Jonty Claypole

Her mother was a teacher.

And I'm really struck by the fact that

she has to move her character further down the social scale.

It's almost impossible, I think, for somebody to write a book about elite education in which your central character just comes from the elite.

Like, I don't think anyone's going to go with that as a story.

What we can all relate to is the idea of feeling like an outsider, of not feeling quite good enough and not feeling part of that world.

But the line I loved from an interview Sittenfeld did was that she said the reason why she wanted to write the book, she didn't want it to be a critique of elite schools.

It was just a school she went to.

And she said, I feel like my childhood and adolescence are more vivid to me.

The world sort of makes a bigger impression on you then because everything is so much newer.

And I think that's true for all of us, that the weight that our school experiences hold in our memories and our imagination is

outweighs pretty much everything else we do in our lives, with exceptions, you know, love, childbirth, et cetera, et cetera.

But those school years, they run through us like rocks.

So much of our insecurities and our beliefs and our values and our friendships come back to that moment.

And I think a lot of books about schools...

aren't that interested in the daily experience of being at school.

They're interested in schools or the school system as a sort of metaphor for social injustice or for other things.

And the other thing I love about this book, alongside what you're describing about the experience of being an outsider, is just the care that Sittenfeld brings to bringing alive really minute details of school life.

Like she wants to honour those experiences and memories in a way that actually writers don't do all that much.

And so for me, it's the minutiae of this book that I loved most of all.