Sophie Gee

In my whole life, Alt was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.

It's a strange passage now that I read it back.

You think you know what she's going to say, but she's actually... She keeps saying something sort of unexpected, I think.

So for me, what this... And we're going to start at the beginning, at the first chapter, because as you said, it's almost like eight linked short stories, this novel.

Before we go in...

I think the thing to say about this novel is that above everything else, it's about the experience of showing up in an institution where you feel like an outsider and believing that everybody else is an insider, is a cozy insider.

I think that's what it's about.

The subject matter is the iconic subject matter of American literature.

Well, we've said it's our favorite class, Jonty.

Completely.

I've read quite a lot of Curtis Sittenfeld's writing.

I actually really like it and she's a good writer.

But the reason I think Prep is her best book is that I think that the topic, the subject matter, which is the elite school, the boarding school, perfectly coalesces with what she's best at as a writer, which is this very almost, she's almost a kind of literary anthropologist.

She kind of breaks down the minutiae and the details of

each stage in this case of the boarding school day.

And it's incredibly compelling because you realise from, you know, actually all the films that we've mentioned in the opening of this episode, including the ones that are set in elite boarding schools, you don't see the minute details except, of course, in that

of masterpieces clueless when you do.

It is also all about the detail.

So I just want to actually quibble or add on to, depending on your point of view, a couple of the things that you've just said.

First of all, this idea that, yeah, that Sittenfeld sort of had to change her class or the narrator's class in this book because you can't tell a story without