Author2Author: Megan Crane & E. Lockhart, pt. 2

This week's Author2Author dialogue started yesterday when E. Lockhart and Megan Crane shared college memories. Vassar continues to play a heavy role in today's exchange, which also starts delving into some of those literary issues our authors had to deal with when working on their English Ph.D. degrees...

Megan Crane: I would say that one of my major preoccupations is with how one locates and identifies oneself, as an adult finding a place in the world and particularly as a woman doing so, and that's definitely a process that began for me at Vassar. I would also say that I've only recently begun to appreciate the ways in which participating in all that delightful melodrama set me up to write the kinds of books I write. It took me a long time to find my voice. What about you? When you say Vassar informs your writing for teenagers, is that the sort of thing you mean?

E. Lockhart: Yes, I'm talking about how the female-dominated PC party enclave that was Vassar somehow magnified and foregrounded the process of locating oneself in relation to the social order and the cultural institutions that shape identity. (I am avoiding saying "hegemony" here.) That is, there was little else to do on the Vassar campus but formulate identity in relation to the microcosm.

The Boyfriend List is all about just that subject--specifically, about someone who goes from popular kid to social leper in a small school. My next book, Fly on the Wall, is about a girl who literally gets transformed into a fly on the wall of the boys' locker room in her high school--so it's about the institutions that shape masculinity, and the process of owning one's sexuality.