There is a scene in Gina Tron’s memoir, Suspect (Whiskey Tit, 2024), that has stayed with me since I read it. On the author’s twelfth birthday, she invites over friends, and the girls give her gifts. One gift is a set of used earrings. The other is a pile of fake dog shit. The friends, after Tron’s mother leaves the room, say their parents gave them money to purchase real gifts, but they decided instead to spend it on Orange Julius drinks and fries at the mall. Tron then hands them party favors she lovingly wrapped for them, trying to convince herself she’s in on the joke rather than the butt of it.
This book is about a kind of bullying most of us are familiar with from films such as Mean Girls and, if you’re older, like Tron and like me, The Heathers. It’s about the kind of girls who give other girls eating disorders and body complexes. It’s about the kind of girls who fly under the radar of the adults around them by playing the game right.
Parts of Tron’s story may be familiar to readers: The book is based on a viral essay of hers that was published in VICE in 2013, called “I Was a Suspected School Shooter.” In the essay, and in her memoir, Tron describes trying desperately to fit into the Vermont town she and her family moved to when she was in grade school. Her clothes are wrong, the way she speaks is wrong, her parents’ liberalism is wrong.
Plus, the ’90s were a different time. Tron mentions how she and her friends used words like “fag” to describe those they didn’t like. (We all did, even those among us who would later come out as queer). It was a time when difference was treated as suspect. Who among us didn’t have a gym teacher who would let the mean behavior of the pretty girls slide while cracking down on the stoners, the alt kids, and the “freaks”? Who didn’t have a school principal who would rather punish the kid of the town’s recently relocated outsider family than the family who owned half the city? Tron’s story isn’t an unusual one, unfortunately, even if the details are a bit more extreme than many.
In my own memories of the ’90s, even though I was an alternative kid, even though I was a closeted queer kid, I don’t recall being bullied the way that Tron was throughout her school life more than on one or two isolated occasions. On these rare occasions, the rotary phone at my parents’ house rang incessantly, and whatever mean girls were on the other end hung up the moment someone answered. Annoying as it was, it was hardly the bullying Tron endured. Nevertheless, I felt this story was incredibly relatable. It’s a story of trying to fit in and failing, of figuring out that you’re not the one with the problems, but the culture of your high school or the parents and teachers around you just might be.
After the birthday party, Tron’s friends grow increasingly vicious, as Tron, for a long time, cowers. Then, when she is sent away to an arts summer camp, she meets girls like herself—girls who listen to Marilyn Manson and wear fishnet stockings and combat boots, girls who aren’t afraid to dye their hair like the main character of My So-Called Life. Buoyed by this summer of freedom and acceptance, Tron comes back to high school and befriends another alternative girl, to the chagrin of her self-proclaimed best friend, Sarah. Sarah stages a dramatic friend breakup with Tron, and the bullying intensifies. Sarah makes up a bizarre lie about Tron losing her mind after a bad acid trip—based on little more than Tron’s alternative style—that everyone believes. But this time, having experienced acceptance, Tron recognizes she is being bullied.
To enact revenge, Tron and her new friend leave a death threat on Sarah’s car, signed, “Love, The Trenchcoat Mafia.” It’s 1999, and the Columbine High School shootings have just taken place. Sarah accuses Tron of being a school shooter and spreads a rumor that Tron is planning to kill everyone who has dated her crush.
Tron’s school is shut down for days, and her death threat receives copious coverage in their local news. She and the friend who helped her leave the note are banned from school events, and Tron remains “that school shooter girl” until she leaves for college. Those of us who didn’t fit in growing up may see ourselves in Tron. Even her bad decisions, like lashing out at her bullies, are ones that feel relatable, if things were just a little different.
In a twist worthy of a high-school movie, Tron is now happily married to the crush whom Sarah and her bullies said she was ready to kill over.
Tron writes that she doesn’t wish to eviscerate anyone’s teen self, herself or even Sarah:
“I am not aiming to avenge or shame anyone, particularly any actions of adolescents, myself included. Rather, the details of some of the included events are meant to paint a picture that I hope can give back in some meaningful way. I hope that those who see themselves within these pages feel less alone.”
This empathy and wide-angled view are on display throughout the memoir, giving everyone an even chance at redemption.
But this book isn’t just a memoir. There are interludes where Tron the adult, and experienced journalist, provides context for the era— – discussions of the school shootings that plague America today and their roots; of the music video for Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” and the effect it had on ’90s culture by giving sympathy to a boy that the video suggested could have been a classroom shooter himself (the real Jeremy died by suicide in front of a classroom); of the phenomenon of hero worship of school shooters from young men and women who assume them to be victims of bullying like themselves.
Tron captures this time without sentimentality, and with a very clear lens, in part because of the many years she’s spent working as a journalist, and in part because she kept meticulous journals throughout her adolescence. Even when Tron verges into something like admiration for school shooters—writing in her journal about how she could be like them and sending letters to pen pal strangers about the cults that grew up around them—it is pretty clear that it’s a corner she’s been forced into. Admitting such a thing feels dangerous, today. It was dangerous then too, but the ’90s depicted in this book are so vivid that it’s like being in them again. Maybe the world is better now. Or maybe, as many of the journalistic interludes in this book hint at, it’s just as bad in a different way.
