COMMENTS:
Sarah Silver: Thanks for bringing us all together again, Amanda. You’re so amazing! Totally count me in! Sadly, I still have a raging case of parental college mania—I don’t recommend having back-to-back seniors applying to college!
Diana Taylor: Thanks for the invite, but I won’t be coming. Tenley dropped out of Stanford last month and is traveling in Europe.
Sarah Silver: Oh no! You must be so devastated! Do you want us to set up a meal train for you and Michael?
Augusta Wagoner: Hey y’all. I’m afraid I have to miss the fun. Greer has a mother-daughter sorority event at Vanderbilt. xoxo
Augusta Wagoner: P.S. I’m guessing Alicia won’t make it either?
Amanda Russell: I don’t think she’s up for early release for at least another nine months. Were you all glued to the news reports about her trial over the summer too? It sounds like the judge really threw the book at her after she put up such a fight in court.
Robin Riley: Did you guys listen to the wire tape recording they played at the trial? I mean, wow! No wonder Bryan dumped her. The whole world heard her call her own husband a fucking moron! Too bad they weren’t able to make a case against him. I heard the prosecutor didn’t want to go forward with just a he said/she said/she said case without any physical evidence. I thought for sure Bryan would have been just arrogant enough to save the phone he used to send that text as a souvenir, but I guess the police never found it.
Augusta Wagoner: Why do the biggest pricks always manage to get off? Oops. Hahaha
Donna Peterson: I guess Brooke doesn’t need a finals care package since she didn’t end up going to college, poor girl.
Peggy Wainwright: Poor girl? Brooke’s doing just fine. Her tell-all has been on the NYT bestseller list for weeks!
Amanda Russell: Has anyone been in touch with Kelly Vernon? Wanted to invite her, but she seems to have dropped off the face of the earth ever since her family was asked to leave EBA. Deleted her social media accounts, deactivated her cell.
COMMENTS:
Jennifer Tan: Actually I ran into Kelly a couple of weeks ago and didn’t even recognize her. She lost 25 lbs. and looks fantastic! She started a test prep nonprofit for low-income students. Krissie spent the summer at a wilderness therapy program in Colorado for anxious and depressed teens and apparently came back a new person. She even managed to enroll at Tulane on schedule and loves it there, and she’s not doing STEM anymore. Kelly’s other kids are at public school, and she said they’re super happy. Sounds like she and Kevin are finally in a good place after a bumpy road. All those memes that circulated for months after Alicia’s trial starring Kelly as the hero of her own pathetic, shitty story were pretty rough on the family, but it sounds like they made their peace with the help of A LOT of therapy. Will send you her new number.
Sarah Silver: That’s incredible! Kelly should market her diet plan. Leave EBA and lose 25 lbs? Sign me up! Sigh…
Amanda Russell: Did you all see Brooke’s book dedication? “To Maren and Winnie—the truest friends.” I guess they patched everything up. I hear Maren enrolled at the University of Washington?
COMMENTS:
Maren Pressley: The rumor is true. I am officially a UW Husky studying literature. I also adopted a rescue dog, spend my free time volunteering at a homeless shelter for women and children, and am happier than I’ve ever been. Winnie is loving UC Berkeley. As a bonus, she’s reconnected with some long-lost family in the East Bay, including two adorable little kids. The little boy recently survived a battle with leukemia, and Winnie’s close relationship with him has inspired her to go pre-med.
Holly Strong: Maybe you should write a book like Brooke. Or a screenplay. I bet you have some unbelievable stories from all those years working for Alicia
Maren Pressley: Sorry to disappoint, but no tell-all or movie will be forthcoming. Signed away all my rights when I settled my civil suit with the Stones. $$$
Sarah Silver: I’ll tell you this…the SST isn’t the same without you this year. We’re a total mess!
Maren Pressley: Somehow that doesn’t surprise me!
Amanda Russell: I heard Ted Clark took a job with the UW School of Education after he quit EBA. Have you run into him there?
Maren Pressley: As a matter of fact, I have
Amanda Russell: Will everyone’s kids be home next summer? Duke’s on-campus recruiting program is the bomb! Audrey already has summer job offers from Amazon, Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley… #decisionsdecisions!
Authors’ Note
The shenanigans portrayed in our fictional Elliott Bay Academy and parent community are exaggerated representations (we hope!) of the temporary insanity that overtakes many high school communities across the country every year during college admissions season. Further, our characters’ sometimes-egregious value judgments regarding various colleges and universities are intended to illustrate the dark underbelly of parental competition fueled by rankings, hooks, gossip, and fear—and are not in any way representative of our own views about these schools or the students who attend them. We’re positive all the colleges and universities mentioned in Girls with Bright Futures—and for that matter, those not mentioned—offer outstanding educational and life experiences. After all, college is what you make of it. Right?
Reading Group Guide
1. When we enter the novel, Maren and Winnie are having a tough conversation with the Elliott Bay Academy college counselor regarding the Stanford early admissions process. What do you glean from this conversation? How is this conversation different from how the other moms and their daughters learn about the Stanford news? What does this say about schools like EBA, their politics, and how they operate?
2. Maren and Winnie planned to emphasize Winnie’s first-gen status as a “hook” for college admissions. What would college admissions look like without this and other hooks such as athletics, legacy, or development priorities? Are any aspects of this system fair? Is there an argument for scrapping the whole system? If the system were 100 percent merit based, do you think parents would be any less manic about college?
3. When Maren compares herself to Alicia, Kelly, and the other EBA parents, she struggles to feel like a well-connected provider. Even Kelly, who is wealthy by every reasonable standard, feels inadequate in comparison to Alicia. How do Maren and Kelly handle these negative self-comparisons?
4. The three women in this book are vastly different from one another. However, they share a common goal—securing what’s best for their child. What do you make of the dynamic in which each character’s actions seemed to push another character to go to further lengths to achieve her goals? Where and why do you think they crossed a line? Is there any justification for their manipulations?
5. There are moments of humor throughout the novel that speak to the ridiculous lengths the characters will go to in order to get ahead. What was one of your favorite moments that made you think I can’t believe they did that? Have you ever encountered a person or situation that mirrors the EBA parents’ behavior?
6. Throughout the novel, Maren struggles with the trauma in her own past and Winnie’s origin story. If you were in Maren’s position, would you have consented to a face-to-face meeting with Chase and Naomi? If you were in Winnie’s position, would you have taken the donor match test to see if you could help Eli?
7. Maren’s life is fundamentally altered by Chase’s criminal assault, whereas Chase suffers few consequences. Do you believe someone who commits such a heinous act can be redeemed through future good behavior? How do you feel about Chase by the end of the novel? Does he have more or less integrity than Alicia? How about Kelly?
8. Discuss the role of DNA testing in the novel. Have you ever taken a consumer DNA test or allowed your child to be tested? What are some of the positives and negatives associated with widespread use of this technology?
9. Girls with Brigh
t Futures ends with details about where the families are in one year. How do you think the mother-daughter relationships will evolve over the next few years? Will the mothers remain as involved in their daughters’ college lives, their decisions about jobs or graduate schools, or even their romantic relationships?
10. Ultimately, what do you think Girls with Bright Futures says about how privilege, opportunity, and ambition cycle through our society? Do you see any parallels between the novel and our current culture? To your own life experiences? Are parents today more amped up about college competition than in previous generations? If so, why? Are there any obvious fixes that would lessen the intensity?
A Conversation with the Authors
Girls with Bright Futures follows three mothers as they fight for their daughters’ futures. Of the three lead women, did you have a favorite to write? Did you have any challenges finding their unique voices?
Would you ever confess to having a favorite child? We loved writing each of our leading ladies, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t rooting for one of them (cough, cough—rhymes with SPAREN). We started with a pretty clear vision of what we wanted to accomplish for each of the women vis-à-vis the Stanford competition, but their individual voices took a lot of work. We spent a ton of time creating elaborate backstories for each of our main characters, much of which never made it into the novel, but this exercise helped reveal their voices organically. People always ask how we write together, and this is a key element. We leverage the fact that there are two of us, so we each take primary responsibility for different characters to start. We’ll never reveal who writes what, because in the end, we edit absolutely every word together, but dividing things up really helps us more quickly and easily discover and individualize our characters’ voices.
What research did you have to do to bring the EBA community to life? How did you delve into the complicated world of college admissions?
Between us, we have four kids ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-three. Although Girls with Bright Futures is not autobiographical and the EBA parent community is wholly fictional, you could say we’ve been “conducting research” for nearly twenty years while our kids attended various schools, participated in numerous sports and extracurriculars, and, of course, applied to college. One of the things we were struck by during the college admissions process was the existence of what we refer to as the “college admissions industrial complex.” This complex, which didn’t exist when we were applying to college, feels designed to prey on parents’ insecurities and anxieties. By the time kids reach high school, they and their parents become the targets of sophisticated marketing campaigns from, for example, colleges and universities looking to increase their applicant pools; standardized testing services looking to build their market shares; and private consultants selling services (usually expensive ones), such as test prep, résumé building, essay writing, far-flung service trips, college-tour planning, and athletic recruitment. In the face of such overwhelming “opportunities,” parents worry: Are we doing enough? Maybe we need another six-hour package of tutoring for the ACT? Or maybe we need to find a way to send them to one of those summer programs at [insert name of selective university]? One of our favorites was an email from a test prep company admonishing ninth graders to set up their LinkedIn profiles to showcase their awards and honors. We had a good laugh over that one, especially since one of us (who shall remain nameless) still had not figured out how to make her own LinkedIn profile.
