Nelson is finally writing a sequel to Girl named Dream School, and it's being published serially at Figment.com. It's about the main character of Girl going to Wellington College in Connecticut.
The first Saturday night there was a big dinner for the freshman at the dining hall. They put white table clothes on the tables and had extra good food and after dinner the president of Wellington addressed us. He told us how brilliant we were and how special. Among us, he said, was a native Eskimo student, the first at Wellington, who was the top math student in the entire state of Alaska. There was also a freshman who had organized relief efforts in Argentina during the terrible earthquake. And one of us had written an important article defining our generation in The New York Times.I was taking this very seriously but behind me Jane and Amy were whispering and giggling. I turned around and they told me who the real famous people were in our class. Like Catherine Powers, the actor, who was taking Intro Psych. I was like, no way, she had been on the cover of People magazine that summer—but they just laughed. It turned out there were a whole bunch of famous people in our class. The son of a Senator from Pennsylvania, Robert Hickox, who was a total coke head and got thrown out of three prep schools. Another young female actor who wasn’t quite as famous as Catherine Powers. The son of one of the super rich computer guys from Seattle who was gay and another guy who invented a computer game that made thirty million dollars but he didn’t get any of it because he sold the rights.
Nelson took up the voice without skipping a beat. Reading it, you can see the influence that Girl might've had on writers who are heading up the naturalistic wave that's dominating the young lit scene now. It's kind of like the missing link between Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin.
