Of course, Everything Sucks (subtitle: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool) is actually a memoir, written about Friedman's days as a scholarship student at New York prep school Danforth Academy. Friedman's only 22, so what her book promises is a look at prep school kids as they really are, or at least as they were just five years ago.

The mean girls in Everything Sucks could go toe-to-toe with Blair Waldorf any day. Called the Great Eight (did anyone else's high school actually have popular crowds with names?), they orchestrate complicated social humiliations via IM, count to ten whenever one of their members leaves the room before mercilessly dissing her, and compete over who can lose the most weight and wear the most expensive clothes. The ringleader is Cashmere, a trust-fund Regina George with a snobby, racist mom and a closet full of Gucci. Her blowout with her mother starts with a birthday gift of designer jeans in size six (horrors!) and ends with Mom tossing the keys to Cashmere's new BMW out the window — a creepily fascinating set piece on bad parenting and teenage entitlement.

Friedman made a splash while still in high school when her essay, "When Friends Are Really Enemies," was published in Newsweek, and a certain amount of Everything Sucks is devoted to her process of breaking free from the Great Eight and the classist, sizeist values they represent. She recounts her final conversation with her frenemies thus:

"Where are you applying, Hannz?"
I take a bite of lettuce. "I'm not sure yet."
"Well, maybe you can go wherever [your boyfriend] Adam is. Where is he, anyway, like, Colorado or something?" Teagan smiles at me generously. "I hear you can really stretch a buck there."
"And with all the hiking and stuff, you would totally lose the weight!" Cashmere adds.
I clear my tray and walk down the steps of the dining hall. I don't come back. Ever.

Friedman eventually triumphs over bulimia and an overreliance (the word "addiction" isn't used, and Friedman isn't interesting in demonizing drug use) on cocaine and Adderall, and over an administration that wants to punish her for her essay. For teenage readers, her book would be an inspiring tale of a smart girl who has been down, but never out. As a grown-up, though, I couldn't help but read it as part of a larger genre of prep-school literature, TV, and film. Friedman acknowledges this, telling Salon's Judy Berman that an obsession with the very wealthy is, "pervasive in pop culture. It seems like every other person is Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton, and that we should aspire to have a closet full of $900 shoes." A reading of Everything Sucks sheds some light on why an audience of largely non-prep-schooled readers and viewers gobble up Gossip Girl, Prep, and the like.

Not everyone in the book comes off badly — Friedman's guy friends are largely supportive, fun, and witty, despite the drug problems from which some of them suffer. But the Great Eight are so superficial, self-absorbed, and nasty — and their parents and the Danforth top brass so materialistic and enabling — that they confirm every negative stereotype the public-school-educated have about prep schools. Especially if we came up through America's overburdened urban school systems, we may have endured indifferent teaching, rundown facilities, and rubbery nacho cheese, but the denizens of Danforth, we can tell ourselves, were far more corroded by their privilege — and isn't it fun to watch it happen?

This combined fascination with the gloss of prep school and feeling of superiority over its supposedly morally bankrupt students may explain the popularity of Prep and Gossip Girl. Everything Sucks deserves to share in this popularity for its clear-eyed account of a young woman who survives being a socioeconomic outsider at a cutthroat institution and learns a lot about herself in the process. At the same time, the Great Eight sometimes read like caricatures, and I started to wonder how much Friedman was relying on her memory and how much she was giving us exactly what we expect rich high school mean girls to be like. Friedman may not have seen any other side of these girls, and she may not have witnessed any family interaction beyond the acrimonious mother-daughter exchanges we get here. But it would have been nice if Everything Sucks offered not just the moving story of its heroine, but nuanced portraits of its villains as well. As a former public school kid, I already have lots of preconceived notions about Gucci-wearing teens named Cashmere, and these notions probably deserve to be challenged.

