Synopses & Reviews
I wrote a story about you. Well, sort of, see, it's mostly about me. Well, entirely about me, but here's the catch: I'm you. No, really, I mean it. Not like that transcendentalism stuff we're learning in English class, but really, truly, I'm you. I know what it feels like when your heart beats so hard against your white bone ribs, when you sing in the shower with soap in your eyes, when you run until you get a side ache. I wrote this story about you because I am so in love with you, your broken-fence teeth and your tissue-paper scars. I love you when you're so exhausted it could topple you to the ground, so in love it could snap guitar strings, so sickly sweet it could make lips smile. This is a reckless love story. This is my shameless confession.
Review
"Imagine all the angst and lust of high school. Now imagine having all the intellectual and emotional maturity to capture every excruciating moment. Zoe Trope has written a book for those of us who remember high school all too well...and for those of us who have blocked it out completely. Who knew that the deadening monotony of high school could inspire such passion, wit, and delectable turns of phrase? Thank god she survived her first year of high school and lived to tell us about it." Thea Hillman, author of Depending on the Light
Review
"I am in awe of Zoe Trope. She is capable of expressing so much feeling, with such beautiful authenticity. This book is more than the kind of good story we've become satisfied with. It's more than interesting. It's art." Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated
Review
"Zoe Trope's tale of a frustrated freshman girl is lively, personal, and refreshingly honest. We follow her through mercurial attractions and the tedious vagaries of high school life while being treated to some of the most enlightened and original observations since Holden Caulfield first left prep school." Mark Jude Poirier, author of Goats
Synopsis
In this wickedly intelligent yet poetically wise memoir written from the trenches of high school, Trope reminds readers that adolescence is more than a angst-ridden phase: it's a time of rare clarity, emergent self-awareness, and heartrending hope.
Synopsis
A memoir of the then-fifteen-year-old author's high school experience to that point, in which diary entries reflect her struggles, angst, and rebellion.
Synopsis
Please Don't Kill the Freshman is the true tale of one Portland girl's first year of high school. It signals the emergence of a true and totally original voice in the world of underground writing.
Written at the start of the new century, while the author was just fourteen, Please Don't Kill the Freshman is a brilliant and entertaining look at what really happens in today's high schools. Her name has been changed to Zoe Trope to protect the identity of herself and her friends.
Synopsis
New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age
About the Author
Zoe Trope exists. She was born in 1986 and graduated from high school with the class of 2003 in Oregon.
Author Q&A
Favorite CD?
Right now, Rainer Maria's Long Knives Drawn or Pete Yorn's Day I Forgot. Other favorites include Tortoise's TNT, Sleater-Kinney's Call the Doctor, Radiohead's OK Computer (or Kid A), Laurie Anderson's Big Science, and Starlight Mints' The Dreams That Stuff Was Made Of.
Where do you write?
On other people's hands, in large blank notebooks, in the margins of my math homework, on envelopes, on the back of worksheets, on dry erase boards in classrooms, on the vinyl seats of pizzerias in Chicago.
Qualities you most admire?
Homosexuality....Yep, thats about it.
What do you do to relax?
Write long hand-written letters to friends and send postcards to complete strangers.
Place where you were/are happiest?
In the midst of a torrid make-out session with someone fabulous, or at the post office.
Most embarrassing moment?
When Dave Eggers made me stand up in the middle of a crowded audience at one of his readings and said some really great thing about my book that I cant even remember now.