An interview with Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale about their book, post-graduate life, and long distance friendships.
by Kaylen Ralph
In the process of emailing each other about their post-graduation, pre-professional woes, Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale wrote a book. It was an inadvertent and productive approach to navigating their first few years out of college. The emails span three years and much of the globe. Both Kapelke-Dale and Pan spent the majority of the time period covered in the book abroad. Gradutes in Wonderland resonates because it’s unadulterated, unfiltered look at something many college-educated women (and men) go through. It’s provocative because it was written without the authors’ knowledge, despite being written by them. Not until they were reunited in London (after three years!) did these two friends realize they had the makings of a book in their hands, er their inboxes, rather.
I had some questions for the Grads about what it was like to write this book and what they’d like to write in the future.
Graduates in Wonderland is out now and available for purchase.
Kaylen Ralph: To me, there was an ever-present sense of irony in the book. You both fret about the legacies you’re creating for yourselves as professional women, despite the fact that there’s a foregone conclusion: you write a book. Did you ever worry about that coming across the wrong way?
Jessica Pan: Our worries and fears in the book are genuine, so that wasn’t really a concern of ours. Despite our correspondence eventually turning into a book, all of our messages were written at the time everything was happening. I don’t think our book is dissimilar to someone having his or her journal published (after cutting the extraneous things). That’s what makes our memoir a little bit different from others – it’s written in real time. In their memoirs, incredibly successful women Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling share their early agonies about their own professional accomplishments when reflecting on their early years – and we all know their stories end very well (not that I think we’ve achieved that level of success, though!).
Rachel Kapelke-Dale: I think we hope that’s part of the magic of reading a memoir like this, of people in their early 20s–you can simultaneously experience the growing pains and fears of those moments, while knowing that, in the end, even when we are very naïve and young and make mistakes, everything turns out all right. I’m not sure that graduates often get that kind of concrete reassurance; so often, we’re told that everything will be fine in the end. Well, how? What Graduates in Wonderland shows is the path that Jess and I took to creating the kinds of lives we wanted–which included writing a book together.
KR: Was there ever a point during your three years of emailing that you discussed the possibility of making this book? (Perhaps in an email we don’t see)?
RKD: No, we didn’t see it coming. Everything we wrote to each other was so personal that, in the moment, it would have felt almost like a betrayal of trust if one of us had said, “Hey, let’s go publish these!” It was only after we stopped writing them (because we were both living in London) and realized how much we missed the messages that we saw the true value they had had in our lives and thought that other women might enjoy reading them.
KR: Jess is a trained journalist, Rachel is pursuing her PhD in film. Did you ever imagine the day you would write a book about neither of those subjects?
RKD: I actually wrote a piece on this called Killing the Ingenue. It’s about how when I was younger, I was a precocious child who always thought I’d publish a literary novel by the time I was 23. What really happened is that during those early twenties years, when I was struggling to hammer out a novel and find the right career path and figure out my life, it turns out I was writing an entirely different book all along–letters to Jess that eventually turned into Graduates in Wonderland.
JP: For me, I’ve always been open to writing of any kind. I was a playwright in college, I wrote fiction sometimes and more recently, I’m a non-fiction writer. I’ll always be open to writing about any subject in any form, as long as there’s a good story or hook.
KR: Because of your candor with each other in email, you present a book that shows the raw millenial experience. Do you worry you’re perpetuating some of the millennial tropes that our generation is lambasted for?
JP: No. We are who we are, as silly as that sounds. We are women growing up in a transnational world; we worry about our careers and finding love and creating the right lives for ourselves. I also don’t think Lena Dunham lies awake at night worrying about this. I think it would be really disingenuous and do a disservice to a reader if we pretended to be anything other than ourselves. We’ve had a lot of readers say that after reading our book, they felt better about what they were doing or how lost they felt or how they shared the same worries and fears.
RKD: And I think that our book is something that will make people feel less alone, in the same way that our emails made us feel less alone. I think it’s because it’s the story of two particular people living out their individual lives–not stock characters designed to ’embody’ a generation.
KR: In her review of The Opposite of Loneliness (for The Riveter), Editor Paige Pritchard wrote that the millennial generation is lacking the stacked squad of writers many prior generations can claim. Do you agree? Do you think the way our culture thinks about “writers” and what qualifies as writing needs to be reinterpreted, reimagined?
RKD: Just as with the previous question, while we (Jess and I) might be part of a generation, we don’t claim to speak for it–we only speak for ourselves. And I think as the world gets bigger in a lot of ways, and more voices emerge in new media and new forms, we might not have that same kind of canon, which in a lot of ways is probably a good thing. As to the question of what “qualifies” as writing–I certainly wouldn’t want to be the arbiter of that debate! But the epistolary form has been around for centuries, and its format lends itself to really letting other people see the raw emotions and the relationship between two people. The fact that our book is written in emails does make it the first of its kind, in some ways, but it also follows in a long tradition of correspondence between friends.
KR: This book is a confessional, in many aspects. Were you ever afraid to present such personal information in a completely unfiltered way?
JP: Absolutely–yes. I can’t state enough how hard it was to put such raw, personal information out there. It’s something that I struggle with in particular, but we weren’t going to publish a glossy, perfect version of our lives–that would completely defeat the point. I remember once reading that you have to put your writing above yourself, and to some extent, I feel like that’s how we’ve approached this book. Is it hard to write about humiliating moments or bad sex or our insecurities? Yes. But that is real life. Life is messy.
RKD: Early on Jess and I did have conversations about how I needed to really put myself out there. It took some time to get used to the fact that the episodes that I find the most heartbreaking or humiliating are the most important moments in my life, because they changed me a lot. But now, I’m comfortable with everything in the book being out there.
KR: What were your friends’ reactions like? Do they wish they had more of a say?
RKD: Some people were initially very nervous when hearing about the book, but actually reading it has put their minds at ease. Nobody at all has asked for ‘a say’–they get the concept of the book. It’s set in stone already, in those emails–too late to change it now!
JP: A lot of them didn’t know everything we had been through, so there were surprises for a lot of them–like how I ended up in Australia after living in Beijing or how Rachel ended up in Paris after a rough time in New York. I keep waking up to emails from friends who are reading the book. They’re like, “Wait, you went to Malaysia?!” or “I can’t believe you fell in love with your intern!” or the most recent, “I hate that guy Ray and what he did to you!”
KR: What’s next for both of you (beyond the epilogue)?
JP: Even though I’m in London, I’m writing for websites as well as some magazines in the US. I’d love to write another book (although probably not another memoir!). This whole experience has been really eye-opening, and I hope that’s also a big takeaway for readers–your life can completely change in two years–from what country you live in, to what job you’re doing, to who you love, so if you aren’t happy, change something. Look for something else.
RKD: I have a novel in the works, as well as about a year left on my Ph.D. And then–who knows? But isn’t that the exciting part?
Kaylen Ralph is The Riveter‘s co-founder and co-editor.
