5. The Phi Delta Fraternity of 2008 and the NFL of Frankie’s expectations are not supportive places for LGBTQIA+ members. What was your impression of his attempts to navigate those attitudes? What would you do in his position?
6. Jessica and Caro argue about the “girl code” when it comes to leaking the sex tape. How do you feel about the girl code? Do you think they violated it? When?
7. Courtney thinks disdainfully that the East House Seven are all so obsessed with each other that they’re practically in love. How does that level of friendship develop throughout the book? Is it healthy?
8. How is the phrase “supposed to be” used as a weapon throughout the book? Whom does it hurt?
9. What consequences would you expect for Dr. Garvey when his affairs came to light? How does tenure work against students in cases like Garvey’s?
10. Describe the development of Mint’s anger. Was there ever a moment when someone could have intervened? How could he have channeled his anger in a healthier way?
11. Each of the East House Seven carries some form of guilt over Heather’s death. Compare the ways they manage that guilt. Besides the murderer, do you think any of them should be blamed?
12. How did you view Jessica’s choice at the end of the book? Where do you see her going?
A Conversation with the Author
Jessica’s overachieving attitude is so familiar. Do you have any personal strategies for maintaining balance while working toward your goals?
Balance is not something I’m known for, actually. I could probably use some advice from my dear readers on how to reach it. I tend to become consumed by ideas or goals; I expect a lot from myself, and I’m very impatient about next steps, achievements. But I’ve made peace with this. I am an intense, ambitious woman.
My trick is to allow my obsessions to exist as a hum in the back of my mind, a thing I return to throughout the day when work meetings get dull. It becomes something that pushes me, a fire that fuels me day in and day out, keeping me from burning out. So maybe that means I do have balance, if I’ve reduced that big, hungry wanting we all feel to a constant hum in my mind? I’m certainly not running around like Jessica, going to wild, destructive lengths to secure the things I want. Even though clearly, I’m capable of imagining those things! I guess my advice is to nurture the flame of your desire, tend to it daily, and become friends with it, so neither of you undermines the other.
Speaking of goals, throughout the book there are many cases of “success” coinciding with “failure.” For example, Jessica feels very successful in her consulting career, while knowing that she failed all her specific post-graduate goals. Do you have any examples of failures that ultimately led you to a different kind of success?
I am going to say something bold: I’ve failed at almost everything I’ve attempted in my life. At the very least, I’ve failed to do things the way I expected. In fact, I started writing this book after being crushed by my failure to achieve something I really wanted. This book was born out of failure.
Stewing in grief and anger, I thought to myself, Why do I feel so frenzied by this disappointment, so desperate? And what if there was a woman who didn’t tamp down those feelings but explored them to their dark ends? And so a villain was born.
The thing about Jessica is, on one hand, she’s a privileged woman most people would look at and say, you have so much. You’re successful. Part of her recognizes that （and would polish those words like trophies if she heard them）。 But on the other hand, she’s not successful in the ways that are personally meaningful to her. I don’t think she’s capable of recognizing, at the start of the book, what meaningful success looks like to her—not to her dad, or Mint, or the world writ large. It will take her the whole book to do battle with other people’s versions of success and discover her own—and by the end, she’s done so many terrible things, been so close-minded, that she may not deserve to be successful. I’m leaving the question of what Jessica deserves up to the reader.
If you don’t mind me wearing my scholar hat for a moment, one of Jessica’s biggest, earliest flaws is that she swallowed the capitalist, patriarchal system wholesale. She’s so deeply conditioned by the neoliberal idea of what success means: that she has to be the best at everything; that she has to achieve this uncomplicated, unnuanced version of first place in every aspect of her life in order to be valuable. It’s an ugly belief system because it’s ultimately about achieving power and dominance over other people; there’s no room for give and take. Jessica’s fatal flaw is that she saw how bad this belief system treated people like her father and she still subscribed wholeheartedly; in fact, she contorts herself in service of it almost until the end.