Get Caitlin’s RSS FeedThis fall I read two stories in the Los Angeles Times that were so horrific and so similar in their details that I had to go back and check that they weren’t reporting the same event. They weren’t. In each case, an exemplary teenage boy – one a star football player and aspiring Eagle Scout, the other the student representative to his local school board and a reporter for his high school newspaper – had attended a certain kind of party and then died as a result of drinking. One boy had passed out and aspirated his vomit; the other had succumbed to alcohol poisoning. The parties – one in northern California, the other in South Pasadena – had been held in private houses where there was no adult supervision and at which a $5 admission price had been charged. Even the mechanism for determining which guests had paid the cover charge was the same: one boy died with a small black X written in felt pen on his wrist, the other wearing a proof-of-purchase bracelet. They were clearly a pair of terrific and well-loved kids, adolescents who had made a single, simple mistake and then paid a terrible price for it. The heartache that has attended their needless deaths – at the pitiably young ages of 16 and 17 – has been without end. (more)
Caitlin Flanagan - Caitlin Flanagan is an award-winning journalist and author of this summer’s Time magazine cover story “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?” She has been a contributing editor for the Atlantic and a staff writer for The New Yorker; her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and O: the Oprah Magazine. Her essays have been anthologized in the Best American Essays and Best American Magazine Writing series, and she is the winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. Her books include To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, and the forthcoming Girl Land (Little, Brown), which is an exploration of the emotional lives of pubescent girls. Before becoming a writer, she was a schoolteacher for ten years. She is married and the mother of eleven-year old twin boys.
