A thousand times yes to this!! I also moved to the UK after college, and the culture shock fundamentally changed how I think about work, money, HEALTH INSURANCE, and community from the bougie scrabble of upper middle class life you describe so well here. A kindred spirit!
It's wild how even the UK, a place with all sorts of challenges and a deeply diminished social safety net, can itself cause such a visceral "wait, it doesn't have to be like this?" feeling.
A kindred spirit indeed! I'm glad this resonated -- I feel incredibly lucky I, too, was able to see a different way of structuring society. Perfect? Not even close. But the bar for enoughness felt innately more right-sized!
We raised our kids in the Chicago North Shore neighborhood where they filmed Home Alone and other John Hughes films. There was societal pressure, but a great deal of peer academic pressure, too. When my oldest was in middle school in early ‘90’s you could make the lowest honor roll with a 3.00. By the time my youngest got there the student council had decided that too many students were on the honor roll so they raised it to 3.5.
When he was fifteen our son did a month long backpacking trip to the Frank Church wilderness in Idaho. It’s one of the most remote places in the west. On the way back home they stopped in Missoula, MT. He saw the U of Montana and it was love at first sight. Even tho he eventually toured other campuses it is the only school to which he applied. When his Dad and I were asked where he was going to school and we answered U of MT there was usually amazed silence. Twenty five years later he is the Marketing Director for tourism in the Montana Department of Commerce. His new tv ad campaign does not show cowboys or hunting or fly fishing or skiing. It just shows people looking at the sky or a family silently sitting around a campfire or a couple looking at a magnificent vista. It evokes the feeling he felt when he was fifteen. It’s calm and peaceful and magnificent. He sees his high school peers living the same lives that their parents did, but he and now his wife (a Hanover, New Hampshire native — Dartmouth doctor father, so same pressure) and their children have chosen a different kind of life. They are blessed.
I can't wait to seek out his ad campaign! Growing up in Missoula, I ran into a surprising number of UM folks from Wilmette and environs-- I mean, I get it.
This movie completely missed me somehow ... I'd never heard of it until now. Because of this article, I watched the preview, and I might just have to watch it. Garrett, are you planning a watch party?
I'll admit, though, that I'll probably have a little more fun watching Jason the principal and Phoebe as a middle-aged mom. LOL
OK, I just watched it. I feel like I should write a whole thing, but I don't know if I'm up for that. Oh, well, but here I go ...
I graduated high school in a class of 25. My best friend got married in April of our senior year because she finally figured out she was pregnant (by a man in his mid-20s who already ran his own business ... in other words, he shouldn't have been fucking a 16-year-old in high school), and she had her baby two months after our graduation. I was dating her husband's best friend, who was also a grown-ass adult dating a child in high school, and I ended up marrying him a couple years later. Are there worse things than volunteering to put those stats on your resume and waiting until graduation eve to go to a party? Eh, probably.
Nobody in my graduating class was trying to get into Harvard or Yale. The three or four people who went to college right out of high school went to the state university. The rest of us got jobs or got married. And the classmate of mine who was rich back then is still rich now because he took over his dad's company, and it's one of the main employers there. Nepo babies in tiny towns are still nepo babies.
When I eventually signed up to go to state college, I didn't even have the hint of a thought that I wouldn't get in. If you would have asked me back then IF I'd gotten in, I would have looked at you with a blank stare and open mouth. Huh?
That's a complete turnaround from my kid who was "lucky" to make it two years ago into the state school that's in our town. I remember back in the 1990s when I lived here, there was a running joke about this university ... how do you get a degree from this school? Roll down your window, slow down, and drive by ... they'll toss it in. And now it's COMPETITIVE? I never would have seen that coming. But I also couldn't imagine the hideous debt and other shit that's been piled on my kids' generation.
