Growing up Booksmart
The White Pages Summer Film Series returns with a reflection on pressure, privilege (and maybe pancakes)
Garrett’s note: Oh my goodness, you all you’re in for a treat. This is another entry in our summer movie series, and it comes courtesy of (whom you’ll learn more about shortly). I literally pumped my fist when Kathryn’s pitch arrived in my inbox (a move I repeated even more fervently when I received the full piece). You likely remember that the whole point of this movie series is to look back on films that reflect an interesting aspect of our shared life over this past decade. I chose Booksmart as the 2019 entry, hoping that there was a younger Millennial/Gen Z writer for whom this movie’s depiction of privileged suburban hyper performance culture would ring true, and oh buddy did Kathryn deliver. In an era where discourse about elite American institutions continues to take up disproportional societal oxygen (see: everything from Trump’s current hostage act with various Ivy League schools to a million “here’s my college application results” TikToks), Kathryn’s grace-filled letter to her younger self feels particularly salient. Enjoy!
In moments of stress, my old boss and I had a little routine. When I threatened to quit, he used to quote Doc Rivers at me: “Pressure is a privilege, Kathryn.” We did this little dance every other Tuesday – him safe in the knowledge I depended on the job to maintain my British visa, and me secretly loving the intellectual rigor and rapid rise in the ranks PR offered. We did this, at least, until we found I did, in fact, have a limit, and I decided to go back to school.
But our little pressure-is-a-privilege routine stuck with me because I have both chased – and been chased by – the pressure and the privilege, often in the same package.
A friend who grew up in a similar high-octane environment as me introduced me to the 2019 Olivia Wilde-directed comedy Booksmart. A film that finally captured my upbringing in a way that I often struggled to put into words – especially for my colleagues in the UK, where the need to have perfect GPAs and ten-year plans and 14 extracurriculars and and and exists in a far more muted fashion than in the Washington, DC, suburbs where I grew up.
Booksmart’s Molly gave up friendships, silliness, and genuine joy to achieve her dream of getting into Yale. She digests the stories of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and meditations on winning to fuel herself and affirm her approach…only to find on the eve of high school graduation that her “deadbeat” classmates are also going to Yale, or Stanford, or Google. “We cared about school,” says her nemesis Triple A, “Just not only about school.” The realization breaks her, and she makes her best (and only) friend Amy swear to party hard that night to make up for four lost years of what could have been.
I was Molly. Seeing her on screen was genuinely wonderful – it’s a comedy! It’s kooky! There are hallucinogenic-induced talking Barbie dolls and Jason Sudeikis! It’s genius: Molly and Amy’s codeword for backing each other up 100%— even when you’re tired and want to go home— is “Malala.” There’s a girl named Gigi who speaks with a vaguely Gweneth Paltrowian accent and seems to defy death in several water-related incidents. It’s quick, clever, and I laugh out loud. Go watch it.
But it was also hard, because Baby Kathryn felt seen in an uncomfortable way.
I, too, grew up in a suburban neighborhood like Booksmart’s, with big lawns and houses ranging from a 1960s interpretation of a Rockwellian utopia and 1980s hulks that anticipated the McMansion trend. Deer overpopulation was a bigger threat than other people, and you had to drive everywhere (even to the Metro). It was a bubble, but also a 40-minute drive from downtown, Washington, DC. We were cultured in a very specific way; more attached to the wider world than to the majority-Black population on the DC side of the Maryland border. We had heaps of visiting scientists (and strip mall restaurants) from all over the globe, especially South Korea, Japan, China, Germany, France, and Israel. Diplomats’ children would cycle in and out every few years. A former White House press secretary was my high school graduation speaker. People’s parents escaped the Pentagon on 9/11. Our neighbors were lawyers, doctors, researchers, businesspeople – good, affluent jobs – employed by the FDA, NIH, the State Department’s public health divisions, notorious lobby firms, big-four consultancies, the country of Ecuador. Not the power players in Georgetown or the castles dotting River Road in Potomac, but…within licking distance.
My high school, but also my friend group and many of my peers, put an enormous premium on our potential. The goal was not to matriculate us ready for the world, it felt, but to win ourselves and the school as much recognition as possible. Friendships were pushed to the brink based on who got into Princeton. I cried regularly over math tests. Graduation dinners for the top 5% of the class went from a lovely token of recognition to a status symbol on par with chunky necklaces (a 2011 trend if ever there was one). I was simultaneously elated and gutted to get into a top-20 school. When you are a high school student and this is your whole world, these petty things are everything. Success is your social capital and your ticket into society. The mental anguish at bad grades was real.
The AP classes, the tuba lessons and band practices, the volunteering: it was all part and parcel of being conditioned to perform. Perform for…what? Image? To make money, eventually? To get a Nobel Peace Prize – never mind the what or how or who you’re doing the work for?
