When you start teaching at your old high school, everyone wants to know if it's changed at all. What's different, what's the same. 

The answer is, everything is the same but also different. The kids dress like kids do: in clothes that are too big or too small. At this point in the year it's cold on campus-- a thing that hasn't changed is the particular cold blue of the mornings-- so they arrive first period bundled up and sleepy-eyed. They think they're grown-ups but they're not quite, not yet. They think I can't hear them talking about their situationships and weekend parties and who's trying to go viral on TikTok, and mostly I do them the favor of pretending I can't. 

They have tech we didn't: laptops and smartphones, though phones are no longer allowed to be out while they're on campus, and they pretty much obey that rule. They no longer do graded out of class writing; the other teachers refer to their omnipresent tutor simply as Chat. As in, "There's no point in assigning that, they'll just ask Chat to do it for them." The essays come in with smooth-brained thesis statements, but at least they're married to strange body paragraphs: kids trying to synthesize what AI tells them a poem is about with their own jagged, uneven understanding of its language. 

What even is a teenager, exactly? I wrote three books trying to understand my own adolescence; I didn't so much get there as get over it, and move on to trying to understand my adulthood. I like some of the kids more and some of them less, the same way I liked and didn't like my own high school classmates.

Their names recur, those classmates. One of them funding Audrey Gelman's new venture with the money he made working for Elon Musk. Another's father in the Epstein files, being recruited to run a foundation for one of Epstein's clients. Their marriages are covered in Vogue. They are moving the world around with their power, influence, money. They are the same and also different as they were at seventeen, I assume. 

I didn't understand this place when I went here, and I still don't. On the one hand, it's full of teenagers: children growing into their faces and voices, who come up to me after class to tell me that they hate public speaking but wanted me to know that an assignment got them to think about the book in a new way. Stubborn, cynical, but also, on their good days, curious. Curious about ideas and about each other, and even, very occasionally, about me.

And but also, this place is full of money. What a time and place to be teaching Gatsby: to be thinking about money's siren song and its sheer, raw, violent power. Careless people who smash things up. Who is able to leave a body in the road and who kneels in the dust, keening, in their wake. 

The best gloss on this job is that I am teaching the kids to be aware of their power, and maybe even their cynicism. Teaching them to think through everything that's being handed to them, and what they want to do with it.

The periods are longer now-- that's another thing that's different. An hour and fifteen minutes as compared to the forty-five we used to have. The thing is, it's such a big job. They could give me every hour in the day and it still wouldn't be enough. 

I was in Vogue this week too, as it happens, writing about how fan fiction’s love stories taught me how to structure a novel.

& my next book has a fun new title.