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Author Tales: Caroline Says

Caroline Says is the author for this Thursday's Author Tales. Caroline along with Hobson Brown and Taylor Materne are the authors of The Upper Class Series: The Upper Class, Miss Educated, Off Campus and the newest novel Crash Test. Crash Test will be released August 26th! Here are my reviews for, The Upper Class, Miss Educated and Off Campus. Remember to leave a comment to be entered in the Monthly Contest!
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RELIVING THE PAST + WRITING = THERAPY
Caroline Says

In this bright future, you can’t forget your past. Bob Marley

So my co-authors, Taylor Materne and Hobson Brown, and I just finished the fourth of the Upper Class series, called Crash Test. Each book deals with the same crew of kids, give or take, through a few years at a New England boarding school called Wellington. For us as writers, it’s been a few years of reliving the past, and making it into something brand new.

Taylor, Hobson and I in real life went to boarding school together, fifteen years ago, and the process of creating Wellington and its students and landscapes and teachers and its problems and pleasures—it was an intense psychological experience, since it involved reaching into our own past. It was painful to remember some of what went down at sixteen, but mainly it was healing and empowering.

It’s amazing how you can look back, and realize that your sense of the past is incomplete, lopsided, skewed. In going back through the moments and vignettes of a time of life, it’s possible to put the broken pieces back into a new whole. I found this to be the healing part, the creative part, of remembering.

In the second book, Miss Educated, Chase—the golden boy from the South—realizes he never paid attention to Parker, the lanky, goofy hipster from Ottowa. As he develops a crush on her, he remembers how during a first semester party he completely ignored her, and she’d been particularly shy and left out that night. In his shame, he does, then, what we writers do in the course of these books as well:

“Chase relives the night. He goes so far as to redo it. He regreets her. Tells her she looks nice. No, he tells her she looks beautiful. He kisses her on the cheek. Before the night gets rough and dirty, he asks her to take a walk with him instead of going back to the hotel. They laugh, kick at litter on the cold street, arms linked in an old-fashioned way, her glittering bag hanging from her arm, and they have nowhere to go. They head that way.”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Santayana

To spend as much time and thought as it took to write the series, we three writers racked up hours and hours reminiscing. We walked those marble hallways again, trudged onto a rainy soccer field where we knew we were about to get beaten, met a boy or a girl in the choir loft where make-out sessions happened, we got nervous all over again, we got rejected, we were kissed, we fell, we got up, we scored in the last ten seconds of the game, and we won—it was EXHAUSTING.

But even if the outcome was the same in these re-runs, the experience of re-doing it was liberating—we had control this time, we could slow the action and watch more carefully what was happening. We could make our own past a more true and honest part of ourselves, and then let ourselves be changed by it.

As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag. Patti Smith


Remembering things accurately has had a few roadblocks. One was gender.

Taylor and Hobson, being guys, had a very different experience from me in high school—braiding together our stories was cathartic. We realized that even now, many years later, both genders have the wrong idea about what goes on behind closed doors. I imagined all the guys as sure and tough, and in control. They imagined that all the girls in high school were confident, and the beautiful girls were extra-confident. That we talked about guys, and made decisions on who to pursue, with
ease and surety.

Ha! Most girls I knew, definitely myself included, were unsure, imitating each other and making it up as we all went along. In hindsight, now, too, I can see that some of the most “popular” girls were going through things secretly—with their families, with their relationships to their bodies, with their sexuality. Very little is as it seems in high school.

One of the things we did, in transposing memory into fiction, was to “honor” those moments of uncertainty. The temptation is to make everything tidy and simple, to create characters that are never insecure, events where everything goes according to plan, to design a world where no one gets hurt or makes mistakes. But that’s not interesting, because it’s not authentic.

So instead we celebrated that in-between state. When Nikki, in the first book, The Upper Class, has an extreme sexual experience that might have arrived too soon for her, she walks across the moonlit campus afterward. We don’t condemn or condone her; instead she “raises her arms as if they were wings, then lets them fall to her sides. Sometimes the body is the way out of the self. There’s a big sky inside yourself where you can take flight.”

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
-G. K. Chesterton


Who doesn’t run into trouble during high school? With a friend, a teacher, a parent. It’s almost inevitable. Throughout our four Upper Class books, the kids do battle with all kinds of demons. Chase with his gruff, heavy-drinking military dad. Delia with her past in California, her friend’s dad, and all the rumors. Laine with her coach, who drives her to faint, bloody-nosed, on a field, from over-exertion. Nikki with the Dean, who tells her she dresses promiscuously.

Bruno Bettelheim wrote a book we love called The Uses of Enchantment. He says that people use fairy tales to work out dangerous emotional or moral issues, in a safe way and a safe place. In writing these books, we also felt like we were making some structure on which we could play, could exercise, could work out all these memories, and fight and resolve old battles.

Let yourself be angry. Curse out the teacher who told you that you’d never come to anything. Storm out the classroom. Slam the door. There’s no repercussion in prose.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. Anais Nin

In the last Book, Crash Test, Parker is really put against the wall. She faces what we all face at one point or another—profound failure. Everyone defines it differently. Parker might not belong at Wellington, and she might not survive there. There are dark forces ganging up on her: a guy who introduces her to OxyContin, a group of friends afraid to make her mad by telling her to stop, good and kind parents who are way too far away to know what’s happening.

What does it feel like to come to the edge of the cliff? To look over? Do you fall or do you fly? It’s exciting, while writing, to take an opportunity and imagine the biggest fear. The biggest failure. And to imagine what comes next, instead of burying oneself there, in that particular grave. A good therapist would say that we should meet our fears, and get to know them. What better place to do that than in a book?
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Thanks Caroline for such an insightful guest post! If you would like more information about Caroline, Taylor, Hobson or The Upper Class novels, you can visit the following link:

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/upperclassnovels