)
Let’s get this out of the way first. Bad girls.
Go on. Think of a sixteen-year-old in a halter-top and cut-off jeans with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. Add a tattoo and a pierced tongue, if you like.
But get that image out of your head because this isn’t a story about those types of bad girls. This is a story about Bad Girls, a novel by Alex McAulay, a Ph.D. student in English at UNC-Chapel Hill. And his story is about our daughters and granddaughters — about what girls can do to one another.
So let’s start over.
Go back about four and a half years ago. To Pepper’s Pizza, on Franklin Street, in Chapel Hill. It’s a date between Alex and Lisa, both graduate students in the English department. He loves Lords of the Flies; she doesn’t. The conversation goes something like this:
“Lord of the Flies has all the elements of a classic novel: suspense, characters, plot, thought-provoking, wide appeal. Real,” he says.
“Real? How about a cheesy boys’ book? How can a book be real when half of the human population — women — aren’t included?” she asks. “If it had been about females instead of males stranded on an island, the story would have been different.”
“But it’s a story about humanity.”
“Yeah, the humanity of boys. It doesn’t appeal to girls in the same way.”
Alex pauses. He contemplates. He tries to think of a rational reason why it was boys — and not girls or both — who were stranded on the island. Then, he wonders out loud: “So how would the story be different if it was about lost girls?”
And that’s how this story — of a couple and of Bad Girls — begins. With Alex and Elizabeth “Lisa” Wright in a pizza parlor. On a date. And a question: what would have happened if William Golding had centered Lord of the Flies on girls?
“It’s worthless.”
Alex wanted to be a writer. When he and Lisa first started dating about four and a half years ago, Alex had the first chapter of a novel completed. He had sent the chapter to four big-name publishers, and three responded: they wanted to see the finished book. But there were no more chapters, and there was no completed book. Alex let it go.
Then he saw Lisa’s bookshelves. There were rows and rows of her personal journals filled with her written words. Alex was impressed. Inspired.
He already had the idea for a story: of girls stranded on an island who must find their way back to civilization. He already had imagined what would become of Ralph and Piggy and the others in Lord of the Flies if they had been girls. And he had seen that if he wrote just a little bit every day, then over time he would have a finished product.
He also had Lisa’s encouragement. “You should do it,” she had told him. “You can do it.”
But Alex worried he wouldn’t be able to accurately present adolescent females, from the way they talked to how they behaved. He wasn’t a girl, after all.
Then one day Lisa brings home Rachel Simmons’ Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. And Alex, the book addict, flips through it. He discovers Simmons has interviewed three hundred adolescent girls, and so he begins reading. “Fear of solitude is overpowering,” Simmons writes. “Despite the cruel things that happened — the torrents of vulgar e-mail and unsigned notes, the whispered rumors, the slanderous scribbling on desks and walls and lockers, the sneering and name-calling — what crushed girls was being alone.” Girls are defined by their relationships. It’s the good girls, Simmons writes, who have “friends, and lots of them.” Good girls never fight, never argue, and never speak their true feelings. And when they do speak, they speak calmly and quietly, with a voice of kindness. They’re perfect angels, just like the children’s rhyme — “sugar and spice and everything nice.”
With each passage he reads, he becomes more interested, fascinated. He not only reads the book, he absorbs it. A story takes shape in his head.
Then, in December 2002, an ice storm knocks out power in Alex and Lisa’s Chapel Hill apartment for five days. The cold. Isolation. Darkness. Lord of the Flies. Odd Girl Out. They stir in Alex. And, one late night, he starts writing. By the time the power’s restored, he has one “large chunk” of the novel written. And he has fallen into a pattern.
He writes from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., as Lisa sleeps. He writes longhand, standing at a lectern.
After several months, he completes his story — A Gift from the Shadows, a “riff” on William Golding’s original title for Lord of the Flies — Strangers From Within.
But he boxes up the manuscript and puts it in a closet.
Lisa asks him why.
“Because I can’t do anything with it,” he says. “It’s worthless.”
“It’s great.”
Lisa, who finished her graduate degree in English in 2000, now works on the Documenting the American South Project in Carolina’s Wilson Library. She takes the bus to and from work each day and reads to pass the time. One day about a year ago, while on the bus, a fellow passenger interrupts Lisa.
“What’s that you’re reading?” the woman asks.
Lisa, a bit startled, tells the woman it’s her boyfriend’s finished manuscript.
“Well, I’ve been reading along with you, over your shoulder,” the woman says, “and it’s great.”
Lisa thought so, too. It’s a psychological thriller she couldn’t put down, she says. And, it was familiar.
