All for reading an eight-page story that appears in the collection When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School. And maybe you'd have trouble with it too, if you read the paper's reductive description of a story that "contains profanity and references to bestiality." Clarke, of course, is baffled over the brouhaha, telling the paper from his home in Dallas: "It’s about a pivotal point in my high school experience when I won an election and stopped being a loser in people’s eyes. ... If anything, the essay is redemptive. That’s what literature does. It gets people to try on another person’s skin and see what it’s like."
But Lori Drew doesn't like it, not one damned bit. And to prove it, she went on the radio yesterday to make her case. Writes Will on his Web site, "It's like a SouthPark Episode." That, sir, is no way to make friends. Notes Clarke further down the page, "It's really like something in a Tom Perrotta novel." That's more like it. --Robert Wilonsky