Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir [Paperback]

Zoe Trope (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2003

I wrote a story about you. Well, sort of, see, it's mostly about me. Well, entirely about me, but here's the catch: I'm you. No, really, I mean it. Not like that transcendentalism stuff we're learning in English class, but really, truly, I'm you. I know what it feels like when your heart beats so hard against your white bone ribs, when you sing in the shower with soap in your eyes, when you run until you get a side ache. I wrote this story about you because I am so in love with you, your broken-fence teeth and your tissue-paper scars. I love you when you're so exhausted it could topple you to the ground, so in love it could snap guitar strings, so sickly sweet it could make lips smile. This is a reckless love story. This is my shameless confession.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up-The 44-page nucleus of this book was originally published by a small press when the author was 14. Her precociously perceptive and preternaturally poisonous pen then drew the attention of HarperCollins, which offered her a six-figure book deal to keep the caustic coming-of-age diary ranting and raving through the increasingly irrelevant remainder of her high school career. Zoe's entries chronicle her tortured search for truth in love and art, her faltering faith in the value of activism in the face of universal apathy, and her bottomless disdain for just about every figure and fixture in her high school life. The language is undeniably raw-a hip mixture of bald statement, cyberesque shorthand, and stream-of-consciousness prose. Her frank accounts of her transgender search for the perfect kiss and her first girlfriend who becomes her first boyfriend will surely shock certain audiences. Still, like Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (MTV, 1999), this is an important offering for exceptional, alienated readers-the talented and the tortured misfits who need to know that they are not alone. The fact that a dorky teen can actually pursue personal success completely on her own terms; make lots of people read, wince, laugh, and think; and score a major wad of cash in the bargain will actually give them something to cheer about.
Jeffrey Hastings, Highlander Way Middle School, Howell, MI
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Zoe Trope exists. She was born in 1986 and graduated from high school with the class of 2003 in Oregon.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: HarperTempest (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060529369
• ISBN-13: 978-0060529369
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #361,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #32 in Books > Teens > Biographies

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The empress is scantily clad., December 13, 2003

By 

MS (British Columbia, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir (Paperback)

There's something maddening about people who embrace their flaws and cryptically dismiss their would-be detractors as a way of immunizing themselves against criticism. Zoe Trope could very well earn her next book deal for writing the textbook on those devices. Both her memoir and its promotion (part of it, paid, by HarperTempest; the rest supplied free by her fans), play up the fragmentedness of the author's writing, as well as its many inconsistencies, and its "rawness" - qualities that most writers strive to avoid - all while suggesting that anyone who prefers their writing more refined just doesn't get it. I'm not exaggerating: in a Salon.com interview, Trope praises her mentor, Kevin Sampsell, for introducing her to "experimental writing - writing that doesn't have to be coherent or make sense". Sure enough, _Please Don't Kill The Freshman_ is incoherent and doesn't make sense, but that's part of its charm, see? Sampsell even said so himself.

The book is a cacophonous mess of images and contextless remarks which, we're told, are brilliant precisely _because_ of how contextless and cacophonous they are. Despite the author's constant insistence that she's _different_ from everyone else her age (no other fourteen year old, she ridiculously postulates, reads political magazines), on the back cover of this book she melodramatically proclaims that the writings inside are actually about you - yes, YOU. But that contradiction isn't a flaw - it's a glimpse into the headiness of being fourteen. It's also a subtle suggestion: if you're special, like her, then this book is about you, too. If you don't see yourself in it, or if you take any issue whatsoever with the writing style (which isn't wholly without value - there are some nice images here), you're a typical high school student. Or a boring adult. Indeed, review after review (some of which can be found on this site) promise that _intelligent_ people will recognize Trope's genius.

The book itself contains reams of self-referential blather on the subject of "OmigodIgotaBOOKDEAL", including some invective directed at an editor whose stylistic suggestions Trope takes personally: this book is about HER LIFE, she writes; to impose upon it such mundane considerations as proper sentence structure is to coopt her life story. Honesty and complete sentences are apparently mutually exclusive, so if you value the former, don't remark on the dearth of the latter. And so on, and so forth.

Still, every now and again Trope gets into a rhythm that's altogether enjoyable to read. Unfortunately, this happens rarely, and when it does it's almost entirely in the first hundred or so pages; and the best parts can be found in excerpts here and there online. (One of the better ones is on Salon.com, and it's far from brilliant.) Nevertheless, this "memoir" is fragmented, more or less devoid of reflection, and riddled with incoherent images ensconsed in flowery prose. And that's not a good thing, despite the author's, and her fans', subtle suggestions that these characteristics are actually the book's strengths.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is just horrible, May 2, 2007

By 

SET67 (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir (Paperback)

Pretentious, self-absorbed, and very, very poor writing. Trying to be avante-gard? of course, but like so many others, it's almost embaressing. Not to mention she forgot to include the super-decoder-ring to understand her inane dialogue.

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Go ahead - kill them, November 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir (Paperback)

I'd heard mixed things about this book, and after reading it, I see why. It's not great but it's not terrible. It's a teenage girl's journal, nothing more. (Actually, it's about 100 pages "more" than it needs to be, so maybe it was better as a chapbook.) I read a lot of young adult books, and this just doesn't stand out. It's not clear whether or not this girl is talented enough to become a writer, but this bland book is not a terribly auspicious debut.