My pseu-called life

"Zoe Trope," the 17-year-old author of "Please Don't Kill the Freshman," received a huge advance to write a diary of her angsty and erotically charged high school days.

By Whitney Joiner

Oct 27, 2003 | It's hard to remain anonymous when you're on a book tour and doing countless interviews, but Zoe Trope is trying. "Zoe Trope" is the pen name of a 17-year-old from Portland, Ore., whose memoir, "Please Don't Kill the Freshman," was released earlier this month by HarperTempest, an imprint of HarperCollins.

A 17-year-old with a memoir?

A 17-year-old with a $100,000 advance to write the memoir?

A memoir blurbed by Dave Eggers ("Zoe Trope's book is unflinching") and Jonathan Safran Foer ("I'm in awe of Zoe Trope").

Well, yes.

It's been a busy few years for Zoe, and she's trying to keep a modicum of privacy in Portland: She won't allow pictures of her face to be used in the press, and she won't give out her last name or the names of her parents, older brother, or high school. "So much of it has to do with my age," she says about her decision to remain anonymous. "I didn't want people to know where I lived or where I went to school and bother me or my friends." But she doesn't kid herself. "It's really terribly easy to figure it out," she says. "Redheads named Zoe in my city? Not that many."

Zoe started writing in the eighth grade, in an after-school writing class taught by writer Kevin Sampsell ("How to Lose Your Mind With the Lights On"). "She was very rambunctious and sort of disruptive, but in a fun way," Sampsell says. After the class, Zoe and Sampsell stayed in touch; she'd send him her writing and he'd critique it. The funny, sarcastic, whip-smart and surprisingly poetic diary entries she was sending him about her life as a freshman in high school -- the tedium of public school, her burgeoning queer sexuality -- impressed him so much that Sampsell, who runs an indie press called Future Tense Books, suggested they publish the entries as a chapbook (a small, cheaply printed and stapled book of poetry or prose).

The cover of "Please Don't Kill the Freshman" -- an illustration of peppy cheerleaders -- belies the narrative inside. The entries, disjointed and cryptic, revolve around Zoe's relationship with her best friend, "Linux Shoe" (Zoe's friends all get pseudonyms, too); her crushes on various friends, girls and boys; and her first relationship with a girl -- a butch lesbian who decides to strap down her own breasts and call herself a "he." ("My girlfriend turned into my boyfriend and didn't even ask my permission!" Zoe writes.)

When Joseph Weisberg, the author of "10th Grade," discovered the chapbook and sent it to his agent with a note ("This is awesome"), the agent e-mailed Zoe, and soon she was fielding offers from publishers. She signed the deal with HarperCollins in May 2002 and spent the next year writing more journal entries and editing them down from 125,000 words to 65,000 words. "Please Don't Kill the Freshman," the longer version, was released earlier this month.

"She's writing her experiences in real time," Sampsell says. "I think that's what's highly original about this book. I think her writing style is dazzling and brilliant. She's not a conventional writer: She doesn't write 'beginning, middle and end' stuff. It's very free-flowing, almost like jazz."

Last May, Zoe graduated from high school a year early. She wants to go to college, but she's taking the year off to publicize "PDKTF" and possibly write another book.

Accompanied by her father, who acts as her chaperone on all her out-of-town appearances, Zoe traveled to the East Coast two weeks ago for the first time. The day she arrived, the New York Post's gossip column, "Page Six," quoted her: "I'm hoping I can maybe visit some schools while I'm out here. You know, shake hands with admissions officers and say something like, 'Have you ever heard of me? Oh, you haven't? Well, sit down, 'cause I'm about to rock your [bleep]ing world.'"

I spoke with Zoe on a recent a Saturday afternoon at Teany, Moby's teahouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, before her reading at the bookstore Bluestockings.

At your reading last night in Brooklyn, you said that the publishing process just kind of happened -- you didn't put much effort into moving it along.

I never worked to set this all in motion, but as it fell together I went along with it. I sent my writing to Kevin to get his feedback on it. When he said he wanted to publish it, I thought, um ... OK. And when the agent e-mailed me six months later, I was really nervous -- like, I don't think I can rewrite this book. I didn't believe in myself, but Kevin thought I could do it.

How did the class with Kevin Sampsell change the way you felt about writing?

Kevin's class introduced me to a lot of new ideas about experimental writing -- writing that doesn't have to be coherent or make sense. His book, "How to Lose Your Mind With the Lights On," showed me that you didn't have to have a normal story arc in order for something to be powerful. The class was only a couple hours, so he'd say, 'Write for 15 minutes about a ghost in an elevator, or take this poem and remix it.' He did a lot of exercises to break away from the idea of 'Make a story with developed characters.' He'd tell us to just write.

At first, I sent him some poetry and short stories I'd written, but he wasn't into them. So I said, 'Here's something I was writing in class today. What do you think?'

What was his response to the entries?

He was impressed because I had so much raw talent and I was so energetic, so unapologetic about how and what I was writing. It was completely different from anything else he'd read before. A lot of people read the chapbook or read the first part of the long book and say it's incoherent, it's confusing, it's cryptic -- but that's what Kevin loves about it.

How did you explain to your family and friends that you were publishing your diary? Were you nervous about their reaction?

I told them, but it was kind of intangible to them. They didn't know what a chapbook was. They didn't understand what it would mean. My parents thought, Oh, that's neat. That's nice. Chapbooks come out all the time, and "small press" means small press, so it didn't seem like such a huge thing.

I talked with people a little about it -- like, I'm publishing some diary entries I've been writing, and you're in it. And they'd be like, Oh, what are you writing about me? And I'd say, Stuff. Just us and what we do when we hang out.

How did your friends -- the people you write about -- react to reading about themselves in your chapbook and the extended book?

I'm so honest anyway, with everyone I know, that no one has ever said they were shocked. If I like you or don't like you it's pretty obvious, so no one was surprised by my opinion of them.

Are your friends jealous of your success, your book deal?

I think if my friends are jealous of me at all, it's because I get to wake up when they're having lunch. And they want the fringe benefits -- I'm paying for their cheese fries at Denny's.

Did anyone in the administration at your school read the chapbook?

My vice principal called me into her office and asked me if I knew what libel was. I said, Yeah, but I don't see how that applies to me. She said something I'd said about one of the teachers could be considered libelous and I should stop printing the book and be careful about what I write in the future. She completely discouraged me from continuing what I was doing. She said I wasn't allowed to have the book at school or promote it in any way, and that they wanted to have nothing to do with it. So I said, That's great, I don't want you to have anything to do with it. It's not your book, it has nothing to do with you, my name's changed, all my friends' names are changed, the school isn't mentioned anywhere in the book, so...

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