BSC and the Painful Truth

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Remember how annoying the first chapter of every Babysitters Club book was? (No, just us?) Miss Martin spent precious ink and paper re-introducing each character and the club like we didn't already know about Kristy's bossiness and broken family, Claudia's crasian parents and art fetish, Dawn's Californian roots and absentee father, or Mary Anne's eating disorder and likely premarital sex (no one was fooled, Logan). Bret Easton Ellis (author of American Psycho) was also vexed by the redundant introductions and took time out from creating sexy urban killing machines to re-write each BSC character's introduction.

Here's a piece of Claudia's intro. We think you'll find it more than satisfactory.

My mom was crying in the front seat and if you knew my dad you’d know he never goes above the speed-limit, it’s just like one of those “never happens” scenarios, which I would probably ascribe to the fact that his daily dose of Valium that he thought he was hiding so well from the rest of the family had been dumped down the drain earlier in the week and replaced with Blue M&M’s. My mom’s Prozac prescription? Tiny crushed up pieces of Certs, inserted carefully back into gel-cap casings after I dumped out all her Happy Pills and let the Newton’s dog lick it up off the floor. Without their carefully regulated diet of feelings, my family was on the verge of a major meltdown. I caught myself smiling in the rear-view mirror and had to reapply my mask of “ambiguously ethnic inscrutability,” as Janine might call it.