Reviewed by Joanna Pearson
6.26.07

There’s something about adolescence— all that magnified awkwardness and longing—that makes it perennially tempting subject matter for writers. The need to reformulate one’s adolescence into hilarious/meditative anecdotes has led to our greatest stock caricatures, shelves of bad (and occasionally good) YA fiction, and the entire filmography of John Hughes. Personal essays on adolescence tend to fall into extreme categories. Done poorly, you get a sappy knock-off Dawson’s Creek episode; done well, you get funny, trenchant writing like that compiled in the essay collection When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School, edited by John McNally.

McNally has gathered twenty-five essays by twenty-five different writers, instructing them to: “Write a personal essay about being a loser in high school.” He gets back the inevitable stories of crushes, bad hair, humiliation, retaliation, underage drinking, and general, miserable anxiety. There are also, however, stories like the one by Tod Goldberg about his first foray in cunnilingus, interrupted by Zsa Zsa Gabor knocking at his door (true). And there’s one by K.L. Cook about working and getting drunk in the same country-western bar as his mother one summer in Amarillo.

The real gems of this collection, in fact, turn out to be the essays that strain most unexpectedly against McNally’s seemingly straightforward directive. Zelda Lockhart’s essay, “Without a Word,” is far more than a mere tale of high school embarrassment. Lockhart explores her complex relationship with her abusive mother, a history of sexual abuse, the loss of her brother in the early AIDS epidemic, and her slowly-evolving identity as a lesbian woman and mother. Her essay is unflinchingly honest, transcending any cute tale of being picked on in the locker room, and at first glance, it hardly belongs in the collection—but that’s part of what makes it so wonderful. Another standout is Erika Krouse’s essay on working in a hospital as a high school student when her family was living in Japan. As Krouse recalls her teenaged self, she is wry, self-effacing, and observant, an adolescent dealing with dual outsider status as both a foreigner and a teenager. Even among the essays that deal with the more quotidian topics of adolescent life—bullies, embarrassment, losing one’s virginity—there are some lovely, lyrical essays, including two by Quinn Dalton and Michelle Redmond.

The potential problems of When I Was a Loser are twofold: the first is that there seems to be a pervasive tendency among many of the essayists to overstate their claims at purported loserdom for intended hilarious effect. Instead of hilarity, however, what comes across is rather a sort of overblown smugness that is far less interesting than honesty. My own high-school-appropriate response would then be that these essayists are in danger of seeming like posers who are trying too hard to achieve that reverse-cool braggadocio of the formerly nerdy. Not everyone can make self-deprecation an art form like David Sedaris.

The second potential problem is one of audience. If there’s any take-home message from high school, it’s that books are indeed judged by their covers, and the cover of this book is, well, (again to use high school parlance) a little lame. At the very least, the cover art combined with the book’s title seems confusingly YA-ish. Most of the writers came of age in the 1970s or 80s, and so are at a distance sufficient to put their youthful trials into a broader context. It would be a shame for an essay collection that is on the whole thoughtful and sophisticated to miss its true audience because it could be mistaken for something intended for teen readers. Unfortunately, superficiality and snap judgment affect book sales as much as they affect prom dates.

Overall, the essays that comprise When I Was a Loser are at the least charming when not downright hilarious, clever when not revelatory, and consistently marked by genuine talent and insight. The essay collection also provides a sampler of some of the more interesting emerging voices among contemporary fiction writers—writers who may or may not have been bona fide losers in their day, but who are certainly inveterate observers of human nature and who are doing exactly what Dalton so eloquently states in the end of her essay: “You will live, and you will write about it.”