What Really Happened to the Class of '93: Start-ups, Dropouts, and Other Navigations Through an Untidy Decade

The homecoming queen, the teen mom, the scientist, the wallflower, the flirt, the discipline case, and the homophobe—how did a decade marked by impeachment, a dot-com bubble, 9/11, and war shake their lives?
 
The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology’s class of '93 graduated into an era of unprecedented optimism. The Soviet Union had collapsed, Clinton was pre-Monica, and rumors were spreading about a thing called the Internet. For young people stepping out into the world for the first time, America hummed with promise. Just ten years later, that promise has collapsed into uncertainty, and the class of '93—nearly in their thirties now—finds itself struggling to make sense of all that's happened.

In the year leading up to his ten-year reunion, journalist Chris Colin tracked down his former classmates and asked them to pull back the curtains on their lives. Sometimes what he discovered was a swath of American history, other times simply frank and arresting accounts of how people fall in love, or steady their nerves on hills in Kosovo, or fall on their knees before God, or find out biology had handed them the wrong gender, and otherwise lurch into adulthood. And when the Thomas Jefferson class of '93 finally reconvenes for the reunion itself —after the very core of their country seems to have been shaken—Colin finds that maybe he and his classmates never left high school behind in the first place.

For all that's been said about the dramatic years straddling the turn of the twenty-first century, little has been observed about those who actually came of age in that time. For the Class of '93, unbridled optimism gave way to bewilderment, peace to war, and happiness sometimes to tragedy. From these stories emerges a picture of an era and the intensely candid story of a few lives taking shape in the midst of it.

CHRIS COLIN is a former editor and writer for Salon. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s, and various anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.