Portland, Nov 17: Do not call Zoe Trope the poster child for the Baby Boomlet generation.
Do not remark on the fact that, at the tender age of 15, she managed to secure a $100,000 contract from a major New York publishing house for what is essentially a diary of her first two tortured years in high school, or that she pulled this off without ever revealing her true identity.
She'll bare her teeth at you, and tell you how over that angle she is, how it's been done and done and done some more. Better, really, to get through it fast, and consider instead the kinked contradictions of 17-year-old Zoe Trope, author of Please Don't Kill the Freshman, and the adopted kid sister of young literati like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. Here, after all, is someone who has laid herself bare for your reading pleasure and now lives a good chunk of her life on the Internet, where she presides over a blog that somehow manages to be both sardonic and touching (www.zoe-trope.com).
She is the girl who has written nakedly about her yearning to be known, to be validated: "I wanna be the girl they knew in high school, the 'yeah I had math with her,' girl, and I want to be their one connection to something famous and meaningful and important. "The last thing I want is to be another student who slips by with a 3.49 who goes to a state school and graduates with a little degree and goes off to a little job and no one ever really knows what happens to her."
She's fed up with the people who snipe that it has all come too easily for her, and says she wants nothing more than for people to recognise themselves in her pages.

And yet, she is the girl who won't be photographed straight on, who says she wants to reserve the right to be anonymous. "It would be 100 times easier for them to market me if I would show my face, give my name," she says during a recent interview with The Associated Press. "But I want to have my own life." Trope is also embroiled in a serious love-hate relationship with her high school, and even though they broke up several months ago (read: she graduated a year early, and is taking a year off before college to be a first-time author), she's still not quite over it. In the 295-page book published by HarperTempest, high school is equated with day care, a place where English teachers talk blithely of the "journey" the class will take together, and assign papers about "what we will put in our 'suitcases."'

When she graduated, Trope says, she was tempted to flip off the whole school as she walked across the stage: "I made it through, I finished high school. And now I never have to go back." Trope's excellent adventure in publishing began in the spring of her freshman year, when she began sending journal entries to Kevin Sampsell, who had taught a writing class that she took while in middle school. Sampsell is an author himself, and the publisher of a small press company called Future Tense.

He loved her work, and published it as a "chapbook," with staples instead of a book binding. She did a reading and the book started selling in Portland. Sampsell eventually discussed the book with another author, who forwarded it to his agent, and things took off from there. Colleen Schwartz, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said Please Don't Kill the Freshman, has already sold, "in the healthy five figures," and the company plans to go back for a second printing.
Bureau Report