Yes, there were obvious things in Alex’s story she recognized. The protagonist, Anna, finds comfort, for example, in photography; Lisa does too. But on the broader level, Lisa was “amazed,” she says, by Alex’s ability to piece together a narrative that shows how girls relate to one another: how some can draw up a petition called We Hate On Rebecca Everyday and circulate it among their clique, which pledges to do “mean things to Rebecca every day;” how a girl can say “At least I’m not a fat, disgusting porker like you. Can’t you go stick your head in a trash can or something?” to your face; and how the characters resemble girls you could find in any American high school, including Kelli, “Miss Piggy with zits;” Kara, “who had a face designed for guys to desire and girls to be jealous of;” Erica, the loud-mouth “punk grrrl;” Stacey, “the nerd and proud of it;” Lindsay, “Gothic-looking girl with short, blue hair;” and Lisa’s favorite, Maria, the wallflower who never speaks.
Alex created such a narrative and such girls by studying Odd Girl Out, using his dissertational research on modern British writers who subvert boundaries of gender, and talking over his characters and plot with Lisa. They’d talked about what worked and what didn’t, what girls would do and wouldn’t do, and which girls seemed real and which ones didn’t. They debated, for example, how far a girl would go in using her body to manipulate others.
Alex also used his own experiences.
He, for example, had attended a non-traditional high school in Dayton, Ohio, which offered students the opportunity to take long, overnight field trips. When he was in the tenth grade, he and a small group of students learned about marine ecology while on a six-week visit to Andros Island. Located between Miami and Cuba in the Bahamas, Andros Island is the largest tract of unexplored land in the Western Hemisphere. Mahogany and pine trees, as well as mangrove swamps, cover about 80 percent of the land.
“The island is so strange because it’s desolate and spooky,” Alex says. And that’s why, he says, Andros Island served as the perfect home for his fictional Camp Archstone — a wilderness camp for troubled girls. It’s at the camp where a group of thirteen girls get lost in a rainforest and must find their way back to civilization.
A compromise.
“You have to publish this,” Lisa tells Alex after she reads his manuscript and he hides it in a box.
They compromise.
Alex writes a letter to novelist and musician Matt O’Keefe, who lives in Hillsborough. Alex mentions he’s an indie-rock musician who records under the name Charles Douglas, he’s heard and liked O’Keefe’s music, and he enjoyed O’Keefe’s You Think You Hear, a novel about a twenty-year-old and his life as a roadie for a band.
Alex also writes that he’s completed a novel, he’s not sure if it’s any good, and he wonders what O’Keefe recommends. O’Keefe responds and asks Alex to send him the manuscript. O’Keefe reads it and sends it to his agent in New York. Both David Dunton, the agent, and O’Keefe make suggestions for revisions.
Alex takes a year off from his doctoral work, spends most of that time revising his manuscript, and submits a final draft.
MTV Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, buys the rights to Alex’s novel, re-titles it Bad Girls, and releases it in June 2005. MTV also options Alex’s novel for film.
“I accomplished what I set out to do,” Alex says. “I told a story that takes elements of Lord of the Flies but centers it on girls. And I came to the conclusions that the dynamics of the groups would in some ways not be significantly different beyond superficial things. The story expresses the notion that there are fundamental similarities that carry us through extreme circumstance. We just exhibit them differently.”
On an August day, in 2005, Lisa and Alex sit at a table in Pepper’s Pizza.
Alex says Lord of the Flies is his all-time favorite novel.
Lisa covers her face with her hands and shakes her head in mock disbelief. She’s heard it before.
She pulls her hands from her face, slightly smiles, and says, “Bad Girls is much better than Lord of the Flies.”
“Well, you have to say that,” Alex says with a chuckle.
“That’s true,” she says. “But I can identify with it, and most teen-age girls probably can, too. There’re a lot of bad girls out there.”
What’s a bad girl anyway?
“Ah,” Alex says. “In the context of the novel, it’s girls who exhibit rebelliousness and individuality.”
“It’s those who aren’t the good girls,” Lisa says. “And people think the good girls are the ones who go to the prom, hang out at the mall, date the high-school football star. So the girls who aren’t that, they get labeled the bad girls.”
“And that’s what makes Bad Girls an ironic title,” Alex says. “There are people out there who will read the book and think all the girls in it are bad girls, but to me they’re not. Most of the girls aren’t treacherous or malicious. And, this isn’t really a book about bad girls; it’s about the perseverance of Anna, the protagonist, and how good girls can finish first.”
Alex dedicated Bad Girls to Lisa. They will marry in October.
