Blueprints for Building Better Girls

Summary

In Blueprints forBuilding Better Girls, Schappell has crafted another provocative, keenlyobserved, and wickedly smart work of fiction that maps America’s shiftingcultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. In these eightdarkly funny linked stories, she delves into the lives of an eclectic cast ofarchetypal female characters—from the high school slut to the good girl, thestruggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child tothe reluctant mother—to explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken ofexperiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers.

In “Monsters of the Deep,” teenage Heather struggles tobalance intimacy with a bad reputation; years later in “I’m Only Going to TellYou This Once,” she must reconcile her memories of the past with her role asthe mother of an adolescent son. In “The Joy of Cooking,” a phone conversationbetween Emily, a recovering anorexic, and her mother explores a complex bond;in “Elephant” we see Emily’s sister, Paige, finally able to voice herambivalent feelings about motherhood to her new best friend, Charlotte. And in“Are You Comfortable?” we meet a twenty-one-year-old Charlotte cracking underthe burden of a dark secret, the effects of which push Bender, a troubledcollege girl, to the edge in “Out of the Blue into the Black.”

Weaving in and out of one another’s lives, whether connectedby blood, or friendship, or necessity, these women create deep and lastingimpressions. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting ourpreconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell, with dazzling wit andpoignant prose, has forever altered how we think about the nature of femaleidentity and how it evolves.