Sloppy Firsts Revisited: The Book That Got Me Writing
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Now that I've addressed the mysterious person who introduced me to Sloppy Firsts, it is time for me to talk about the actual book itself and why it had such a searing impact on my life. It goes without saying, but as a book lover all my life, I had a lot of books that I enjoyed and a lot of YA authors I followed at the time—and yet, none of them hit me quite as hard as this series.
Here's what I remember: I devoured Sloppy Firsts (ditto with its sequel, Second Helpings). I slept with it under my pillow, I brought it with me on plane rides to soothe my fear of flying, and I reread it incessantly. Katie was the one who introduced that book into my life, but it was Jessica Darling's inner world that had me hooked. Jessica was smart, witty, driven, and observant—she was the older, wiser teenage girl I had wanted to become once I hit high school. I loved seeing the world through her perspective: her frustrations with being misunderstood by everyone around her, her dissatisfaction with the ennui of high school life, and her observations and realizations about her own personality and how she moves through the world.
"This is my new hobby. I watch my life depart minute by minute. I anticipate the end of everything and anything—a conversation, a class, track practice, darkness—only to be left with more clock-watching to take its place. I’m continually waiting for something better that never comes. Maybe it would help if I knew what I wanted."
- Sloppy Firsts, Megan McCafferty
That quote hit me hard when I was a teenager, always feeling like I was going through the motions of life while waiting for the "real" part—my real life—to actually begin. At the time, it felt validating to have a character I looked up to put into words the unhappiness I felt. It made me feel less alone. And while I no longer sit with those feelings today as an adult, I am grateful that teenage me had these words and this character to hold on to.
Not only did I strongly identify with Jessica Darling, but I also idolized the hell out of her. I wanted to be Jessica, so much so that in the 7th grade, I started journaling obsessively, in the same black-and-white speckled composition books that she wrote in. I captured every embarrassing thought, every detail (some of which I later crossed out, tore apart, and soaked in the sink before tossing away, much like how Jessica literally burns her first journal). I recorded memorable conversations verbatim as a gift for my future self to revisit, the way I loved to revisit my favorite Jessica-and-Marcus moments. I watched John Hughes movies, listened to The Smiths and Morrissey, and developed a bizarre, unironic fixation on Barry Manilow's music, yes, all of this at the age of twelve. I read up on psychology and toyed with the idea of studying it in college. I spent my middle school summers taking introductory psychology classes at my local university. I wrote pages upon pages every day, not just in my physical journal but on my LiveJournal account. By the end of 7th grade, I had written so much that I filled literally three composition books' worth of angsty journal entries. And I kept on writing.
I started drafts of novels I wanted to write and decided they had to be in journal format, just like in the series. For my eighth grade NaNoWriMo assignment, I spent the month of November writing 50,000 words of what I thought was a hilarious novel in the format of personal diary entries, from the perspective of a therapist complaining about the trials and tribulations of her life dealing with her chaotic clients—who were really my friends and classmates who I had chosen to star in my book. While that novel never amounted to anything more than a class exercise, I remember thinking around this time that it would be really cool, if once, before I died, I could write an actual novel of my own. And then I thought: maybe later, much later in life when I had more life experience—the kind that Jessica Darling had, or maybe even the kind she dreamed about—I would finally do it. I'd go so far as to say that Sloppy Firsts was the book that made me see myself as a writer to begin with. And as I'm sitting here at age 30 typing this out on my personal blog, I am amazed at how steadfastly that has remained a key part of my identity.
I have gone through many periods of questioning and uncertainty in my life. I changed my major three times in college. I got a master's in a field I am no longer pursuing. I am now in a doctoral program in a field I never studied at all in college. I have taken up hobbies and dropped them more times than I can count. And yet, throughout all this, I knew I was a writer. Whether it was my 12-year-old self scribbling away in her composition book, my angsty high school self posting into the LiveJournal void, my unemployed early-20s self freelancing personal essays for some extra cash, I have always been a writer. Whether I saw any external value in my writing or not, I knew that writing meant something to me, and that it would remain a part of my life for as long as I have the capacity for language.
In the summer of 2007, at age 13, I emailed Megan McCafferty to tell her how much I loved her book, how she inspired my interest in psychology, and how she made me feel so seen as a young girl with so much anxiety about her life and her future, and she actually replied. To this day, she remains the only author I've ever tried to contact. In the process of revisiting Sloppy Firsts, I discovered that the entire series got a revamp in 2020. Along with new covers, the books have been edited to remove offensive language that no longer slides in today's age, and it's a relief to know that as we've grown up over the past few decades, the books from our youth are able to do the same.