Back to the movie ... let me talk about the actor Skyler Gisondo who I didn't know/remember until I stumbled upon the 2019 movie Feast of the Seven Fishes after the seven fishes episode of The Bear. (After googling, I also see he was, as a child, in Four Christmases from 2008, which I thought was a HORRIBLE movie. It was supposed to be funny, but it didn't make me laugh. I wanted to slap everybody in it. I still do.) But in the Seven Fishes movie, he was like an anachronism. It was like he was a 70-year-old in a 20-year-old's body. Maybe because the movie was set in the 1980s. Maybe because it's a story as old as time. But, to me, it feels like he fell into a completely different dimension. Like he's Frank Sinatra in a Chappell Roan video. (Can you imagine old Blue Eyes riding a unicorn?) So, it was ... interesting to see him in this movie.
In any case, I'm feeling an itch to do a Celebrity Math equation with him.
I'm probably way off theme here, but ... whooooo! What a ride down memory lane this was.
Loved it because I wasn't a Molly but had lots of them as friends and often felt lesser than because of my more limited college choices (because of brains and money). I have reconnected with one as we both moved back to our hometown and it has been so incredible to share our feelings from that time and understand that EVERYONE was going through it in high school (duh lol)
Thank you so much for your kind words, Nikki! And what a full-circle moment with your own friends. High school is...a lot. Being able to look back as an adult with this new kind of perspective on burnout, on relationships, on the expectations we had then and maybe some expectations we've shed now -- a gift. I enjoyed writing this and I love hearing that you enjoyed reading it!
I have so much affection for both this movie and this essay but I mostly came here to comment on the WILD ABUNDANCE OF HAIR in that music video. GLORIOUS!
Thanks for sharing this essay! I will also have to watch the movie. What struck me was that I also went to a similar high school surrounded by Mollys. But I can’t remember any pressure to perform. My parents got excited about the literature I read and my fruit fly genetics experiments while gently sneering at SAT prep classes and the college rankings game. I appreciate that you named fear driving this race. I can now recognize that I was free to focus on love of learning because I had no fear of losing. I wonder what it would take to impart this security at scale.
A thousand times yes to this!! I also moved to the UK after college, and the culture shock fundamentally changed how I think about work, money, HEALTH INSURANCE, and community from the bougie scrabble of upper middle class life you describe so well here. A kindred spirit!
It's wild how even the UK, a place with all sorts of challenges and a deeply diminished social safety net, can itself cause such a visceral "wait, it doesn't have to be like this?" feeling.
Oh yes— By no means a utopia, but the boot-strappy individualism of my native Midwestia were truly challenged in all sorts of ways in bonny Scotland!
It doesn't take much social democracy to blow an American mind!
A kindred spirit indeed! I'm glad this resonated -- I feel incredibly lucky I, too, was able to see a different way of structuring society. Perfect? Not even close. But the bar for enoughness felt innately more right-sized!
We raised our kids in the Chicago North Shore neighborhood where they filmed Home Alone and other John Hughes films. There was societal pressure, but a great deal of peer academic pressure, too. When my oldest was in middle school in early ‘90’s you could make the lowest honor roll with a 3.00. By the time my youngest got there the student council had decided that too many students were on the honor roll so they raised it to 3.5.
When he was fifteen our son did a month long backpacking trip to the Frank Church wilderness in Idaho. It’s one of the most remote places in the west. On the way back home they stopped in Missoula, MT. He saw the U of Montana and it was love at first sight. Even tho he eventually toured other campuses it is the only school to which he applied. When his Dad and I were asked where he was going to school and we answered U of MT there was usually amazed silence. Twenty five years later he is the Marketing Director for tourism in the Montana Department of Commerce. His new tv ad campaign does not show cowboys or hunting or fly fishing or skiing. It just shows people looking at the sky or a family silently sitting around a campfire or a couple looking at a magnificent vista. It evokes the feeling he felt when he was fifteen. It’s calm and peaceful and magnificent. He sees his high school peers living the same lives that their parents did, but he and now his wife (a Hanover, New Hampshire native — Dartmouth doctor father, so same pressure) and their children have chosen a different kind of life. They are blessed.
I can't wait to seek out his ad campaign! Growing up in Missoula, I ran into a surprising number of UM folks from Wilmette and environs-- I mean, I get it.
This movie completely missed me somehow ... I'd never heard of it until now. Because of this article, I watched the preview, and I might just have to watch it. Garrett, are you planning a watch party?
