PECULIAR QUALIFICATIONS
About the Book
Peculiar Qualifications is my first novel, for which I am currently seeking both representation and a publisher. The book is set in Oak Park and River Forest, Illinois, two affluent and historic suburbs of Chicago. The title comes from Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel Sister Carrie, which describes a young woman's journey from innocent Wisconsin girl to savvy city woman. Her first stop is Chicago, which Dreiser describes vividly:
"Before following her in her round of seeking, let us look at the sphere in which her future was to lie. In 1889 Chicago had the peculiar qualifications of growth which made such adventuresome pilgrimages, even on the part of young girls, plausible. Its many and growing commercial opportunities gave it widespread fame which made of it a giant magnet, drawing to itself from all quarters the hopeful and the hopeless – those who had their fortunes yet to make and those whose fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax elsewhere. […] The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where perhaps one solitary house stood out alone – a pioneer of the populous ways to be. There were regions, open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas lamps fluttering in the wind. Narrow board walks extended out, passing here a house and there a store at far intervals, eventually ending on the open prairie."
When I first read these words in E.L. Doctorow's Craft of Fiction class during Spring 2008, I was immediately reminded of my hometowns, Oak Park and River Forest, which stand today where Dreiser's "open prairie" once was. The image of sidewalks and lamps waiting for people matched up with the feelings of fate and beauty that I have always had about Oak Park and River Forest. The quotation gave me a title for the manuscript I had already begun to write.
"Before following her in her round of seeking, let us look at the sphere in which her future was to lie. In 1889 Chicago had the peculiar qualifications of growth which made such adventuresome pilgrimages, even on the part of young girls, plausible. Its many and growing commercial opportunities gave it widespread fame which made of it a giant magnet, drawing to itself from all quarters the hopeful and the hopeless – those who had their fortunes yet to make and those whose fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax elsewhere. […] The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where perhaps one solitary house stood out alone – a pioneer of the populous ways to be. There were regions, open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas lamps fluttering in the wind. Narrow board walks extended out, passing here a house and there a store at far intervals, eventually ending on the open prairie."
When I first read these words in E.L. Doctorow's Craft of Fiction class during Spring 2008, I was immediately reminded of my hometowns, Oak Park and River Forest, which stand today where Dreiser's "open prairie" once was. The image of sidewalks and lamps waiting for people matched up with the feelings of fate and beauty that I have always had about Oak Park and River Forest. The quotation gave me a title for the manuscript I had already begun to write.
Plot Synopsis
Peculiar Qualifications follows the lives of Nina Nocente and Susanna Jordan, two girls growing up in Oak Park and River Forest, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The story begins as the girls enter adolescence, captivated by the dangers and delights of the adult world. In their airtight universe, everything contains equal measures of peril and beauty: the dream lives they create on the Internet, the days they spend stoned or anxious at school, and the constant threat of psychic and physical violence in their relationships. They meet briefly in their ninth-grade French class, but the book largely follows their separate paths. Nina begins a series of relationships that will shape her identity, while Susanna becomes a park rat, a denizen of the teen underworld at Scoville Park. When Nina and Susanna begin to explore the world of sexuality, their lives veer out of control. A heroin dealer at the Park targeting lonely young women offers a tempting escape. Nina and Susanna want to be good girls, but what does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be a girl?
Why I wrote Peculiar Qualifications
The vogue for sordid stories of teenagers behaving badly began when I was still in middle school, in the late 1990s. The world was transfixed by beautiful young women performing reenactments of male desire; Britney Spears's "Baby One More Time" video and Ali Larter's whipped-cream nude descending a staircase in Varsity Blues are two early examples that come to mind, although these seem pretty tame by today's standards. When I began high school, there were bad girls in my real life, too, girls with half-closed eyes who smoked cigarettes all morning at the park across the street from the school. I admired their blunt rebellion and insouciance, but I wasn't one of them, even though I sometimes wanted to be. I made forays into their world but never fully inhabited it.
Like many writers, my inspiration has always been equal parts voyeurism and narcissism. When I began my graduate studies at New York University, my work was comprised of highly allegorical stories that bore some resemblance to my life - or at least took inspiration from it - but actively avoided any content that could draw comparisons between my fictional world and my real world. I didn't want to write a highly autobiographical first novel. I wanted to explore something different, something weirder, a world that would surprise my reader.
As I moved through my coursework at NYU, I began to realize that the world I wanted to give my reader was one I knew well, one whose details were intimately known to me, a place both foreign and familiar: the landscape of danger that I engaged with tangentially in high school. Once I accepted this, Peculiar Qualifications took shape relatively quickly, over a whirlwind eighteen-month period of drafting and revision. I had the good fortune of working with Lydia Davis as my thesis adviser, and with her sharp editorial eye I was able to create a narrative of self-determination in an age of uncertainty, one that restores agency and personality to the girls I watched in high school. I felt a responsibility to write this book, not only to the many girls who wouldn't tell the story, but also to my younger self, the girl who observed so closely and wanted to tell everyone what she saw. Perhaps the public appetite for "bad girls" will never decrease, but I'd like to hope that those girls can begin to author their own stories.
Photo of the author at age eleven in front of the River Forest Public Library, June 1996.
Like many writers, my inspiration has always been equal parts voyeurism and narcissism. When I began my graduate studies at New York University, my work was comprised of highly allegorical stories that bore some resemblance to my life - or at least took inspiration from it - but actively avoided any content that could draw comparisons between my fictional world and my real world. I didn't want to write a highly autobiographical first novel. I wanted to explore something different, something weirder, a world that would surprise my reader.
As I moved through my coursework at NYU, I began to realize that the world I wanted to give my reader was one I knew well, one whose details were intimately known to me, a place both foreign and familiar: the landscape of danger that I engaged with tangentially in high school. Once I accepted this, Peculiar Qualifications took shape relatively quickly, over a whirlwind eighteen-month period of drafting and revision. I had the good fortune of working with Lydia Davis as my thesis adviser, and with her sharp editorial eye I was able to create a narrative of self-determination in an age of uncertainty, one that restores agency and personality to the girls I watched in high school. I felt a responsibility to write this book, not only to the many girls who wouldn't tell the story, but also to my younger self, the girl who observed so closely and wanted to tell everyone what she saw. Perhaps the public appetite for "bad girls" will never decrease, but I'd like to hope that those girls can begin to author their own stories.
Photo of the author at age eleven in front of the River Forest Public Library, June 1996.
