Quasi-literary quasi-aspirations

Writing stuff in exchange for payment seems a hopeless way to make (or contribute to) a living, so while I have a few pieces sitting around (conservative defense of birth control, anyone? Jewish parochialism? Anyone?), I'm not optimistic enough to do anything with them, other than to perhaps send them to publications and count to ten as I wait for the publication to fold.

That said, one literary market seems to be in full force: first-hand accounts of Upper East Side prep school. If your child could paint a Pollock, I could most definitely write up a novel based on my impressions of that rarefied world. If I dig deep, there's got to be something. What's holding me back?

-It's a boring topic, not to mention one that's been done. Somewhere in the blogosphere is an exchange, I think with Amber, about how there are already enough novels set in New York, so who needs more? Readers might think they do, but they don't, unless whatever it is covers new ground. Which, for reasons soon to become clear, my Great Upper East Side Novel would not.

-I was neither the limitless-credit-card-holder-soon-to-develop-a-coke-habit-and-then-poof-onto-Yale-like-nothing-happened nor the scholarship-student-of-color-from-a-not-yet-gentrified-outer-borough-location. If you did not experience high fashion and hot clubs while underage, you have no authoritah to write about lives others could only dream of. If you did not spend your private-school years developing totally justified class angst, living in two worlds, etc., you have no authoritah to write the Private School Outsider novel. One reads about Manhattan prep schools to learn about Class In America. I could certainly analyze the strange ways class mattered at the school, but can't contribute, not first-hand, at any rate, to tales of extreme decadence or out-of-placeness.

-I left after 8th grade. The thrill of the prep-school novel is the precocious entry of high school juniors into New York's glamorous world of adults. As far as I know, my classmates' debauchery was limited to 'interactions' with boys from the local boys' schools, not with investment bankers. Plus, who remembers age 13 and younger? Frank McCourt, I suppose, but it's a gift I lack.

OK, I remember some. But:

-I am unwilling to write (thinly-veiled or openly) about real people I once knew.

-What I do remember, and would be willing to write about, is not the stuff novels are made of. Does anyone really care about how the cafeteria was all gourmet (Caesar salad, balsamic this-and-that, and one time, due to a parent's donation, a whole lot of crayfish), or how a ridiculous amount of ballet class was mandatory, or how how we used striped tights as a challenge to the uniform, or how all the 'half-Jewish' kids had Jewish fathers, or that dances - for kids! - cost $50 because they 'went to charity' but were really just opportunities to - at long last - speak to members of the opposite sex? The neuroses and disordered eating of well-off adolescents, also memorable, could provide enough material for maybe a "Styles section" blurb, but the imagined calorie count of a hollowed-out bagel does not a novel make. I also have a Sheldon-like recollection of who was in which clique in the third through fifth grades, a subject I found fascinating at the time, but beats me what made it interesting. And even if I could remember why I cared, and could find a way to make others care, too, this would involve creating all new people who were just like the real people (again, authoritah), but not (again, won't speak of real people).

-Compare this with this. Whose Upper East Side authoritah would readers respect?

La jalousie

How upset should I be that one of the style influences for the Gossip Girl costume designers is one of my honest-to-goodness former classmates from my Upper East Side girls' school days? Because two things are upsetting here, really. One is that I want TV to be make-believe, but the other is that this was just not a girl I imagined could become a socialite, and this was at a school with droves of girls who seemed destined to become one. By this I mean, why am I not a socialite? Not that I'd want to socialize every night of the week, so there's that. But I'm quite sure my all-silver ensemble (space-age dress and sparkly ballet flats) today was at least as fab as any pseudo-hippie headband.