Welcome to the World Book Club Podcast.
I'm Harriet Gilbert and this month we've been reading a novel about teenage anxieties, dreams and mistakes.
It's called Prep.
It's been described as a cult classic and here with us to answer questions about it from BBC listeners around the world is its bestselling American author, Curtis Sittenfeld.
Curtis, welcome to the World Book Club Studio.
Thank you so much for having me.
Curtis Sittenfeld, whose bestselling novels include American Wife and Rodham, is really, really over in the UK to promote her latest book, romantic Comedy.
But we've lured her away for an hour or so to talk with us about her first novel, Prep, whose young heroine or anti heroine Lee Fiora, finds herself at the age of 14 in an elite co educational boarding school in the northeast of the US Lee is a small town girl from the Midwest whose parents could never have afforded the school fees if she hadn't won a scholarship, and she is at first confounded by the wealth and upper class assumptions of her fellow students, not to mention the school's many mystifying rituals and unspoken rules and conventions.
But Lee is a survivor and a shrewd observer.
Keeping as low a profile as she can, she watches and learns from the other students, working out what makes a person popular, whether having a grand family counts for more than having a rich one, for instance, or whether being really physically attractive is just as important as wealth or class.
And in the process, Lee also learns which friendships are worth cultivating and which friends are best dropped.
But Curtis Sittenfeld, would you read from near the start of Prep?
This is when Lee is still wondering whether she's made a big mistake actually going to the school at all.
Yes, I will, Reid.
The school's called alt.
Alt?
Yes, Alt had been my idea.
I'd researched boarding schools at the public library and written away for catalogs myself.
Their glossy pages showed photographs of teenagers in wool sweaters singing hymns in the chapel, gripping lacrosse sticks intently regarding a math equation written across the chalkboard.
I had traded away my family for this glossiness.