Ann Brashares, author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, including SISTERHOOD EVERLASTING --- now available in paperback --- has been delighting us with the tales of Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget for over a decade now. As these characters have grown from teens to 20-something adults, Brashares discusses how they have changed throughout the series.
There is an ancient law of the universe, which states that people who were notably successful in high school go on to lead disappointing lives. I’m not sure this is true. I’m not even sure it’s a law of the universe. But there’s something to it, isn’t there? Maybe it’s just a matter of fairness: it would feel poisonously unfair for the people who swanned through high school to go on to live happy and well-balanced lives.
But I wonder if maybe high school is a very particular talent, and one that doesn’t often translate into the rest of a person’s life. Success in high school seems to require that you declare who you are early on, when you are still growing and changing rapidly. It requires that you calcify at a tender moment. The high school star typically calcifies around a pretty shallow identity: the precocious socialite, the drama maven, the athlete. It’s the uncertain people, the invisible ones, who get to cast about for a long time, who get to figure out in some more robust way who they actually are.
I was thinking about this today in relation to my book, SISTERHOOD EVERLASTING. This is a book about four girls in their late twenties who defined themselves very clearly in high school. Primarily they defined themselves by their friendship. And that epoch of their lives has taken on this legendary status for them, so as the book begins, we cans see they are afraid or unable to grow beyond it. It’s a shell that served as great fortification in high school, but it doesn’t quite fit anymore. As Norman Mailer wrote, “One must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” These girls can’t afford to stay the same, and they can’t quite give up what they think they know in order to change.
It turns out it takes a tragedy to break them open again. They get another chance at uncertainty, which maybe doesn’t sound so great, but it’s an essential condition of the Long Haul.
