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True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School
Free Press
March 2007
On Sale: March 6, 2007
304 pages ISBN: 1416532447 EAN: 9781416532446 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Who's teenage years weren't terrible? Remember the scary
older kids? The sadistic gym teacher? The smelly kid who sat
next to you in science class? Your first fumbling kiss? That
time you threw up in the cafeteria? Your first attempt at
putting on a condom? The period that arrived unexpectedly?
That awful fight with your parents? The first time you got
drunk? That note you wrote that you shouldn't have written?
The day you forgot to zip your fly? That monster zit? When,
you wondered, would it all end? In When I Was a Loser, John McNally, author of the novel
America's Report Card, assembles twenty-five original
essays--often hilarious, sometimes tenderhearted, always
evocative--about defining moments of high school loserdom.
Brad Land, Julianna Baggott, Owen King, Johanna Edwards, and
many more fresh, talented writers explore their own angst,
humiliation, heartache, and other staples of teen life. These essays perfectly capture what it was like to be in
high school: to experience so many things for the first
time, to assert independence while desperately trying to fit
in, to feel misunderstood and unable to articulate the wild
swings between heartbreak, anger, and euphoria. One writer
recalls how his grandmother helped him with his home perm in
preparation for the Senior Class picture; another recounts
her discovery, sometime after hitting puberty, of the power
she held over boys and men, while at the same time she felt
herself at their mercy; a third remembers the casual
cruelties visited on him by the cooler kids, and the
cruelties he, in turn, inflicted on kids below him on the
social ladder. Utterly candid and compulsively readable, these essays
conjure up and untangle those raw and formative years. The
writers cringe and laugh at the teenagers they were, but at
the same time, they honor their adolescence and the way it
shaped their lives. Because, in truth, beneath the layers of
adult respectability, we all still carry a little bit of our
teenage selves around with us.
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