Prep School Casualty [Salon]
Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool [Amazon]

What attracted you to Laura as a fictional construct in the first place? In the Times you've declared your love for her and I've read the Salon essay in which you first mention your admiration for her. You call her "a mastermind of stealth independence."
Basically I read these various articles about her, and realized that she was more complicated than I would have imagined. She and George Bush got married at the age of 31, and she was a democrat until she married him. She actually has some very liberal close friends, including a woman who’s a midwife in Berkeley. I think a lot of people, most people, are primarily friends with people who are of the same political persuasion as you are. I think it’s notable to be First Lady to a super conservative President and friends with midwife. She would invite people over when she was First Lady of Texas and when she was at the White House. Because she was such a great reader, she would invite writers to events, and they would have been on record as disagreeing with her husband. They just assumed that Laura had never read their books, but then they would show up and have realized she had read everything they'd ever written.

I’ve read all of your novels, and while Lee (from Prep) and Hannah (from The Man of My Dreams) are more cynical, all three heroines are quite shy and introverted. It seems like these sorts of introverted characters are not usually protagonists. What makes you gravitate towards them?
Well I think that the all the protagonists of my books are observant, because I can’t really imagine writing a novel that didn’t have an observant protagonist. What would be the point? I also think that I’m interested in social awkwardness, because it seems to illustrate or magnify these aspects of human behavior. So I would say that’s a lot of it: the things that interest me as a person.

Alice's shyness makes her incredibly ambivalent about her husband, Charlie's, ascendence to the Presidency. I was particularly taken with the observation she makes as narrator: "We did everything we could to get as many people as possible to pay attention to us, and it worked, and now we complain. Leave us alone, we say. Just like you, we’re entitled to privacy."
I feel like most people who are famous have actively pursued their fame, but some people are famous as a result of their relationship to someone else, and that’s always true for political families. For example, Sasha and Malia Obama didn’t choose to be famous, but now they are. It's the outsider question. To me it’s always more interesting to hear a story told from the perspective of an outsider, because an outsider notices things more, whereas an insider takes things for granted.

I read the Cindy McCain profile in this week's New Yorker as I was reading the American Wife, and it struck me that very few women really revel in being First Ladies. What sort of person does enjoy being a political spouse? Do you think Hillary liked it?
I think Hillary Clinton is a really interesting person because people have very strong reactions to her in terms of admiring her or disliking her. I think she was a good First Lady, but I think she’d actually be a better President than First Lady.

Ok, now I need to ask the obligatory question about what you think of our potential First Ladies, Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama.
There was an article on Cindy in the New York Times on August 23rd. It was the same day Biden was announced as Obama's VP pick so it didn't get as much press as it should have. I really urge anyone to read it, it raises a lot of questions about her professional involvement with her family’s company (ed. note: the article basically says that Cindy, "a private person" is an absentee chairwoman who cashes the checks from the beer distributorship she inherited but "has left scarcely a mark on the company.") Michelle Obama seems like a much more regular person. I just watched her on Ellen and I think she’s a good sport. You see her dance with Ellen, which Barack did too. It is interesting. Obviously because everything in politics is so scripted it makes us even hungrier to know people’s real selves, which we kind of can’t do.

Speaking of real and fictional selves, one thing I thought was really interesting, and one thing I’ve been thinking about with Sarah Palin, is how these details come out about you and become your “official biography” that everyone refers to. Like with Alice in American Wife, her father being a postal worker, which wasn’t even true, was seized upon by her husband's campaign. Do you ever wonder what details would emerge about you and become those sorts of talking points?
I’m not planning to run for office, but there are definitely certain details. This is a different kind of book than Prep or the Man of my Dreams. So there are different questions that come up over and over. There’s a set of questions with this book and a set that comes up with other books. There’s a tidbit that Prep was turned down by 14 out of 15 publishers, which is true, but misleading because it was sold within two weeks. It makes it sound like I struggled more than I did. Anyone who is writing about fiction writing likes stories about long odds.

Long odds makes me think of Sarah Palin. What's your take on her?
I wish she were a fictional construct. I’m not a fan of hers. But I certainly admit that she’s got a compelling life story.

American Wife [Amazon]
Curtis Sittenfeld [Official Website]
Imaginary First Lady Tells All [NYT]
Why I Love Laura Bush [Salon]
For McCains, a Public Path but Private Wealth [NYT]
Michelle Obama On Ellen [YouTube]

Earlier: Pussy, Parents And Puppies: A Q&A With Comedian Margaret Cho
This Is Not Chick Lit: A Q&A With Writer Janelle Brown
New Yorker Profile Shows Cindy McCain Is A Nouveau Betty Draper