Please Don't Kill the Freshman - Teen Writer Queen Zoe Trope 

Zoe Trope took copious note while blazing through the hollow halls of High School in her 2003 HarperCollins memoir, Please Don´t Kill the Freshman. Keeping a record of what was not being taught in class and the hormonal sport that seethes between the lines of seats, Trope wrote straightforwardly about her lust for girls and boys, her gay best friend, and the cabal of burnt out, ineffective teachers. “While I was in High School I was watching myself be in High School at the same time,’ acknowledges Trope. “I´ve always sort of existed outside of experiences. Being mature or smart for my age, I wasn´t able to entirely immerse myself.’ She exudes a confidence, sarcasm, and intelligence that belie her age in her writings and in person.  Though there is also a girlish sweetness about her, Trope, now 19, admits that for some her acrid retorts can be off-putting.

{quote}“People either love me or hate me, I have a pretty grating personality.  You find it funny or amusing or obnoxious.’{/quote}

Initially Trope´s diary entries from her freshman year of High School were collected into a chapbook.  Trope emailed the entries to Portland, Oregon micropublisher and writer, Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense Press, from whom she´d recently taken a class.  “I wrote it and Kevin read it and corrected some grammatical errors and was like, yeah this looks good, we´ll do this.’ The 44-page booklet was photocopied, folded, and stapled. It was sold mostly in Portland bookstores and through word-of-mouth. It was a nice and modest production.

Sampsell later passed the chapbook off to Joseph Weisberg, a New York writer who also wrote about high school (his novel, 10th Grade, had just come out at that time). Weisberg wrote back a week later, raving about the book and offering to show it to his agent. Weisberg´s agent contacted Sampsell and Trope soon after and they hammered out a proposal for shopping the book to a big publisher.  

 After offers from MTV Books and Scholastic, HarperCollins jumped in with the healthy offer of $100,000 for writing an extended version of the chapbook. Immediately Trope was surrounded by a circus of posse from the big house. “With HarperCollins there is just a lot more people,’ Trope says. “Agents, the lawyer, the editor at Harper, the team of graphic designers that wanted to put together the cover, the publicist, and people who just dealt with the web marketing side of things.’ Trope later turned in a manuscript of 100,000 words. It needed to be trimmed by 40%. “Mainly I cut boring repetitious stuff--I didn´t need to have 30 pages about my girlfriend--all the main stuff remained.  Days when I did my laundry were cut.’

You may think: Amazing! Incredible! 100,000 dollars! Life-changing! Fame is just around the corner!

Hold on there, buckaroo. Let´s take a look at how that money can dwindle quickly. After the lawyers, agents, Uncle Sam, and various others got their pie holes filled, Trope was left with under $50,000. Still, a very decent sum and Trope doesn´t thumb her nose at that. Though HarperCollins set up her readings in a few cities they did not pay for her (and her Dads—remember she was only 17) air fair and hotels—so subtract for that as well. Trope was able to treat herself to a Volkswagon Bug, a laptop, and a digital camera. “It´s not like I went all tech crazy,’ she says. Some money was tied up in a CD and the remaining $13,000 went toward her first semester at Oberlin (where it costs about $20,000 a semester). “I´ve gone from being independently wealthy to relying on my parents again,’ she says. Consider that this is likely three times more than most first-time authors receive as an advance.

There were interesting and amazing experiences in the year that followed the book´s release. Trope took a year off from school to promote the new, bigger version of PDKTF. “The year after I graduated from high school was pretty surreal because I was living at home with an income and I wasn´t working which is amazing for a person my age.’ There were other perks that most people don´t get to indulge in at such an early age. “The whole experience has been really valuable in teaching me about publishing and human nature,’ she says. “Being able to travel is a great thing--I don´t think I would´ve been able to go to New York or Philadelphia otherwise.  I met a lot of really great people. “

This past year Trope worked three smaller jobs along with a full school load as an Art History major, and only occasionally gets asked about her book by students. “I´m definitely having this sophomore identity crisis figuring out where I fit in the world of writing and publishing. I´ve been with a very small independent press and big publisher and I´ve seen the raw, exposed side of writing. I´ve seen the hyper-polished writing that´s super-polished and super-marketed. I can write something that is personally meaningful and pay for it out of my pocket and not deal with any editors.’

Trope says the ghost of having sold a book to a major publisher definitely follows her around. “There is this thing that if I did write something someone would likely publish it, I could likely get some money for it, if I just did it. So sometimes I feel like there is an expectation of… soooo Zoe working on anything?’

The when-will-you-write-your-next book thing will likely follow Trope for a long time. “The thing is, I may finish undergrad, go to grad school and then sit and write three or four books. I may be a literary genius, but I don´t know that so I have to have some kind of back up.’  So, plan B is to take the “I know it sounds square’ route of a Library and Information Science masters degree. “The reaction from most people is why do you JUST want to be a librarian,’ Trope says in a frustrated tone. “People don´t even understand that you have to get a degree for that. I have to have some kind of realistic future. It´s something that I really enjoy and it absolutely can´t hurt me to have this degree, whether or not I end up using it. I´d be happy working at the library, or doing other things, or writing. “

Zoe Trope 

Zoe Trope was born in 1986. Her high school memoir, Please Don't Kill the Freshman, was published by HarperTempest in 2003. Her work has appeared in Curve Magazine, The Oregonian, and Pindeldyboz.com. This fall, Zoe will enter her third year at Oberlin College where she is majoring in Art History. Find her online at www.zoe-trope.com

ou can also purchase her book Powell's: http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-0060529369-0