Our country’s fascination with the prep subculture is ubiquitous and at times unsettling. Shows like Gossip Girl and NYC Prep document the lives of the entitled and the clueless. This phenomenon carries over into books, the literary (?) equivalent of Gossip Girl and the Clique Series (the poor-man’s Gossip Girl) are quite popular as well.
Now enter Everything Sucks. Written in the vein of Prep, Everything Sucks (subtitled: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool) denounces prep school life in memoir form.
Hannah Friedman gives us a highly candid look at her life at a New York private school. The daughter of one-hit wonder, Dean Friedman and a monkey-obsessed, paranoid mother, Hannah spends her childhood and preteen years in the shadow of the family’s beloved pet monkey, Amelia. She suffers humiliation at school in the form of bra stuffing gone awry and some unfortunate fashion missteps, such as wearing a bindi to school. Soon, it becomes all too much for Hannah and she enrolls in a private school on scholarship.
Determined to fit in, Hannah makes friends with the In-Crowd, who are called the Great Eight. The Great Eight are like the Plastics, but with a seven (plus) figure trust fund. They could get together with the Heathers for a good game of croquet and could tangle with the aforementioned Plastics any day of the week. Their leader, Cashmere, disregards price tags and throws a fit at her sweet sixteen when given size 6 jeans.
Little by little Hannah becomes acquainted with the intricacies of Queen Bee-dom. She dresses the part, eats as little as possible, and ridicules the less popular. Hannah feels on top of the world for a good while. She enjoys a relationship with Adam, a rich upperclassman who has a bit of a pot problem and a chip on his shoulder. But, soon things begin to spiral out of control. She develops an “overreliance” on Adderall, cocaine, and purging.
Things come to a head for Hannah when college application season comes. The students become even more cutthroat and she writes a cathartic essay that is published in Newsweek about her experience in the application process.
In general, Hannah’s story is something that will be very familiar to many teenage girls, regardless of income or region. It is about one girl’s strong need to fit in with her peers and how far she was willing to go to achieve it. As a teenage girl I found myself cringing with her at the familiar moments of angst and embarrassment. However, there were moments when I wanted to personally tell her that these people were not worth anything that she put herself through.
Despite her fear of freakdom, Hannah Friedman gives us an honest account of how much prep school can suck.
