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Overview
On the first day of middle school, Lydia Meadows, a former lawyer turned full-time mother, is startled to discover that her daughter Erin is one of the popular girls, a tight foursome whose mothers are also great friends. Lydia has always thought of popular girls as ambitious little manipulators who enjoy being cruel. But Erin is kind and well-adjusted. Maybe this popularity thing won't be so bad after all.
Then a new student ruthlessly targets Erin to boost her own popularity, and Lydia helplessly wonders what to do when her daughter's phone stops ringing. And the uneasiness among the girls begins to affect the friendship of the mothers—even though they are all grown women who should know better. Has their driven energy, once directed toward their careers, turned into an obsession with the social lives of their daughters?
A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity is a delightful novel of manners, an unabashed chronicle of the rules, rituals, and pitfalls of raising a daughter.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312333270 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2007 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.72(d) |
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
In Her Own Words
Isn't It Time to Stop Blaming the Popular Girls?
An original essay from Kathleen Gilles Seidel
The woman's voice was shaking as she talked about going to pick up her daughter during a middle-school dance. The girl had called her from the school restroom in tears, wanting to come home because no one would talk to her. "It was those popular kids," the mother said angrily. "They just ignored her."
It makes a good story, doesn't it? Good stories need villains, and so the villain of the young adolescent years is the popular girl—the pretty one, the well-dressed one, the mean one, the one who won't be your friend. Parents are happy to blame her when their child is unhappy; researchers talk to her self-identified victims and assume that that is an accurate picture. But is the story really that simple?
I have two daughters. During middle school, the older one, Becca, had a very stable, very clearly defined group of friends. It was a great group of kids, and while they weren't unpopular, they certainly weren't "the" popular crowd. My younger daughter Abby went to a different middle school. She, too, had a very stable, very clearly defined group of friends. It was also a great group of kids, and they were the popular girls.
Suddenly I was a lot less willing to call the popular girls villains. My Abby was a happy, lively, confident kid. Why was it her fault if other kids weren't
Popularity as a phenomenon peaks in middle school. During elementary school, parents make their children's social plans, and during high school, the influence of the popular group diffuses. But very often during the middle-school years, a single popular crowd dominates the social life of the environment.
I'm not a sociologist or a psychologist. I'm a mom and a novelist. I don't have data; I have observations and insights. Of course there are exceptions to everything I'm about to say, but I do believe that much of what is said and written about popular girls is biased against them.
1. Everyone hates the popular girls.
This is an oxymoron; the definition of the word "popular" involves likeability and approval. Popular girls are, in fact, very likeable. They are lively, verbal, and poised. People may envy the popular girls more than hate them.
What makes adults uneasy about the popular kids is their power. A variety of students in middle school have power. The ones who beat you up and steal your lunch money have one kind of power. The kids who manage to get everyone to feel sorry for them have another kind of power. The popular kids have power because, for whatever reason, the other kids look to them for validation. If you are wearing what the popular kids are wearing, you aren't a dork. If you are sitting at their lunch table, you aren't a loser. As the vice principal of Abby's middle school repeatedly reminded parents, the other kids give the popular kids their power. They haven't necessarily asked for it.
2. The popular girls are mean.
This may be true, but if so, it's because all middle-school kids are mean to some degree or another. In fact, the meanest things I heard said while driving carpools were what Becca and her friends——the "other" kids——said about the popular kids. Probably suffering some degree of suppressed envy, they were very critical of the popular kids. But Abby and her popular friends never spoke about the other kids; they simply weren't thinking about the other kids. Although your child may be thinking about the popular girls all the time, they may not be thinking about her much at all.
This may result in errors of omission. If one girl says to another, "you can't sign my yearbook," that's mean. If she hands her yearbook to one girl, but then not to a second girl standing right next to the first one, that's objectionable as well. But when she doesn't cross the lunchroom to get a signature from a kid she never socializes with, if that is a sin at all, it is one of omission.
The kid on the other side of the lunchroom, however, might interpret that omission as either direct rejection or at least as something that diminishes her own status. I doubt that popular girls are meaner than other kids, but what they do is more visible, and sometimes their sins of omission are perceived as meanness.
3. Popular girls only care about being popular.
Abby, now safely in college, added this. Through most of middle school she says that she never thought about whether or not she was popular. She just really liked her friends. Popularity matters the most to the girls who don't quite have it.
A director at a private girls' school agrees. She told me that if you want to know who the truly popular girls are, ask all the girls to map the social hierarchy. The truly popular girls——the innermost circle——will be the ones who don't believe that there is one.
