Author2Author: Megan Crane & E. Lockhart, pt. 4

After swapping undergraduate memories, E. and Megan have moved on to their graduate school experiences and their efforts to reconcile academia and commercial fiction. Today E. tells her side of the story...

Megan Crane: Experiencing "the tragedy of higher education" first hand demystified "highbrow" literature for me. While I might appreciate a Serious Novel, it's probably not what I'm going to choose to curl up with when I have a free hour. It's not what I'm going to write, either. Not that this is good or bad, it's just the way things worked out for me. (I no longer hide my "lowbrow" novels from view, either!) The battle isn't much of a battle anymore: pink pretty much won. What about you? Let's hear your graduate school experiences, "gray" versus "pink" battles, the (as you put it) drama, angst, horror, triumph, regret.

E. Lockhart: Having partied away much of my undergrad education, I deeply needed to prove that I was smart. I could get this doctoral degree, and people who knew me as a "Mug rat" (party girl) would be surprised. My older and supposedly wiser ex-boyfriend would be surprised--as would all the teachers who didn't think much of me. I would feel valid. I would feel adult.

Grad school was painful in a hundred different ways. I managed to become a decent scholar and a good researcher (I did book history) but I was never a theoretical mind, and Columbia was a hotbed of post-modern deconstructionist post-colonial whatnot. My professors were known to pat me on the head, or tell me my dress was pretty, or forget my name. Edward Said yelled at me. My favorite experience was studying for my oral exams: I spent three months reading ten hours a day. I read all of Jane Austen, all of Charlotte Brontë, and nine Dickens novels, back to back. No bad education for a novelist.

When I was mid-dissertation, I had a boyfriend whose roommate wrote a bestseller. To my own surprise, I was suddenly consumed by the desire to write a real book--that is, one designed to be read by people who were not academics. I wanted to communicate with an audience. (I wrote two books, both published under another name, while procrastinating my dissertation.)

Getting the doctorate has done two things for me. One, it got me a job. And two, although I went after it for the crap reason of wanting to prove myself--it worked; I no longer have that chip on my shoulder. I feel like a grown-up, and I take myself seriously. I don't care if anyone thinks The Boyfriend List is a silly book, or not a "real" book. It is my book. So there.

Check over the weekend if you can for one last round of discussion, and be sure to come back next week, when my Author2Author guests will be Pearl Abraham and Naama Goldstein.