John Knowles: A Separate Peace
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OMG THIS BOOK. 8th grade, honors English class, after Great Expectations we were all so excited for this, writing I <3 so-and-so all over our copies and passing notes and everything clicking for me, for the first time. I loved this book so much for some reason. I hardly remember it now, although we read it again I think in 10th grade, when I moved to Florida. I remember that the one guy “jounced” the other guy off the tree, because jounce was the vocabulary word I had to present to the class and we all thought it was hilarious. I remember I bought the companion book and kept them both in the windowsill by my bed (where I had taken a permanent marker and written puns in red ink all around the window frame, whoops. Puns. Not literary quotes. Puns that I think I found on some funny website on the internet.) Anyway I maybe mostly loved it because during final exams I wrote an essay about it that made my teacher call my mother to make sure that when I went to high school I would keep reading and writing. This scared me but felt right, and I did. I hadn’t cared about school in years, and thought that teacher hated me—she was my homeroom teacher, too—because I was always passing notes and when she had us do some creative writing exercise that involved WRITING YOUR OWN OBITUARY, which strikes me as a little fucked up for 13 year olds now that I think about it, I wrote on my worksheet that I died during sex, which should probably go in my Catholic guilt hall of fame. Anyway I need to reread this book. It is sitting in my living room in Brooklyn, still covered with notes from friends and I <3 so and so’s. It is probably so much more fucked up than we thought when we were teenagers.
