Tales of Post-Graduate Love, Turmoil, and Friendship: A Conversation with Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale
by Jen Doll
Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults is an epistolary memoir by Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale that’s out today. You may already know Jessica from The Hairpin; she writes the Baking from a Bygone Era column and often enlists Rachel when she embarks “on disgusting culinary adventures from the past,” she says. The two friends and co-authors met at Brown. Before they graduated and Rachel headed to New York and Jessica to Beijing, they promised to stay in touch with honest, tell-it-like-it-is, regular emails to each other. Those emails, which they returned to years later after reuniting in London, became the basis for their book.
It’s a great, heartfelt memoir, incorporating the raw feelings and confusing experiences of newly post-graduate life and the aching desire we all have to finally, given the freedom of adulthood, really do something, something that we may not be able to quiet identify yet. The book is full of witty descriptions and cultural observations, capturing not just a picture of twentysomething life but also a sense of the time: Jobs weren’t a guarantee after graduation, blogging was a bit different then, but best friends who lived as far apart as Beijing and New York could, luckily, communicate fully about their experiences via email.
I talked with Rachel and Jessica recently about what it’s like to put together a memoir with a best friend.
Tell me how the book began.
Rachel: It started with our pact to stay in touch, before we graduated from Brown. We really didn’t realize it would end up this way at the time, though. We were on the back steps at our house in Providence, and it was really late. We were talking about how much we’d been through in the past four years. Both of our moms had so much love for their college friends, and now they’re just on their Christmas card lists. Jess knew she was going to Beijing; I knew I was going to New York. We knew it had to be brutally honest emails we were writing to each other. It’s so easy to fall into just being like, hey, whatever…
Jessica: We’d been emailing each other for about 5 years and then we both ended up in London and were meeting up for coffee every day again. (The timeline is compressed in the book; we don’t include just being unemployed eating crackers and doing nothing.) We were in London and trying to remember something, so started searching our inboxes, and all these strange weird emails were popping up.
Rachel: We felt how shocking that raw emotion was. It’s so weird with men, jobs, things you no longer care about. Some of the emails were like, “Jess, I think I’m in love with him,” and she was like, “No, you’re not.”
Jessica: At the beginning, we thought this was a fun friend project, and then we were like, maybe other women would want to read this. There are so many growing pains included, things women all go through. We decided to email some literary agents.
What was the process like to turn it from emails into a book?
Rachel: We had so much material! At the beginning we were like, this could be 120,000 words, we have so much material. The main process was to find out the most important moments, to think about ourselves now and figure out what had been the turning points, what’s changed and shaped us, and to show those moments where that happened. We went and copied and pasted our emails into several enormous documents, and we were looking over them, taking out chunks.
Jessica: We cut out so many inside jokes that don’t even make sense to us anymore. We kept in the important moments. The details of me in China. We often say that, honestly, our emails were like journals.
Rachel: If we had been more self-aware, I think we wouldn’t have written so much, it would have been all, “New York is great!”
Jessica: I kept in cringeworthy details; that’s what the book is about, being in your twenties. We’re talking about how people read it and are like, “you sound so young in the beginning” and we were young, we see that. We also had to put things in for context, like, I’m half-Chinese, I’m from Texas. We would try not to write new text, though. We would combine things. There are things that are misspelled, stuff we’d written when we’re inebriated, that the copy editor let us keep in for humor’s sake.
Is there anything you’re particularly embarrassed or worried about people reading?
Jessica: I could never write anything as embarrassing as this. There are some really raw emails. We didn’t censor at all. If we made things perfect it wouldn’t be true or relatable. We had to keep in the raw stuff. But with my parents reading it, I thought, I want to die. I mailed them two copies on which I used two bottles of Wite-Out, and I wrote them a note. I was like, “Lena Dunham does more risque stuff than I do, and her parents love her!” I whited-out stuff with guys that was a little explicit. My mom’s reading it now, and she’s like, “Who’s Bruno?” I am not going to talk to them until after they’re done.
