We have to trust that our own experiences will resonate with others. I guess the lesson here is that we all experience life differently. And the best thing about it is that I’ve had many readers who went to Kent who tell me that I seem to have captured something real about boarding school existence. I didn’t want people to think I had no idea what I was talking about.īut I decided to trust my own reality. As I wrote the novel I began to realize what I was writing about was incredibly different from what I was seeing in the real communications from the school. I regularly get newspapers from Kent and of course alumni magazines. The school where much of the novel takes place actually does exist: it’s the Kent School in Kent, Connecticut and they have been big supporters of the novel despite all the tragedy in it. Many of the people I wrote about actually exist in one way or another or are amalgamations of the few people I’ve known. I think that the most challenging part of writing the novel was realising that, as I tell my students, “Reality is a tyrant”. What was the most challenging part of creating This is why rock stars, writers, and badly behaved kids always will be popular to kids. These people are heroes, especially to teenagers. We allsecretly admire the person who doesn’t mind being an outsider or who upsets the status quo. So this is why stories about outsiders so popular. We look back on this with some humor and irony when we are adults, but at the same time the memories linger. Teenagers live a paradoxical lifestyle: they believe that most groups at high school are not worth joining but at the same time they desperately want to belong. The need to be part of the group is so strong when one is a teenager that rejection is a kind of mini-death. I recently went back to the actual school where Flat Water Tuesday takes place and I was surprised to meet people whom I thought were extremely popular back in the day who told me that they felt incredibly alone while they were students there. The standard stance towards life by a person under the age of 18 is that nobody understands them and they are so totally different from everybody around them that there is no way they could possibly fit in. Ron: I truly believe that almost all of usthink we were outsiders while we were adolescents. What do you think it is that makes outsiders so appealing as characters in fiction – and that makes the stories featuring them so popular? GLAMOUR: While Rob is an outsider because he isn’t from as wealthy a background as his teammates, Ruth often faces special challenges as the only girl on the rowing team.

Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin