
On one especially surreal day I found myself on the fourteenth floor of the Random House offices in midtown Manhattan, drinking champagne. Over the next several weeks Prep became a New York Times best seller, Paramount Pictures optioned the movie rights, and foreign rights were sold in thirteen countries. In January my first novel, Prep-the story of an Indiana girl who goes on scholarship to an elite New England boarding school-was published by Random House.


For a period of months last fall and winter, when I was twenty-nine, my life turned into an implausible movie about being a writer.
