The Happy Booker: Guest Blogger

Susan Coll, author of Acceptance, stops by today to guest blog.

Acceptance, a sharp and very witty book about the college admissions process, made us laugh out loud. Kirkus described the book as a "cheerfully pointed satire about the college-admissions process at a suburban Washington, D.C., high school where students and/or their parents have Ivy League aspirations… Coll's affection for her targets does not detract from her bite." Even if the book weren't set in our own backyward we would still have enjoyed it—and we're not alone, check out this Acceptance-inspired a giveaway contest over at Lizzie's place. It's a funny book, folks.

You can hear Coll read tonight at Politics & Prose. 7PM.

Read an excerpt from Acceptance.

Guest Blog by Susan Coll

I didn’t realize how attached I felt to Taylor, a character in my novel, Acceptance, until she made her debut in cyber-space. The first time that I logged onto her MySpace page and discovered that she had a 31-year-old male friend named Tom, I was ready to pull the plug on this experiment in book promotion. Taylor is still in high school and she spends a lot of time alone in her room brooding, which is to say she might be vulnerable to the advances of some possible pervert from California who says he likes karaoke and is interested in building alternate communities.

Building a MySpace page for a fictional character has been a strange endeavor. I created Taylor, I gave her life, and now, in an all too familiar maternal lament, it seems I’ve lost control. I thought I knew her well, but now I realize there are pretty basic things about her that I’d not previously considered. Filling in the blanks on a MySpace profile requires knowledge of whether she’d like to have children, someday, for example. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to figure out her favorite movies, but what is her horoscope sign? The one I’ve put as a place-holder is almost certainly incorrect. More to the point, Taylor is relatively shy and reserved, so how much would she really want to reveal about herself to complete strangers?

I teach occasional novel writing workshops, and one of the first exercises I typically inflict on my students is to create a resume for each main character. Even if the summer spent scooping ice cream for the minimum wage never really figures into the larger narrative, having a grip on the back-story invariably helps the writer invent a more fully realized character.

Creating a MySpace page shouldn’t be much different from writing a resume, so perhaps part of what felt so odd was that I was doing things in reverse. I had already invented Taylor, and now I was being asked to elaborate. She was previously static on the page, but now each detail of her life is a literal link to others. Identifying Donnie Darko as one of her favorite movies is going to put her directly in touch with others who like morbid cult films, and this doesn’t necessarily strike me as a good thing. Simply by providing a list of her favorite bands she’s already made friends with the entire musical group “Dashboard Confessional.” Taylor’s other so-called friend, Coner Oberst---aka the musician known as Bright Eyes---has unilaterally removed her favorite song from the page, directing would-be listeners to his new CD.

I imagine that writers who are fortunate enough to see their work transformed on the movie screen must experience a similar sort of separation anxiety, yet in that case at least they are presumably handing their characters off to a writer who has their best interests in mind. Floating Taylor in cyberspace feels like some sort of wrenching right of passage, weirdly not unlike sending a kid off to college, which is in fact the theme of the book. I had spent years fretting about her future, trying to help her do the right things, hoping that she would learn to make good choices, and now she’s out there on her own, blogging, networking, and making age-inappropriate friends.

Perhaps the most telling thing I’ve learned from this project, however, is that people of a certain age shouldn’t be mucking around on MySpace in the first place, an opinion my kids were quick to share when I expressed my initial mortification about Tom. It turns out Tom is the founder of MySpace, and a friend to all of the 157,381,552 people with accounts, I was told, with accompanying eye-rolls. Evidently this is something that everyone except mothers in their 40s already know.