Just One Thing with J.H.

J.H.’s November issue memoir “Pretty Girl with Expiration Date” would be remarkable no matter what—but it’s especially remarkable coming from a high school senior! Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“Writing this piece, I was thinking about the versions of teengirlhood that I grew up with: Cinderella, Cassie from Skins, Regina George, Blair Waldorf. While only one of them made it into the essay, I wanted to give the prose a cinematic quality to match how I saw them, a vibrancy and hypervisuality that would both glimmer and throb, a stomachache on the day after Halloween. The setting is a prison and a dream. The most romantic version of ugly truths. Likewise, the scenes grow softened and smoky when all I’m able to remember is an emotion. In many ways, memory is self-deception, and sometimes words must land on the page for me to disentangle them.”