It's Always High School
The writer Elizabeth Ellen earned my admiration in October of 2022 when, as the Deputy Editor of literary journal Hobart Pulp, she defied the then-reigning orthodoxy of cancellations and speech-policing and published an interview containing taboo, forbidden, but humorous and obviously and widely true statements. And then instead of backtracking and issuing an apology, as was the norm, she stood up to the cancel mobs, weathered her staff quitting, and kept on publishing. It’s a well-known story at this point and it’s also already a little bit difficult to remember how unusual Ellen was in the lit-mag context of 2022, when to publicly support her would have posed a threat to a person’s livelihood in books or media. Her latest novel, American Thighs, published in January 2025, explicitly riffs on her unique, punk rock, insider-outsider status through its humorous invocation of Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho—Ellen circulated an original cover design playing off Ellis’s cover—while also offering its own countercultural diagnosis of America.
The comparison is whimsical, but both Ellen and Ellis are Gen Xers, with names so close in the alphabet that their books sit side by side in the “contemporary American fiction” section of my bookshelves. Both have been targeted and ostracized for stating the obvious and having a sense of humor. Both are obsessed with pop culture and drugs and sex and high school. Ellis is the darker character—essentially he’s never joking, even when he is. He enjoys constructing fictional traps and writing perfectly polished sentences. Ellen, on the other hand, has a casual prose style and is strangely sweet-at-heart no matter what terrible things she’s saying. Ellis’s ur-American is a serial killer; hers is a thirty-one-year-old former child star who steals her teenage daughter’s identity in order to go back to high school.
American Thighs establishes itself as a pop culture book and a small press book in its first pages with a lengthy scroll of quotations from child actresses such as Christina Ricci, Kiernan Shipka from Mad Men and Drew Barrymore, followed by some internet-formatted online commentary by anonymous users discussing a woman who has transgressed. Kappa18 says “Impersonating your daughter and pretending to be a high school student when you’re 31 years old is pathetic.” Rowrowrowyourboat says “…if she’s so bored can’t she just have an affair?” Thus, the game is given away and the reader knows it will be, even before meeting Anissa Grant on her first day of school at Dobson High in Elkhart, Indiana “population, I don’t know: twelve?”
We later discover through a skillful slow reveal that Anissa, a successful though not A-list teenage starlet, was the girlfriend of a much bigger and somewhat older male star, Quinn James, who is supposed to be something like a combination of Kurt Cobain and Jonny Depp. Quinn killed himself when Annisa was only fifteen and pregnant with their child. So Anissa’s stereotypical controlling stage mother, Robin, convinced her to pretend to everyone, including the child, that the baby was Robin’s, and kept Anissa controlled and psychologically imprisoned for the next fifteen years as they raised the child together. Anissa escapes to Elkhart to relive the ordinary American teenage years she never had after a family blow-up reveals this secret to her now-teenage daughter, Tatum. The impersonation isn’t very difficult—Anissa is youthful-looking, and people see what they want to see.
I don’t know if GenX had the best high school movies or it just seemed like it, but a glorious nostalgia for high school is irresistible to us, a sensation I think we felt even while in high school. A certain sense of living-up-to-a John Hughes movie, or having failed to do so, is foundational to who we are. Ellis wrote the book that inspired a foundational high school movie, and even he is still working it out in work as recent as The Shards. Ellen’s humorous subversion of the Freaky Friday premise makes the situation elegantly literal: Adult woman actually goes back. And then, because Elizabeth Ellen doesn’t care about your taboos, people start having sex.
Anissa has painstakingly researched the coolest, most beautiful cheerleaders on social media before arriving in Elkhart (which, in a further skillful late reveal, turns out to be Quinn’s hometown). Because she’s mysterious and new and pretty and from California, she immediately scores the hottest cheerleader, Taylor Ragner, as a best friend and lands a corresponding spot in the school’s top-status clique. But instead of doing much with this in terms of either cheering or social domination, Anissa gets horny for Taylor and the two start sleeping together, which mostly forms the rest of the plot. This also betrays Ellen’s unerring instinct for the GenX woman’s inner soul; we never did really want to be the cheerleaders, we just wanted to fuck them in a vaguely self-involved way, as if through sex we could become them, but without the work.
Ellen, who is 55, is a mother of a daughter in her 20s, and is also a youthful-looking woman who could pass in photos for high-school age. She tends towards porn-aesthetic self-promotional materials—full frontal nudity on the cover of the story collection Her Lesser Work; a lace catsuit on Instagram and X for this book. She strikes me as someone who is inhabiting and acknowledging female archetypes and having fun, and thus who is undermining the archetypes and making some new points with them. Mostly, as the high-school students would say: It’s not that deep. Gendered femininity exists; it’s also another thing we can play around with; everyone is going to live.
American Thighs is a near-rhyme with American Pie, a niggling affinity that my mind kept returning to, wondering if this book is what would happen if American Pie and American Psycho had a baby. Ellen has taken Ellis’s society-condemning masterpiece but turned it around and played it as a high-school burlesque, where the people are Middle American, not that rich and pretty normal, and where even the former child star is a fully-inhabited character with a human soul. Anissa may be sleeping with a fifteen-year-old girl like a psychopath, and she may also be having sex with the gym teacher to dominate him with the male fantasy of the “underage” girl, but she’s a human being. She obsessively online-stalks her daughter, missing her terribly. (The real Tatum is still living with Robin back in Los Angeles). Despite the ridiculous circumstances, Ellen convincingly paints Anissa as processing her grief for Quinn, her lost motherhood, and her lost youth. And then in the second half of the book, when the plot picks up and the various threads start to come together, a sharp critique—long overdue, actually—of our culture’s approach to teen sexuality emerges.
Ellen has said that she started the book as part of a 90 Day Novel challenge with then-husband Aaron Burch (one of the people who quit Hobart Pulp during the cancellation fiasco) a decade ago. Unfortunately, it does sometimes feel this way. The small press and alternative literature world that Ellen is a part of allows people to break with convention and write in a less processed and formulaic way. This system produces more interesting work, to my mind, but sometimes at the expense of readability. American Thighs is way too long at 400 pages (Ellis also writes long!) and is presented as an after-the-fact narration from multiple points of view, which creates opportunities for humor but never lets the reader get immersed. At times, I wished it had been ruthlessly processed and written straight, with traditional scene-building and characterization. I also wondered if the time-structure was fully worked out. The cultural references are GenX at heart (though of course Anissa and Quinn could be a millennials with vintage taste), but the cellphone and social media technology seem to be at least 2010. Ellen’s freedom to do exactly what she wants perhaps isn’t always a strength—but I admire her for doing it.
Valerie Stivers, a columnist for Compact, cooks from literature for The Paris Review.
