Book Rec of the Day 5/2/2007

MEMOIRS

David Carkeet was never a campus sexpot himself, despite the title of his award-winning memoir. Campus Sexpot was the name of a trashy dimestore novel that was based on his high school in Sonora, California. Turns out an English teacher at the school wrote the roman à clef about his own affair with a student. When word broke, the teacher fled, leaving the townspeople in an uproar while furiously turning the potboiler’s pages to find thinly veiled portraits of their neighbors all over them. Carkeet ingeniously weaves the story of his own coming of age through the thread of the novel that made his sophomore year so memorable.

CAMPUS SEXPOT, by David Carkeet (University of Georgia Press, 2005)