Going back to high school is not something everyone wants to do. This may be especially true if you went to an all-girls school. And you can imagine the problems associated with finally being accepted into a desirable private school at 15 years old — only to take on the role of outsider among a sea of cliques.
That’s the basic plot of The Eliot Girls — the new semi-autobiographical novel by Toronto author Krista Bridge.
“To me, it’s that story of struggling to fit in that so many people can relate to,” Bridge says. “I think I’ve always been interested in exploring that time because adolescence in general is such a powerful time in people’s lives. You’re in your formative years and so much happens to teenagers in that amount of time. And adolescence can be hell for a lot of people. Most of us wouldn’t want to go back there.”
Despite the upper-class private school and the tony families of the students, the struggles in The Eliot Girls — a teenage girl’s desire to fit in with peers, to seek approval from her mother and find contentment with herself — are universal.
Though a fictional tale, the storyline is based on some of Bridge’s personal experiences. Bridge herself is a former private school girl who began attending Branksome Hall in Grade 3 after being turned down by St. Clement’s School. A few years later, she passed the entrance exam and stayed at the latter school for several years.
“I guess that made an impression on me, even though I was a kid,” she says. “That idea of ‘you’re not good enough for this school.’ ”
Writing a story about finding one’s identity also helped Bridge with her own soul-searching. She says that, although she didn’t set out to write a novel for cathartic reasons, surprisingly she found herself working through old ghosts when writing the book. Through the writing process, Bridge felt herself overcoming the negative emotions from the past and was left with a sense of nostalgia for the early high school years.
Sticking with personal knowledge, the Torontonian references her city throughout the book, even giving a shout-out to the North Toronto Post.
“I’ve grown up in Toronto. This is my world, and it felt interesting to me to bring the world of Toronto to fiction,” Bridge says, “and in a lot of ways a very specific part of Toronto, which is a very privileged world of the private schools and the beautiful neighbourhoods they exist in. It adds to the idea of that elitism.”