I'll admit, though, that I'll probably have a little more fun watching Jason the principal and Phoebe as a middle-aged mom. LOL
Another convert to the Booksmart fan club! Success. Thanks for reading :)
OK, I just watched it. I feel like I should write a whole thing, but I don't know if I'm up for that. Oh, well, but here I go ...
I graduated high school in a class of 25. My best friend got married in April of our senior year because she finally figured out she was pregnant (by a man in his mid-20s who already ran his own business ... in other words, he shouldn't have been fucking a 16-year-old in high school), and she had her baby two months after our graduation. I was dating her husband's best friend, who was also a grown-ass adult dating a child in high school, and I ended up marrying him a couple years later. Are there worse things than volunteering to put those stats on your resume and waiting until graduation eve to go to a party? Eh, probably.
Nobody in my graduating class was trying to get into Harvard or Yale. The three or four people who went to college right out of high school went to the state university. The rest of us got jobs or got married. And the classmate of mine who was rich back then is still rich now because he took over his dad's company, and it's one of the main employers there. Nepo babies in tiny towns are still nepo babies.
When I eventually signed up to go to state college, I didn't even have the hint of a thought that I wouldn't get in. If you would have asked me back then IF I'd gotten in, I would have looked at you with a blank stare and open mouth. Huh?
That's a complete turnaround from my kid who was "lucky" to make it two years ago into the state school that's in our town. I remember back in the 1990s when I lived here, there was a running joke about this university ... how do you get a degree from this school? Roll down your window, slow down, and drive by ... they'll toss it in. And now it's COMPETITIVE? I never would have seen that coming. But I also couldn't imagine the hideous debt and other shit that's been piled on my kids' generation.
Back to the movie ... let me talk about the actor Skyler Gisondo who I didn't know/remember until I stumbled upon the 2019 movie Feast of the Seven Fishes after the seven fishes episode of The Bear. (After googling, I also see he was, as a child, in Four Christmases from 2008, which I thought was a HORRIBLE movie. It was supposed to be funny, but it didn't make me laugh. I wanted to slap everybody in it. I still do.) But in the Seven Fishes movie, he was like an anachronism. It was like he was a 70-year-old in a 20-year-old's body. Maybe because the movie was set in the 1980s. Maybe because it's a story as old as time. But, to me, it feels like he fell into a completely different dimension. Like he's Frank Sinatra in a Chappell Roan video. (Can you imagine old Blue Eyes riding a unicorn?) So, it was ... interesting to see him in this movie.
In any case, I'm feeling an itch to do a Celebrity Math equation with him.
I'm probably way off theme here, but ... whooooo! What a ride down memory lane this was.
This is why I love the movie series-- it can't help but elicit these stories!
And here's my Celebrity Math.
https://bsky.app/profile/beckyg0204.bsky.social/post/3lvuklzmafc2a
This was such a beautiful piece, thank you!
Wasn't it? I was so excited this morning when I got to press publish on it.
Loved it because I wasn't a Molly but had lots of them as friends and often felt lesser than because of my more limited college choices (because of brains and money). I have reconnected with one as we both moved back to our hometown and it has been so incredible to share our feelings from that time and understand that EVERYONE was going through it in high school (duh lol)
Thank you so much for your kind words, Nikki! And what a full-circle moment with your own friends. High school is...a lot. Being able to look back as an adult with this new kind of perspective on burnout, on relationships, on the expectations we had then and maybe some expectations we've shed now -- a gift. I enjoyed writing this and I love hearing that you enjoyed reading it!
I have so much affection for both this movie and this essay but I mostly came here to comment on the WILD ABUNDANCE OF HAIR in that music video. GLORIOUS!
oh my god Evangeline it is so much hair
Terrific essay, thank you so much! Now I have to go find the movie.
It's fun!
Thanks for sharing this essay! I will also have to watch the movie. What struck me was that I also went to a similar high school surrounded by Mollys. But I can’t remember any pressure to perform. My parents got excited about the literature I read and my fruit fly genetics experiments while gently sneering at SAT prep classes and the college rankings game. I appreciate that you named fear driving this race. I can now recognize that I was free to focus on love of learning because I had no fear of losing. I wonder what it would take to impart this security at scale.