Hotchkiss ’n’ Tell Post-‘Prep’
Is publishing Waspy again?
After the success of Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel, Prep, publishing has sensed a new trend: the boardingroman written by people with ambisexual (Curtis is female) “family” names. “There are a lot of dark things that occur at boarding school,” says Taylor Materne, 24 and male, the youngest of three Hotchkiss alums who’ve quit their day jobs to write a four-book series about a fictional school. The stories might be fake—“This won’t be an exposé” vows Hobson Brown (’93, also male)—but the pain of not being understood by non-boarding-school America is for them very real. “We thought the media had never accurately portrayed boarding school,” Brown says. “We could just write about the crazy stuff—elitism, drugs, racism,” says Materne, “but we’re not going to.” The first is out from HarperCollins in 2006. “It’s such a secretive subculture,” says Jardine Libaire (’91, female), “but statistically, boarding schools produce many decision-makers. The story of boarding school is the story of our country.”
—Emma Rosenblum