Sophie Gee

She's not a Daisy Buchanan.

Okay, so how are we going to bring this in for a landing, this series on schools?

I'm pretty committed to my face-off between the rugby of Tom Brown's school days and the alt or grotten, as I prefer to call it, of Curtis Sittenfeld's prep.

And the thing I have alluded to, but not fully mentioned, is that some of my best friends appear as real life characters in prep.

So I feel that I'm an intimate of this world.

So how are we going to stage the rivalry between the two books?

And what's the, more importantly, what's the significance of the rivalry?

Rugby represents good old English values and the future empire, right?

Well, I've got a smoking quill.

It might even be a smoking gun.

So the first time I heard about this novel was when I was teaching a class on the history of satire at Princeton in 2003.

And one of my students who was in my class, who was charming but seemed on some level a little unsound in some way, and who reminded me quite vividly, had I read the book at the time, of Cross Sugarman,

P.G.

Sittenfeld.

And he came up to me after class one day and he said, I'd like to give you a novel.

And it's written by my sister.

Now, normally when someone says, I'd like to give you a novel written by my sister, your heart sinks and you think, oh, God, you know.

So he handed me a copy, an advanced copy of Prep.

And Prep, for anyone who didn't see it at the time, was one of the most brilliant pieces of early 2000s publishing, sort of American-style commercial publishing ever.

It was a white cover with the word prep written in lowercase and distinctively preppy pastel colored belt around the middle of the cover.