“And then she occurred to her that she was the ghost in her story. She had spent years haunting her own life, without ever noticing.”
The romantic comedy starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s book was very different from the source material. I enjoyed the movie, as I would probably anything starring Fey and/or Rudd. But while the movie was a fun romcom about an unhappy admissions officer finding love and family, the book is much more serious and in my opinion, a better story.
Portia Nathan is 38. She’s been living with the same man for 15 years, without ever marrying him or having children. She thinks she’s fine with this arrangement. She spends her days with other people’s children, reading their transcripts, their essays and their recommendations from teachers, coaches and others. She takes her job as an admissions officer at Princeton very seriously.
But then things change. Her boyfriend leaves her. She meets a teacher at a new alternative school who knew her back in college, back before something happened that changed her forever (if you’ve seen the movie or even the trailers this event has probably been spoiled for you like it was for me which is such a shame because Korelitz handles it very subtly and organically within the story).
Beyond being a book about Portia, who is wonderfully flawed and interesting, it’s also a book about admissions. Portia finds herself distraught over these kids, who spend the first 18 years of their lives being molded and shaped and guided into these perfect college students. Their parents fight with and scream at and attempt to bribe anyone who stands in their child’s way. It’s an exhausting and difficult process that doesn’t always end with the shiny diploma and job that everyone expects.
In Portia’s words:
“They were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives…the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren’t brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.”
Anyway, this book was much more than the romcom I expected. I really enjoyed it.
It’s funny. I’ve read about 95% of this book and it’s the only book I’ve ever stopped because it made me so uncomfortable to keep going. I haven’t seen the movie version of it, but you’ve reminded about this existence of this book. I might have to give it another chance.