From The Wall Street Journal:
As the news broke on the college-admissions scandal, Bruce Holsinger says he felt shocked, both as a parent and a professor. As an author, however, he understood how parents could cross so many lines. Years before parents including Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman made headlines, Mr. Holsinger began writing his own drama of a school-admissions scandal.
In “The Gifted School,” out July 2, Mr. Holsinger, a 51-year-old professor at the University of Virginia, explores just how far parents will go to achieve the status of a prestigious education for their children. “Over-parented kids, over-invested parents, a cutthroat selection process, and the rest kind of writes itself,” Mr. Holsinger says in an interview.
With two sons now in high school and college, he has experienced how parenting can become a competitive sport. His new book shows how this not-so-friendly competition can shatter friendships and self-perceptions as parents fight to land their child a spot in a community’s new gifted school.
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What inspired you to write the book, and when did you start working on it?
I started sketching out “The Gifted School” something like 15 years ago. So in some ways this novel has been in my skull for a while. When I really started writing it in earnest, I remembered a sentence from a book my mother, a Montessori teacher, published years ago. It was about child development, and I remembered that she had discussed gifted education.
I went back, and that’s actually where I found the epigraph for the novel: “There is something so tantalizing about having a gifted child that some parents will go to almost any lengths to prove they have one.” That in a nutshell is really the theme of “The Gifted School.”
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Did writing the book change the way you thought about parenting?
It gave me more of a sense of empathy for some of the choices that I’ve made, that other people have made. I hope what readers can take from “The Gifted School” is that similar sense of empathy, that even if you’re reading about outrageous behaviors on the parts of other parents, that maybe they hold up a mirror to your own choices and your own decisions and how you act in the world.
Since you spent so much time in this fictional world, how did you feel when you heard about parents acting the same way in the admissions scandal?
One of my initial worries was, oh no; I wanted people to think that the stuff the parents were doing in “The Gifted School” was so crazy and outrageous it couldn’t possibly be plausible. I wanted the novel to have a real satirical edge, so a little bit of me worries that the admissions scandal blunts that a bit.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)