This Beautiful Life

"The teenagers in this book are not just the actual teenagers but also the parents who in some way behave like teenagers – the mother gets stoned walking through the park on the way to pick up her daughter from nursery school. What I love about this book is that it really is one of the great novels about the now, about what it is like to live with all of this technology that mediates so many of our relationships. It’s a book about a very wealthy family in New York City that’s privileged enough to send their children to private schools. They have a son called Jake and a daughter they’ve adopted from China called Coco. Jake goes to a party and meets a girl called Daisy, who is much younger. She comes onto him and eventually winds up sending him a sex video of herself to get him excited and interested. Without even thinking about it, Jake forwards it to a friend. It goes viral, everyone in the school knows about it almost instantly, and it becomes this scandal. There are no heroes in this book, everyone behaves badly. The parents are not as aware of their children’s lives as they should be, the teenagers aren’t really aware of the kind of power that they have on their cell phones. I was lucky enough to be at a writers’ conference this summer called Bread Loaf which takes place in Vermont. Helen Schulman read from this novel and she read this section where Jake has an exchange with Audrey, a girl he has a crush on. She has witnessed all of the scandal going down and she says to him, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a girl? You’re just an idiot boy, you’re all just idiot boys. Some day I’ll be old and ugly and nobody will want to fuck me and I won’t have to deal with you any longer. I’m really looking forward to that.” When I heard the author read that, it just cut through to the heart of what it was like to be a teenage girl: to have to play by all these rules where you really do feel powerless. You’re only valued for your appearance and your sexuality, you’re not really valued at all. There’s certainly an element of that but, wisely, the book doesn’t offer up any easy answers. It doesn’t say ‘This is what should have been done.’ Certainly there should have been more communication and transparency among the family, and more awareness of what goes on at the parties these teenagers go to. But parents also don’t want to know. A good parent wants to give a teenager a certain amount of independence, and let them make their own choices. One of the things my own novel considers is that, as a parent, you always want to protect your child and ultimately you wind up having to protect your child from him or herself. When a child does something bad, that there ought to be some consequence for, does a good parent try to get their child out of trouble and prevent them from being punished? Or does a good parent say ‘These are the consequences of your action, you have to face them.’ I think so often nowadays, with children of tremendous privilege there are no consequences."