That version of me was sad, a lot. And confused, because it would take years – long after college, and grad school, and a big job – for me to reckon with those questions. And I didn’t much like the person I was at the time. She could be ruthlessly ambitious, and selfish, and too-often passively cruel to the people she loved. So seeing Molly exhibit so many of those same traits was hard; cringey, even.
But to witness Molly have an opportunity at such a young age to realize that she could be better, to redefine success, hit more than a little like jealousy. I have grieved for the version of me I could have been in college and in my earlier twenties if I, too, had a graduation-eve reckoning. To quote the girls’ teacher, played by Jessica Williams, “I spent the majority of my twenties compensating for the fact that I didn’t have fun in high school…I mean I went crazy…you know I’m banned from Jamba Juice?” I would have loved to escape my own version of being banned from Jamba Juice, to say nothing of the emotional turmoil of the intervening years.
These days, I have a bit more compassion for the version of Kathryn that most resembled the beginning of Booksmart, particularly as I’ve got older and pried a bit more into the forces that shaped her. I’m no longer Molly and Amy’s age. I want a family of my own. I want to offer them a different start in life than I had, with full gratitude to my parents for what they provided. And so I find myself trying to unpack how we all ended up here. Booksmart had a surprising amount of answers for a movie once described to me as a chick-flick version of Superbad.
At first, I chalked it up to the parents. That our affluent area’s families wanted Successful Children for the Christmas or Hanukkah cards. Or, like me, students had parents who weren’t brought up well-off and had the unspoken expectation that we not squander the privilege they worked hard to provide for us. Pressure is a privilege, indeed.
But I spoke to friends while writing this, and while this hypothesis rang true for some, it didn’t apply to everyone. My best friend growing up had parents who wanted her to try less; they would have cheered a Molly-and-Amy-esque underage-drinking-citation escapade. For her, it seemed the expectation came from our peers (hi, yes, me – I’m sorry, Sarah). Other high achievers in my life shared that Booksmart-level drive was an escape: from complicated and deeply private home situations, or from a life lived safely and without adventure. I identified with those, too.
Varied reasons, sure – but all leading to a common-enough experience that there’s a Blockbuster movie about it – or dozens, if you include the likes of Risky Business or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or even the college companion The Social Network. My friends who fell into this mindset come from Kansas and Ukraine, Mumbai and St. Louis. The phenomenon is far bigger than my suburbs, but that my ambition baffled so many British colleagues points to something that feels inherently native to the US experience.
Booksmart itself reveals a common undercurrent that is so glaringly obvious that all of you probably felt it far earlier (see again: Baby Kathryn couldn’t see past her own competitiveness).
The undercurrent is fear. Molly is so driven because she is afraid. She is scared of not being successful, of missing out on having a big, fulfilling life. To beginning-of-the-movie Molly, that means needing to be the smartest and most decorated one in the room.
I was afraid, too. Afraid of not being interesting without success, of not being able to support myself, of being forgotten. Sometimes, if I’m honest, I still am.
And it’s no accident that Molly and I were driven by this fear. Our society is built on idolizing abundance. It was they myth that drove Europeans to colonize the continent. It’s still very much the story that America tells about itself, and why internationally, American-style consumerism is seen as aspirational. America has much to offer, and so we are supposed to want much. Much is our national ethos. It keeps the country going.
I internalized a fear of scarcity before I was even conscious of the privilege. A common dinner-table conversation at my house whenever I got a C on a math test or had to re-take the SATs was that I would have to go play tuba in the Metro. The joke hid an unspoken “truth”: that it was all or nothing; success or utter destitution. This joke ended only when a lovely man who did play tuba on the streets of Seattle was brutally and callously murdered. Then fear and the sadness became too heavy to name.
Everyone loses something in this system, from street tuba player to billionaire. We are taught to see only those forced into some sort of scarcity as “losers,” because their whole existence is threated, punished, outlawed. This is particularly true for non-white Americans and undocumented immigrants. People with the most to lose. People not born into privilege bust their butts to reach it because society tells us all that if we work a little harder, we, too, can go from being a Molly to a Michelle Obama. And that we should all want to be like Michelle Obama, or whoever we may idolize, because her life is perfect and she has means and she has overcome the racial barriers in front of her.
My parents busted their butts so that I ostensibly wouldn’t have to; I haven’t had to – at least, not in the same way. The pressure I faced was, in many ways, a privilege. But the people who are supposed to be the #goals at the top of the social hierarchy aren’t trying to survive on a daily basis, sure, but they’re not having a good time, either. They have money. They are comfortable. But they still have that fear, their children are still pushed to the breaking point to keep the cycle of privilege going, and in service of what?