Abby now says that being popular is a label, and some kids simply want that label. They want the status, the power, of being popular far more than they want to associate with the specific individuals who are popular. "They would want to hang out with us," Abby now says about the kids who cared so much about popularity, "but it never seemed that they liked us."
4. Popular girls are obligated to act with the graciousness appropriate to their high social status.
Once it is formulated with such precision, I don't suppose that anyone would admit to believing this, but when you listen to parents talking about what the popular kids "should" have done, they do seem to believe that the popular girls are obligated——and have the skills——to make their children feel comfortable and validated.
For almost everyone in American life, social status varies with the situation, and as adults we've learned to modify our behavior accordingly. If you go to a dinner as the boss——or worse——the boss's wife, you know that some of the younger people aren't going to be entirely comfortable with you so if you want there to be any conversation at all, you will need to put them at ease. Similarly, if I am the only published author at a dinner with people who haven't sold their first book, I am going to act differently than when I'm the only author who hasn't been on the New York Times bestseller list.
But that kind of ability to understand social situations and read social cues requires the knowledge and confidence that comes with experience. Twelve-year-old girls don't have those social skills.
Think about that girl who called her mother from the school dance because none of the popular kids had talked to her. Probably anxious when she came into the gym, she would have made little eye contact; at most she would have murmured a greeting. How were the popular girls to know what she wanted from them?
5. Popular girls are growing up too fast; they are boy-crazy clotheshorses.
I wish a sociologist would take the following as a hypothesis and see if it can be proven. I suggest that popular girls are, very often, not the oldest child in their family.
This goes against the common wisdom about leaders, that leaders are usually oldest children, but when we are talking about middle-school popularity, we are less talking about leadership than we are talking about group behavior, about fitting into a group, and second and third children may be a lot better at that than first children.
So if this is true, popular girls may seem, to parents of firstborns, like boy-crazy clotheshorses, because younger siblings have more information about popular culture than do first children. When Abby started middle school, she had been observing middle-school life for two years already, she had been listening to her sister's music, looking through her sister's preteen magazines, watching what her sister wore. She heard her sister and friends giggle about boys. So she simply knew more about how to be a cool middle-schooler than a first child can know. To a first-time parent she may have seemed too sophisticated.
I got this wrong in A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity. Because I was interested in how involved mothers get in their children's lives, I made all the girls firstborns. But I think that the incident with the matching skirts would have required at least one of the girls to have had an older sister.
6 Popular girls are having more fun than you and me.
This is probably true.
But that doesn't mean that if your child were invited to all the popular kids' parties, she would be having as much fun. Some people are simply livelier than others, some people adore the noise and confusion of a group. They are the ones who do seem to be having the most fun.
Fun-filled vivacious gatherings aren't for everyone. Other children are happiest with one close friend. They are satisfied with quiet and intimacy. They might or might not want the label "popular," but they don't want the social life of a popular kid which almost always involves a group.
But just because they are having "fun" doesn't mean that the popular kids are happy all the time. They are middle-schoolers, and that is a difficult age for anyone. Popular girls have a great many relationships, and managing them can be exhausting. Used to success, many of these kids are very afraid of failure. The principal of a large public middle school told me that if a popular girl comes into his office and starts to cry, she can't stop.
Reading Group Questions
1. Jane Austen, speaking of perfect novels and heroines, said, "pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked." How might she view
A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity? Does it avoid "pictures of perfection"?
2. What do the four friends——Lydia, Mimi, Blair, and Annelise——have in common? Is it a good basis for a friendship?
3. Lydia had always thought of popular girls as "manipulative little blonde bitch-goddesses" only to discover that her daughter was one. What issues confront the mothers of popular girls? To what extent do you sympathize?
4. Lydia stops practicing law to stay at home. "I was afraid I would disappear if I quit work," she tells us. Does she disappear?
5. What challenges face professional women who decide to become stay-at-home moms? Would more women stay at home if they could afford to?
6. Lydia travels to Houston to visit Jamie. Does the novel's depiction of marriage seem too pessimistic? Too optimistic?
7. The novel is set in a "theme-park version of a small town." Does this setting reflect a trend in American culture that transcends this affluent section of Washington, D.C.? What is appealing about life in a small town?
8. How valid are the meritocrat/aristocrat class distinctions that Lydia makes?
9. We see the events of the novel through Lydia's eyes. How would Mary Paige tell this story? How would Chris Goddard?