I recently attended the Style Week OC Author Talk focused on Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, the debut book, made up of an array of essays, from Podcrushed podcast hosts Penn Badgley, Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari. The book offers stories about adolescence, heartbreak, anxiety and self-discovery. Attending the talk gave me insights on how the book was created, how authors struggled with revisiting honest moments in their lives and processing losses. They covered the process of looking inwards to write these essays, alongside, a main concern was figuring out “how much to share that serves the story and the reader,” that is, how to write about other people in a courteous manner. The essay collection is intended to serve as an homage to the people who helped shape the writers’ identities.
The three co-authors, who are partners in life and business, discussed their varied writing experiences. Known for his parts in Gossip Girl and You, Penn Badgley acknowledged that he was “so behind on deadlines,” while penning his contributions during the filming of the third season of You as his wife was also pregnant with twins in the first trimester. He views the finished book as evidence that he learned from the past. Nava Kavelin, who co-founded Ninth Mode (a production company) with Badgley, wrote the book in two major sections. Sophie Ansari, an illustrator and video creator, noted that she signed up to write during her maternity leave and even created a studio for a “writer’s retreat,” focusing heavily on revisions from her first drafts.
The Book’s Content
All of us can recall the cringeworthy intensity of our youth – the first crushes, breakups and the frantic quest for identity. That specific universal feeling that leaves you both lost and hopeful. Perhaps you never imagined that you would live past the age of 15, but hey, 20 finally arrived. That emotion is explicitly tapped into in Crushmore. Transcending the genre of teen fiction, it provides a selection of candid and personal stories that demonstrate how the messy process of coming of age is a lifelong journey.Â
My biggest takeaway from the event was the specific insights into the core themes of the book. Penn discussed his essay “Grief,” which addresses the heartbreaking loss of his first serious girlfriend, Keira. You would expect the story to focus mainly on a youthful romance that ended, but instead, it takes a look at the trauma and toxic environment that shape the lives of child actors. Badgley describes their home, the Ashmoor Apartments, as an “unstructured micro-community of professional minors” where every resident was a homeschooled actor. They did not grow up in the traditional schoolyard but the Vons supermarket parking lot, a place of countless teenage “firsts.” He refers to it as an “Eden of firsts, but of lasts,” a metaphor for their world’s life-or-death predicaments. Keira was sexually abused as a child and her life was an indictment of multiple systems that let her down. Her mother not only failed to foster her daughter’s future, but also deliberately destroyed it by hiding her college acceptance letters from UC Berkeley and UCLA. She died of alcoholism at the age of thirty-three, just like her mother did, when her life became caught in a vicious circle of trauma. He reflected on how celebrity culture distorts a person’s perception of fame, noting that “Fame is a 700-pound mirror you carry with you always.” Â
Nava Kavelin discussed her essay, “After the World Stopped Spinning,” which chronicles her mother’s sudden passing. Often in our day-to-day life, we find it difficult to reframe thoughts and accept plans that did not turn out the way we intended. She challenges the notion that coming of age only happens during our teenage years. Kavelin describes the loss, including the crippling panic attack she had in the morgue’s lobby and a reassuring dream she had about her mother the night before she passed away. Her story highlights the societal discomfort that surrounds loss. She felt the need to expedite her grief, with a coworker advising her to “reframe” her sadness “so that it’s a joyful thing.” This lesson serves as an important reminder of what grieving individuals truly need. “I needed friends who would give me space to cry,” Kavelin writes. In the essay’s conclusion, her mother Farahnaz is shown as an example of bravery. She tells the inspiring story of Farahnaz valiantly fighting off a robber. Kavelin comments, “We’re living in frightening times…I think the current moment…calls for a lot of courage.”
Sophie Ansari provided background information on her chapters, including “Cool Girl,” an essay prompted by a rumor started by a girl and focused on how she could be a better friend. She also discussed her key chapter, “Decision Day,” which explores the conflict and eventual decision to become a mother, a commitment she approached with both longing and fear. The societal narrative that people, particularly women, will “know” when the time is perfect to start a family is directly challenged through her experience. In high school, she looked after Frederika, a six-year-old girl whose mother had recently passed away. According to Ansari, “Being a surrogate mother for her…remains one of the most fulfilling roles I have ever taken on, and it confirmed my need to nurture and to hold.” Despite this assurance, years later, she was still attached to her past life, worried about her declining fertility, and so unsure that she looked into the /RegretfulParents Reddit forum. Then, as she watched an episode of This Is Us, she realized she wanted to begin living the memories she would one day treasure after seeing the matriarch on her deathbed. Siria, her sister, provided a perspective that allowed her to make that jump: as a woman, you accomplish so much more than you ever would have thought possible and you do it because it is necessary. Your capacity grows out of necessity.
Dear Reader,
The talk demonstrated how the book achieves its goal of exploring what it means to mature at all phases of life. The book reminds readers that they can find healing and inspiration from even the most awkward adolescent moments. After finishing the book’s chapters on first crushes, jealousy and betrayal, I have come to the conclusion that our “coming of age” is not a destination we reach in our teenage years, but an ongoing and messy journey of becoming. Crushmore contends that the true work of maturing occurs long after we have matured, whether it is Badgley’s eventual reunion with the essence of a friend lost to the machinery of fame, Kavelin’s bravery in facing her own grief in the fearless example of her mother, or Ansari’s leap into the memories she hopes to one day cherish. The book encourages readers to reflect on our own lives with the same candor.
I would like to pose the question: When you look back on your own life’s montage, what do you hope will stand out?