The Manhattan Prep Schoolers Are Different From You and Me

This is part one of a dialogue between Caitlin Macy, author of Spoiled; Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, authors of The Nanny Diaries; and DoubleX associate editor Samantha Henig.

Dear Caitlin, Emma, and Nicola,
Anna, star of the novel Schooled, a sort of Devil Wears Prada for the NYC prep-school scene, spouts the idealistic, “I will change the world one child at a time,” rhetoric you would expect at a Teach for America interview. That is, until she gets close enough to the people of “Langdon” (a made-up Upper East Side prep school), Manhattan’s most Botoxed moms, distant dads, and entitled teens.

Schooled came out last month, and the Wall Street Journal called it “a piece of sociology.” But it isn’t, really. Besides being fiction (though thinly veiled: the author’s biography mirrors her lead character’s, with Dalton as the actual Langdon), it is fiction about a character who has “gone native,” who has thrown herself into the alien culture instead of staying aloof, objective.

Almost immediately, Anna lets herself get drawn in—sporting Juicy sweatsuits or Dior hairbands to earn the approval of the ringleader seventh-grade girls. She accepts invitations to blowout bat mitzvah parties, packs her evenings with $250-an-hour tutoring gigs (wherein she “helps” other prep school students “polish” their as-yet-unwritten papers) to finance her newfound addiction to $1,500 Chanel bags and $950 haircuts at the John Barrett Salon.

Are the people Anna encounters—and the person she becomes—just a cliché we keep repeating? Or are they really out there, leading lives so enviable that starry-eyed tutors who come too close can’t help but buy into their strange priorities and blatant materialism? We see these uber-privileged New Yorkers in Real Housewives or Gossip Girl, but from a more comfortable spectator’s position. From a distance, you can laugh at them for being materialistic, shallow, and spoiled. You can scoff at their priorities, or tsk-tsk their childrearing, or roll your eyes at their ignorance. But from close up, the book implies, they are irresistible.

I had my own version of Anna’s experience. For my junior year of high school, my father took a one-year fellowship in Manhattan, and my mom and I tagged along. Included in his package: a subsidized apartment for us in a doorman building at 64th and Third (which I learned within my first week did not qualify as the Upper East Side) and money to help my family send me to private school for the first time in my life. I chose Trinity on the Upper West Side because it seemed the furthest from what I had known. I was coming from a packed and diverse high school of 3,200 students, more than half of whom were black and Hispanic. At Trinity, there were 100 kids per grade, and most of them were white and very, very rich.