Teen Queen Training: Essays After the Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining, 1963 - Paperback

by Kristine Langley Mahler (Author)

Desperate to know what behaviors would produce the "right" adolescence, during the late 1990s Kristine Langley Mahler sought instruction from outdated etiquette guides and Seventeen magazine to subdue her central fear: how to convince someone to choose her. Twenty years later, married and mothering three adolescent daughters of her own, Mahler stumbles upon a 1963 edition of The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining--elegant, archaic directives that push her right back into her old frustrations and propel the creation of Teen Queen Training: a series of 26 erasure essays created from its 26 chapters, illuminating the differences between what she was told and what she really learned.

Author Biography

Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of A Calendar Is a Snakeskin and Curing Season: Artifacts. Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and Art at Cedar Point and twice named Notable in Best American Essays. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska, Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press.