Literature / We Were Promised Spotlights

"I wanted my best friend, Susan, to hug me for a really, really, really long time while I buried my face in her stomach and Melissa Etheridge played in the background. I wanted her to drive me to California, and then I wanted to die in her hair.

'Want a cigarette?' Corvis asked."

— Taylor Garland

We Were Promised Spotlights is a fairly trope-heavy young adult novel by Lindsay Sproul. The novel presents a subversive take on the mean girl archetype, with Taylor Garland, a popular teenage girl, as its main character. Taylor is a head-turning beauty, and starts the story as homecoming queen with the rest of her senior year ready to go. The story is set in the 1990s and in some ways follows the beats of a classic coming-of-age story: prom, young love, and the implications of the future.

Lindsay Sproul, in an interview with bitchmedia.org, describes her relationship with the mean girl trope:

"Looking back on films and books from the late ‘90s and even today, a lot of the time, characters like Taylor—the popular mean girl—are really flat. I wanted to keep that character but give her dimension and show that all teenagers have insecurities and sometimes the reasons for their insecurities are the reasons that outsiders think their life is really easy. I knew I was writing an unlikeable narrator, but I think it’s important to give her dimension because, at that time, that character was always flat, but, in real life, she’s never flat. "

In Spotlights, Taylor is not in love with the popular jock, but is instead in love with her best friend, Susan. She is a closeted lesbian grappling with her place in the town: what would it mean for people to see her for who she is? How can she handle their expectations for her? Of course, there are more than a few subversions along the way.

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• Book Dumb: Taylor. “Her jeans were ripped, and she wore a faded T-shirt that said FREE PALESTINE, which made me feel stupid, because I didn’t know anything about Palestine or why it wasn’t already free.”
• Dumb Blond: Averted. Heather is blond, and by far one of the most capable characters in the novel.
• Even the Girls Want Her: When Taylor comes out two-thirds into the story, it is revealed that Heather, who up until that point Taylor assumed was assumed straight, is in fact, quite attracted to Taylor.

• Important Haircut: Subverted. Taylor thinks her haircut will be important, only to discover that no one cares.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Taylor and Corvis. Taylor considers herself to be more popular and adjusted to the social mores than Corvis, but wishes she could have the same detached indifference as Corvis.

• Politically Incorrect Villain: Taylor’s internalized homophobia causes a lot of interesting swerves and mishaps.
• Shrouded in Myth: Taylor, her face, and her father. Some of these myths turn out to be true. Magazine covers with Taylor’s face on them can be seen hanging out around town.

• The Friend Nobody Likes: Susan. None of Taylor’s friends understand why she places Susan on such a high pedestal, and accommodates so much to her.
• The Starscream: Subverted with Heather. She seems to be built up towards this, particularly after Taylor and Susan have a falling out. However, she takes Taylor’s side in the end.
• Title Drop: PJ during prom planning, when she learns that the neighboring school had decided not to lend them spotlights.