![]() “As I get older, I’m so aware of the way we constantly alter the narrative of our past and choose to leave out whole chunks of it, or turn something complex into a simple thing,” Perrotta says. “She’s trying to figure out, how did I get here, when I expected to be somewhere else entirely?” Not even Tracy Flick can have it all. “She’s a middle-aged person with regrets,” Perrotta says. It would be a different book, Perrotta says, if Tracy simply said, “I was a victim.” But her feelings are more complicated than that. As an administrator she feels one way, but she does not want to surrender her narrative completely.” She’s in charge now of policing these sorts of things. “One of the really fascinating things about writing a book like this almost 30 years later is you realize just how powerful these cultural lenses are,” he says. That was another reason Perrotta was drawn, even if only subconsciously, to revisit Tracy Flick’s story. There were some people blowing the whistle and saying, ‘I was abused by this teacher.’ And there were other women who would say, ‘I thought at the time that it was a consensual relationship,’ and now they’ve had to revisit that from an adult perspective, in a very different cultural climate.” “There were so many MeToo stories of often prestigious private high schools where teachers had abused their students for years and years. Tracy was embodying this particular early-’90s sex-positive ‘girls can have it all’ mentality.”īut there’s no denying the power imbalance between an adult teacher and a teenage girl, a reality Perrotta reckons with in the new book. They can have sex whenever they want to and be unapologetic about it and walk away from it and go on to the next thing. These brash Madonna-esque ideas that women can have everything men can have. Perrotta says that when he wrote Election, in the early 1990s, he “was drawing on these currents in feminism at the time. And she wonders if maybe the experience damaged her in ways she doesn’t even see. She still won’t call herself a victim, yet she does wonder what on earth her illicit paramour was thinking, embarking on a relationship with a teenage girl. But the Tracy Flick of 2022 is more reflective. In Election, Tracy adamantly insists she wasn’t victimized by that relationship: she was in control she ended the relationship he was the one who fell apart afterward. ![]() If that plot development was eye-opening enough in 1998, in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, it has taken on a whole new dimension today. That’s what feminism would be for her.”Īnd in the midst of her career quandary, Tracy Flick has something else to contend with: the memory of her sexual relationship with a teacher when she was still a teenager. She wants to compete on an equal playing field. She’s appalled by unearned male advantage. “But she’s aware that these men get all these unearned advantages, and that she’s constantly being put in the shadow of men who are her inferiors. “I don’t think she’d use the word ‘ patriarchy,’” he says. Yet he’s sure that she is still, in some sense, a feminist. While Perrotta doesn’t dig into Tracy’s politics in the new book, he notes that she’s probably rather conservative. And to give them parts of myself, I think.” I felt I had to be on the side of every character, and to see them as full people. That was the reason I tried to write Election with those multiple viewpoints. “ Bad Haircut is all about male friendships, and The Wishbones is about these guys in a band. Perrotta had come to think of himself as “kind of a guy writer,” he says. But both of those books were largely about men Election, he says, “was the first book where I really tried to write women characters, in a central way. Though Election was one of the first books he wrote, it wasn’t the first to be published: that was Bad Haircut: Stories from the Seventies, in 1994, which was followed by The Wishbones in 1997. He ended up at Yale, graduating in 1983, and enrolled in the graduate creative writing program at Syracuse University a few years after that. ![]() He’d grown up in New Jersey, in a working-class family, and though it had never occurred to him that he might attend an Ivy League university, a careers teacher at his high school persuaded him to try. For Perrotta, creating Flick was a leap of faith.
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