In addition to anecdotal experience, we devoured newspaper and magazine articles and several nonfiction books about the college process. Two of our favorite books in this vein were Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz and Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania by Frank Bruni. We were actually completing the first draft of our manuscript when the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal broke, and suddenly, this world we’d been depicting was all anyone could talk about. We found it validating on some level that our chosen topic was clearly part of the zeitgeist. And like most people, we were shocked by the extent of the criminality. What we were not surprised by was the parental anxiety component.
As coauthors, what does your brainstorming and writing process look like? What’s the best part of working as a team?
By far the best part of working as a team is having another person who is equally invested in every single aspect of the book…and all the laughter. We have a really good time, and at least one of us is usually able to remember why we made a certain decision or changed a particular detail. Our best brainstorming happens on long walks or over text late into the night. We typically write side by side and spec out all plot points chapter by chapter. One of our favorite moments is sharing a new chapter with each other and the surprise of seeing how our partner creatively accomplished each goal.
When writing the suspense aspect of Girls with Bright Futures, how did you map out all the twists and turns? Did you know “whodunit” going into the project?
We are both laughing right now hoping that the other one remembers how we mapped it all out! As a writing team, we are plotters out of necessity, so we figured out the major twists and turns before we started writing. We had poster boards with color-coded sticky notes all over them spread across Tracy’s dining room table and floor for months as we tried to keep track of what each character knew and what the reader knew at any given point in time. As we got further into the writing and editing process, our characters added a few twists and turns of their own, further complicating our storyboards. And then our fabulous editor, MJ Johnston, had great suggestions for heightening the suspense. We had a strong sense from the start about “whodunit” and why, although we did play around with a few alternate ideas before eventually coming back full circle to our original plan.
If you had a child attending EBA, which character would you avoid at the SST meetings?
All of them! Just kidding! But seriously, we intentionally amplified the crazy in the SST meetings and at EBA in general to show the very real temporary insanity that seems to overtake so many of us during the stressful college admissions process, which can affect friendships and even our self-worth as parents. It’s a very insecure time for all involved. The truth is that like anywhere, some people are truly awful no matter the situation, and some people are absolute saints, but most of us fall somewhere in between, and the college madness makes people act in ways detrimental to all types of relationships. We are only seeing a snapshot of these SST women during the height of anxiety. Some of them may have been lovely, normal people before the toxic college race, and they may go back to that after. But during, the general rule is “steer clear!”
Girls with Bright Futures is a fantastic blend of suspense twists with a lighter, often-comic look at the absurdity of one elite community. How did you strike a balance between the darker, more suspenseful scenes and the levity of the EBA parents and their hijinks?
Our natural tendency veers toward humor, but we wanted to write domestic suspense, so it was definitely a balancing act. We approached striking that balance the way we used to make mix tapes (or in today’s parlance—a playlist). You need to vary the speed and tempo to keep things interesting. We intentionally juxtaposed suspenseful and emotional scenes with the more comedic EBA parent scenes as a way of heightening the drama but also to further emphasize the absurdity of the college madness.
Do you have similar reading lists?
Rarely does a day go by that we are not talking about books, movies, TV shows, and articles over our morning coffee. We constantly add to our shared reading list and divide up who reads what and then make recommendations to each other.
Acknowledgments
Girls with Bright Futures was born out of the pressures of modern motherhood, a mutual desire to collaborate on something creative, and most of all, our recognition of the value of unconditio
nal friendship while navigating life’s peaks and valleys. After countless brainstorming sessions (about the book—but also, if we’re being honest, about what the heck to make for dinner, again), writing retreats, editing draft upon draft, supporting each other through life-altering events, and working side by side in our kitchens for several years, our friendship is stronger than ever, and our partnership pushes us to be the best versions of ourselves in work and life. So we must start by thanking each other for the gift of this thriving, challenging, and fulfilling KatznDobs enterprise. However, we are abundantly aware that without the help of so many others, we would never have achieved the indescribable thrill of holding this debut novel in our hands. We have many people to thank, so please hold your applause to the end!
To Carly Watters, our brilliant literary agent: we are forever grateful to you for betting on us. Your guidance made us better writers, and your industry expertise helped bring our dream to fruition. Thank you a million times over! Our gratitude also extends to Curtis Russell and the P.S. Literary team.
To MJ Johnston, our editor at Sourcebooks Landmark: your lovely, collaborative style coupled with your keen eye for storytelling and pacing made this book so much better and made our first publishing experience both enjoyable and educational. Thank you to Jessica Thelander, our production editor; Karin Kipp, our copy editor; Sabrina Baskey, our proofreader; Nicole Hower, our cover design lead; Holli Roach and Jillian Rahn, our page designers; Molly Waxman and Kirsten Wenum, our marketing leads; and the entire Sourcebooks team for believing in and supporting this book.
To our film/TV agents, Addison Duffy and Eni Akintade, at UTA: it’s impossible to convey how much your enthusiasm for our manuscript’s adaptation potential, even before we had a book deal, meant to us.
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