Rachel: My parents are both writers, and really, I could put anything out there, and I think they’d just be excited that I have a book coming out into the world. I make them read so many drafts of so many things.
Do you have an ideal person in mind as a reader?
Rachel: Our target audience is people of all ages. I think everybody has these moments that seem so horrible to live through in the present, and, now, I read them and I can’t believe I’m the same person I was then. We’ve have some men saying they love it. I think it’s for women who are thinking about friendship and the ways we develop. So many depictions of female friendship are so one-dimensional — about sex, or how perfect my friend is. We thought it would take a longer form to explore how nuanced friendships really are, and I think that’s a message women of all ages can respond to. It’s not one sentence, it’s something you keep working on.
Jessica: Some people say “I really related, I haven’t been to college, I haven’t traveled the world, but I get that.” There are emails where we’re feeling really lonely, feeling lost in the world, but through the emails, we didn’t feel alone. I knew I had this best friend living thousands of miles away who could understand, and that makes a difference.
Rachel: That’s been overlooked in a lot of books about female friendship. It’s always women searching for love, finding love; you have a more nuanced view of romance. Friendship is equally as rich and is written about a lot less.
How do you think the world we live in now has changed the notion, and the reality, of female friendship?
Rachel: Without getting too much into waves of feminism, we’re at a moment where, with college and travel, we’re seeing different formations of friends who gather and leave, and these are morphing in ways they haven’t so far. Our mothers, they had college friends, but my mom got married at 22, right out of college. You went from the sorority house to your husband’s house, as my mom would say. There are so many different ways of living now. And in terms of just how things have changed in culture, Jess has a great moment where she’s an unemployed journalist, and she’s like, “I’m so tired of people telling me to start a blog.”
Jessica: People didn’t respect a blog, and now they do, and now we do have a blog.
What’s been your favorite thing about writing a book together?
Rachel: My favorite thing was making my day job hanging out in a cafe with Jess.
Jessica: I think we’re even better friends now that we’ve worked together. We have a contract together!
Is there a worst thing?
Jessica: I think the moments when we were like, maybe we shouldn’t include that.
Rachel: Jess had come from an editing background, and she could see that certain topics were a side-journey down a different path, but it was hard for me to, you know, kill my darlings.
Quick: Name what you think each other’s great talent writing talent is.
Jessica: What she did in her original emails. She’s a very poetic writer; she’d take you to Paris!
Rachel: Jess, she’s so funny, first of all, and really no matter where I was, she’d always know what to convey. She’s an excellent self-editor and editor of other people, too.
What do you most hope people take away from the book?
Jessica: We’re really excited a lot of women might read it and not feel alone or that mistakes and fiascos only happen to them. I think it would be really cool if people start making pacts like ours at graduation.
Rachel: The importance of sustaining friendship, to remember you and who you were. The big dream is to go onto a college campus and see someone reading this book, or be on the L train at 9 a.m. and see a twentysomething reading this book. Going back and rereading yourself as a 22-year-old, it makes you laugh and cringe at the same time. It’s strange to see that in yourself, but the whole point is to talk about what’s real and reflect on your past lives. Everyone should try that. It’s a really good exercise.
Want to recommend some favorite books to our readers?
Rachel: Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford and the Emily of New Moon series, by L.M. Montgomery.
Jessica: A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Stolz. It’s amazing, Rachel told me to read it in an email. Also, Joan Didion was a big college bonding experience for us.
What is the greatest friendship lesson you’ve learned from each other? What do you need to know to be a good friend?
Jessica: You need to keep in touch, and be honest with each other. I’m a crazy impulsive person and it was good to be in touch with someone who might say, “Maybe you shouldn’t do that.” We need that in our lives.
Rachel: The life lesson of my 20s was learning when to let things go, what’s a big deal, what’s not. Your friends are like family, but to a certain extent you have to leave the past in the past, and focus on now, knowing who they were and who you are… Jess and I never broke up.
Graduates in Wonderland is out today.
Jen Doll is a regular contributor to The Hairpin and author of Save the Date.
