Notebook: Projections

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

When I was twelve years old I saw an author on some morning show who was my own age and had just written a book that had been published by a publisher (it was illustrated in a child-familiar style by her best friend). The book was called She Was Nice to Mice, and it was about a mouse observing the daily life of Queen Elizabeth (the first one). I was so jealous.

The author of this book was Ally Sheedy, who would go on to become famous for something else. A few nights ago, casting about to avoid my weighty book review editing responsibilities, I watched the documentary Brats by Andrew McCarthy, whom I remembered as “the thoughtful one” from the signature “Brat Pack” movie St. Elmo’s Fire. The Breakfast Club came out when I had just graduated from college: the actors were my age, but they were playing ourselves as high school students, so the movie seemed to me charming in a prematurely nostalgic way. St Elmo’s Fire, arriving soon after and addressing our contemporary selves, struck me as just ridiculous. (Glancing back at it, the characters seem startlingly heedlessly “privileged” in the contemporary parlance: oblivious to the world beyond their demographic niche, as Reagan arrived at his second term—they were in Washington!—Oliver North diverted funds to the contras, and Gorbachev entered public consciousness. The critic Ira Madison III in the film magnanimously suggests that Black audiences at the time were used to seeing themselves in white characters. The Brat Pack actors are identified in Brats without wincing as defining the youthful spirit of the age rather than, say, hip hop or AIDS.)