My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

Where everyone was desperate to be an individual, but they all were terrified to stand out.

I wrote the first draft of this book and gave it to my wife to read, then sat back and waited for her to fall over in awe of my genius. Instead, she waited until we were on the subway to tell me it was a dumpster fire. It was all clichés and stereotypes. The characters felt thin, the situations were predictable, the emotions felt second hand. When I finished having my little man tantrum, I realized she was right. Everything in that draft was lifted from a John Hughes movie or a horror flick. I’d regurgitated tropes from the high school books and movies I’d been consuming all my life. I had been playing with someone else’s toys. What I hadn’t done was the hard work of actually remembering what high school in the Eighties had felt like. So I sat down with all her journals and letters and photos from back then, and all my journals and letters and photos, and spent a few weeks just reading them. I copied letters over again to remember how it felt to write them. I did that so much my handwriting changed. And, finally, after a couple of weeks, I remembered what it felt like to sit on the Quad at lunch on a Spring day. I heard the seagulls and the conversations, I remembered what the wet grass felt like, and how I wanted to be seen, and who I was talking to, and what I wanted them to think about me. It was a perfect memory of a few seconds, but that memory led to another, then another, and pretty soon I had the beginnings of this book. That sentence about being an individual? That’s word-for-word right out of the diary I kept in 1990 when I was 17.