'This is not some true-crime tell-all. This is my actual journal, with everything I wrote at the time, edited by me. The revisions are minor; I only changed things when I felt that I wasn't really thinking something that I wrote at the time, and probably would have thought something else. After all, I was only eighteen then.'
Meet Flannery Culp, a world-weary high school senior. She is primed to taken on the few remaining obstacles that stand between her and the rest of her life: the SAT, college applications, the autumn term...Mercifully, there are a couple of distractions: her friends: Kate (the Queen Bee), Natasha (less like a high school student and more like an actress playing a high school student on TV), Gabriel (the kindest boy in the world and in love with Flan), Lily, Douglas, V - (her name has been deleted to protect her prominent family), and Jennifer Rose - the Basic Eight; and Adam State, a well-groomed, polite young man and the object of Flan's affections.
If only things hadn't gotten out of control. If only Flan had stayed away from the absinthe. Then she wouldn't be a topic on daytime talk shows, or on the cover of tabloids, or incarcerated, or have time to edit her journals...
The supremely talented Daniel Handler has perfectly captured the absurdity of school life in this wickedly funny, dark-as-can-be novel.
"Dazzlingly funny...covertly lyrical, and absolutely without parental supervision,
The Basic Eight manages to be amoral and humane simultaneously." --Mark O'Donnell, author of
Let Nothing You Dismay and
Getting Over Homer "Imagine being young, messed up, and too smart for your own good. Flannery Culp is all three. I followed her adventures with admiration and envy because Daniel Handler is one of the sharpest, funniest, and best writers around." --Kit Reed, author of Weird Women, Wired Women
"Flannery Culp is Holden Caulfield in drag, forty-five years later." --Peter Lefcourt, author of The Woody and Abbreviating Ernie
"If you can resist Daniel Handler's hell-raising powers, fair warning: A wicked young century starts here--without you." --Lois Gould, author of Mommy Dressing and Medusa's Gift
"A funny, unique novel that single- handedly returns high-school revenge fantasies to their rightful owners." --Joanna Torrey, author of Hungry
"Like no other book, The Basic Eight demands to be read twice. Do." --Stephin Merritt, lead singer of the Magnetic Fields
