I’d been taking notes towards the idea of writing a book titled Gina School since I attended an anniversary party in 2019.
Seated on one side next to the successful adult daughter of the couple whom we were gathered to celebrate, and flanked on the other side by her boyfriend, I found myself giving the boyfriend essential advice on how to behave when at an elegantly choreographed grown-up dinner party. “Do not ask the server for a gin and tonic when he must go to an entirely different part of the hotel to make you a cocktail. You’re not a ‘wine guy’? Fine. Then have water.”
The daughter, surprised to see that he followed my wise directions with alacrity, leaned over and asked, “Can he please go to Gina School”? (The book is dedicated to them; they’ve been cheerfully and contentedly married for 3 years now.)
But I couldn’t quite imagine how this book — lessons, truths, instruction, reassurances, reassessments, aphorisms — could take shape.
Yet I kept writing.
In terms of my writing habits, I’m a cheap date: I can write for two hours without lifting my hand from the page or fill a page in 15 minutes if a quarter-hour is all I can scrounge from the day.
Sitting alone in silence with a legal pad is lovely; writing on a laptop as Amtrak lurches out of New Haven is also dandy. Having written ten books and edited 17, I’ve learned not to wait for inspiration. I’m driven essentially by three factors: a deadline, a paycheck and the kick of putting words into sequences that give me pleasure, or leash my emotions, or spark curious conversations in my head with strangers.
I’ve rarely found writing lonely or isolating, lucky woman that I am, and I have even had the pleasure of co-authoring a couple of books in the past.
But never did I expect, at age 68, to discover the astonishing bounce and creative roar of collaborating on a book with a person more than 40 years my junior — a young man who, once my student, had developed since he left undergraduate life, his own signature not only in writing but also as an artist, cartoonist and illustrator.
For the last 4 years or so, John Guillemette and I talked about creative writing, comedy and culture. There were great gaps of time in between some of the conversations, which is unsurprising. Former students create their own orbits, and many are elliptical. One reason I have kept my day job as a professor at the University of Connecticut, where I began teaching in 1987 (“Walk Like an Egyptian” anybody?) is because it keeps me connected to The Young.
Some of The Young in my life are now old enough to retire, but they nevertheless provide enlivening perspectives on the world. I listen for their distinct and distant voices and take notes, as they once took notes in my classes.
As a member of the younger Young, however, it surprised me that John so profoundly found the same things funny as I did, as to render the connection uncanny. In turn, I found his meticulously inked drawings, covering full pages of small notebooks, both as beautiful as a medieval Book of Hours kept in a Vatican vault and as subversively original as the best of Edward Gorey, R. Crumb and Mimi Pond.
Looking at John’s images, I saw what Gina School needed to be: it needed to have a new dimension added to it, needing to be both anchored and set free by the imaginative world provided by his artwork.
It was like seeing a small flat piece of paper, through origami, turn into a bird, or seeing a pleat in a piece of fabric unfold out into unsuspected fullness. It was like opening a fan or releasing a jack-in-the-box.
John was getting an MFA, working full-time, doing his own projects, but he was wise and ambitious enough to say “yes” when I asked him to collaborate on Gina School. He had no time, but neither did I, what with editing a book series for Woodhall Press, writing regularly for Psychology Today, and teaching full-time at UConn, in addition to lecturing nationally and internationally.
Nobody you would want to work with has any time for you, but you can do it anyway. And so, we did.
I sent John words, and he sent me art, thereby making Gina School the quintessential anti-AI book.
This creation is no monster contrived from dead, used and reworked scraps unearthed from who-knows-where, but a living, joyful, honest witness to what combined forces of imagination can make together given encouragement, time and an inexhaustible willingness to try-it-again-in-a-different-way.
It’s the unflinching embrace of shared human experience that makes books worth the trouble of making books.
About the Author:
Gina Barreca’s classic on women’s humor, They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted, was followed by Perfect Husbands (And Other Fairy Tales), Sweet Revenge, Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League and It’s Not That I’m Bitter, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World. Author of eleven books, she’s also the editor of seventeen others.
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Connecticut, Gina has appeared on American Masters, This American Life, the TODAY show, CNN, the BBC and Oprah. Barreca’s been published by the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, Cosmopolitan, Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Harvard Business Review. Her blog for Psychology Today has more than 8 million views. You can find her in the Library of Congress or the make-up aisle at Walgreens.
About the Artist:
John Guillemette is a writer and artist who enjoys hikes, houseplants and disparaging mankind. He reads monks and drunks; if a monk wrote it, or a drunk wrote it, then he’s probably read it. His satire has appeared in Little Old Lady Comedy, and his stories have been published in The Wild Word, Book of Matches and Long River Review, where he received the Edwin Way Teale Award for nature writing. He lives in New Haven, CT.
