I couldn’t find hide nor hair about personality books on the Internet, so I was almost sure I had dreamed them. It wouldn’t have been the first time I was the only one to be so sure that something was a thing, only to find that I was overruled by reality. But I distinctly remembered personality books, these homemade booklets we used to put together in middle school and pass around for our friends (and frenemies) to sign.
“Do you remember personality books?” I texted my friend The Other Diane. “Because I think I dreamed them. Remember, they were made out of stapled notebook paper and each page had a question to answer and then there would be a kid’s name on the top of the page and we’d have to write what we thought of them.”
“I do,” she wrote back. “We got comments like funny or smart. But the popular girls were tuff. Sometimes they were called slam books, I think. What a bad idea.”
So I googled slam books and sweet Mary mother of Jesus they actually were a thing. And it was a bad idea alright. Slam books, personality books, whatever you want to call them were everything that is wrong with tweens, public schools and paper waste all bound up with i’s dotted with hearts and obnoxiously round loopy handwriting.
The fact that they weren’t in Mean Girls makes me wonder what’s going on in Hollywood these days. I mean, I know Tina Fey is younger than me, but did she grow up after the ’90s? Even my mind, sick with having watched too many British psychological thrillers, would be hard pressed to make up this stuff. [Read more…] about Let’s Slam Each Other and Call It Middle School