An Underachiever's Diary Book

Born in 1968 to impeccably progressive professionals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the identical twins William and Clive are chalk and cheese, nay, Cain and Abel. Despite an educational assessment at the age of three which ranks them both in the upper percentiles, Clive garners all the laurels, while William grows sickly, spotty and socially retarded. Clive gets the gorgeous girl next door and goes to Harvard. William dates drunks and con-artists while taking five years to graduate from a repulsive New York university whose name begins with "R". Clive enters Stanford Law, William gains admission to an exceptionally ridiculous communal cult. The diary is, of course, William's, triumphing over infantile amnesia to bring us his miserable memories straight from the womb. These are illuminated with Freudian reflections suitable to a Cambridge childhood in which psychotherapy is mandatory, but nothing helps him. William wants to be a loser and he's smart enough to know it. Indeed, he identifies his failure as his deliberate attempt to become the victim his parents' liberal politics idealised. A Genealogy of Morals for Generation X, An Underachiever's Diary is less about sibling conflict than that between '60s parents and their disillusioned offspring, still at odds as the grandchildren grow up to denounce us all.--Mandy MerckRead More