In their freshman year at Stuyvesant High School in NYC, a group of friends started writing to each other in a notebook in order to keep in touch despite their conflicting class schedules. One of them is Wesleyan’s very own Sophie Pollitt-Cohen ’09. That’s a risky wager, to put the private thoughts of four teenage girls out on the printed page. But Sophie didn’t seem daunted. In an interview, she explained the ins and outs, ups and downs of publishing this book.
How did your book get published?
My dad is a writer, and he was the person who said, “You know, maybe other people would be interested in reading this, as a book.” But I didn’t really take it that seriously, because I’ve been around the writing stuff, I mean both my parents are writers, and most [book ideas] never end up happening. Also, your parents always think that what their kids do is more interesting than what other people might think.
[After finding an agent], we had to go around to all these different publishers, and we made a little sample notebook, with some of our favorite entries, and all the good pictures…Then we got an offer from Warner and we took it.
Is this exactly what you wrote originally?
We changed everyone’s names except for our own. This is what the editors really helped us with: making something that would be only funny to the four of us into something understandable for people that didn’t know us, didn’t live in New York, maybe even not in this country, I don’t know. There were certain stories that didn’t really make sense to other people, or certain people that we’d talk about but never bring up again, so why confuse the reader with another character they don’t understand?
What was the most humiliating story in the book for you?
For me? Well, there’s a lot of really personal stuff. I mean, I wrote about losing my virginity in the book, but for me, that’s not the most embarrassing thing. I think the worst thing for me was when this guy that I liked totally screwed me over, and you never want to think that someone you like would do something bad to you, so I believed him when he said that [my friends] were involved in something, so I blamed them. That’s the thing I think is the most hard to read…because I still feel really bad, and it’s embarrassing that I wasted so much time thinking about him.
How would you compare the writing styles in this journal to your writing when you have publishing in mind?
That’s the reason we had to stop keeping the notebook—because we knew it was gonna be published…Once you know that people are gonna be reading it and judging it, you want to sound a lot more mature, a lot smarter, a lot funnier, and you start writing things like, “By the way, as long as we’re talking about that party we went to, here’s my feelings on Marx’s dialectic materialism.” The great thing about the book is that you can’t deny how dumb you were when you were fourteen.
If the book was made into a movie, who would play the four main girls?
Well, I’d probably be Angelina Jolie—no, not at all. A lot of people compare our book to “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” and I think those girls did a good job, or anyone from the O.C., because we all love the O.C.
What might people be surprised to learn about you?
I’m really good at calculus…It’s hard to understand that we as people are more complicated than [the characters] in the book. A lot of time people [think of us as], “Oh Lindsay, she’s the black sporty one, and Julia’s the Jewish one that’s really nice…”
If you could have superpowers, what would they be?
See, I always think I would want to be invisible or be able read people’s minds, but I think you would find out a lot of stuff that you don’t want to know; sometimes it’s better to just not know that stuff. Maybe I’d be super-snowboarder, because I’m so painfully bad at it. But if I could have super sports powers…I get really afraid to touch the machines at the gym, because I feel like I’m gonna break them and then everyone’s gonna laugh at me. I’d also love the super ability to pass my driving test.
How do you see your book being received by literary critics? Do you see it being read in classroom or just by teenage girls?
Well, I always thought teenagers would hate the book…I though that twelve-year-old girls would like it; I think that people around thirty would like it, because they’re young enough to still relate to high school, but old enough that they’re separated from it and would want to know what kids are doing now, and I think parents will, I don’t know if they’ll like it, but I think they’ll want to read it. Actually, one little review I read online [in a livejournal] said that after she read it, she would never have kids…A teenager reviewed our book [online], and she said it was the worst book she had ever tried to read. I think that for teenagers, because you’re so much still in that world, you judge it as, “Well, why did they get to write a book? Why are their lives so much more interesting that they write a book?” And our lives aren’t more interesting—we just write about it better and we have an agent. But hopefully it will be received well.
Is there anything else you would like to tell readers about the book or yourself?
I hope that people at Wesleyan, and everywhere, but especially at Wesleyan ’cause I go here, can separate the person, me, that they might know or see at the library or whatever and not think, “Omigod, I can’t believe she thought that whatever was the best band.” I hope they remember that I was fourteen. There’s a quote we always attribute to
Lindsay: “Everyone was a douchebag when they were younger, and if they think they weren’t, then they still are a douchebag.” I hope people can remember that we were all stupid and lame when we were fourteen, and hopefully I’ve grown up since then.
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