my friends and some extremely mysterious and scary boys in the dorm next door. I was dancing to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall in a dorm room, I was taking other people’s Ritalin, I was having the time of my life. I was not there for the Beat Poetry, I was living the Beat Poetry. In this time period, I would routinely hand people a stack of poems I had written about them, as if that was a normal thing to do. If we went to high school together, I probably wrote a poem about you.

Everyday, I see a lot of people that I went to high school with—not only the ones who I’m friends with, but because my children go to my old school, I am therefore there every day, and so are a lot of my fellow alumni parents. A few of them know a little bit about my new book—high school! 90s! and I wonder if any of them worry or wonder that they might appear in its pages. They might. Nothing unflattering, certainly. But if you know where to look, there are some familiar descriptions. If I wrote a poem about you, the chances of you appearing in one of my novels increases tenfold. A good rule of thumb—be nice to the people who are always writing things down.

Pre-order This Time Tomorrow for more Upper West Side bathroom self-portraits.