Our toxic system, is what. The toxic system that Booksmart is so cleanly and hilariously laying bare amid a raunchy subplot about a stuffed panda. Everyone exists on a sliding scale of loss in our system.
Molly found her way out of this mindset through her friends. Love and community were her antidote. Amy made her see the person she was becoming – in a big fight between the two at a house party, Amy called her mean, selfish, a bad friend (a sucker punch to Baby Kathryn, too). Amy sacrificed herself for her classmates; arrested to save the other teenagers at a house party. Molly was rescued on a post-party solo walk home by Triple A. Other people help Molly redefine her vision of and for herself from one of prestige, which she (and I) embraced all too easily, and towards a conceptualization of a life made meaningful through people and purpose.
And that’s my way out, too. People. Community. Love. The life I want to model for my children isn’t one chasing material abundance or Nobel Peace Prizes. Sure, we have to make a living. Molly still goes to Yale because that’s her best option in a system where we still need to make money. But I want to chase what I have seen described various places as enoughness – to have enough for a comfortable life, sure, but not to take so much that I leave nothing for others. This is the definition of success and abundance so many communities and Indigenous traditions have been screaming are the important ones, and I hear it. End-of-the-movie Molly hears it.
I want my privilege to mean not having to be put under pressure to maintain a bad system. The abundance I want to chase is being able to rent silly movies to write silly essays that might, maybe, hopefully, resonate with someone else (hi, mom). My abundance is being able to laugh with my rec volleyball team. A regular old Thursday night meal at home with my partner, talking about the silly thing of the day, like donkeys gone wild. Meeting up with my mother for the occasional opulence of a pedicure. Volunteering because I want to genuinely connect with people in my neighborhood, not because it’s for a resume. And, to take a page out of end-of-the-movie Molly and Amy’s book, it’s pancakes with my best friend (and her dog).
End notes (by Garrett, mostly):
Thanks, Kathryn! I feel so lucky to have your words and wisdom in this space. Lots to dive into with this essay, and I hope you all come hang out with both of us in the comments.
Do you appreciate a space like this on the Internet, full of writing about community and identity and the mess we’re all in together? If so, please consider a paid subscription to The White Pages, which both helps me keeps the lights on, allows me to welcome in other voices like Kathryn’s, and also comes with cool perks.
What perks, you maybe wondering? Well, there’s a bunch, including very sharp looking tote bags and t-shirts that aren’t for sale, just for supporters. While I’m about to head off on vacation, when I return I’ll be doing another merch raffle for paid subscribers, which means that if you get on the list, in a few weeks you could potentially look as rad as does here:
Re: my vacation. Will it impact publishing schedule? Maybe! There might be a Friday piece before I leave, but that’s TBD, as will be the overall cadence for the next couple weeks. Sometimes I don’t write at all while traveling, but you never know when those words’ll come out. Either way, I hope you ether enjoy the essays that do come out or love having a break in your inbox. And Missoulians— I’m coming your way! I’ll be in town the 14th-17th, though it’ll be for a family reunion (will the Garden City survive an influx of prodigal Buckses?), so my schedule will be more limited. Never hurts to try, though, so if you’ve got my email or phone number and want to be like “Garrett, I’m in town too,” I wouldn’t hate it.
I will be participating in the Parents Fast For Gaza (which, as you’ll see from their FAQ, is open to non-parents and features a wide variety of ways to participate). I’ve both signed myself up for the week of September 21st AND requested that the White Pages be designated as a community team that week (UPDATE: It’s official! We’re in!). While I’d encourage you to sign up for any week you can, I’d especially love if any of you so inclined would like to join me in signing up that week of 9-21 (just specify The White Pages as your community in registration).
I told Kathryn that she could pick a song of the week and oh my God her response sent me back : “Picking song of the week sent me into an absolute tailspin, because how can I choose but one of my emotional support tunes?! However -- channeling what my best pal and I used to listen to most on the bus every day -- one iPod earbud in my ear and one in hers -- it has to be one of: Ingrid Michaelson's "You and I," Fountain’s of Wayne’s "Stacey's Mom," or White Snake's "Here I Go Again." (What range, hey?)”
Three great choices, regardless of whether you ever listened to them on one earbud with your best pal. I’m adding them all to the song of the week playlist (available on Apple Music and Spotify) but when it came time to choose one to get the Youtube thumbnail treatment, how could I resist?
Finally, I love that The White Pages community includes so many incredible writers, and while I share many of your essays in various online spaces I’ve realized that I don’t share enough of them right here. What better way to break that pattern, though, then with this gorgeous gut punch to the heart from friend and longtime reader
. It’s about her own cancer diagnosis, but also so much more.
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!
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