Idlewild: A Novel
James Frankie Thomas“A deeply relatable portrait of queer adolescence . . . With any hope, it will go down in the annals of high-school-theater-kid literary history like Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.”— Vogue, Best LGBTQ+ Books of the Year (So Far)
James Frankie Thomas’s Idlewild is a darkly funny story of 2 adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship, in a queer, trans, & early-Internet twist on the Manhattan prep school novel.
Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, & every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers.
For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the 1st day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, & obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive, & obsessed with Fay. The 2 of them bond fiercely & spend all their waking hours giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext. Then, during rehearsals for the fall play, they notice 2 sexually ambiguous boys who are potential candidates for their exclusive Invert Society. The pairs become mirrors of 1 another & drive each other to make choices that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.
Looking back on these events as adults, the estranged Fay & Nell trace that fateful school year, recalling backstage theater department intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, smutty fanfic written over AIM, a shared dial-up connection — & the spectacular cascade of mistakes, miscommunications, & betrayals that would ultimately tear the 2 of them apart.
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James Frankie Thomas is a lifelong New Yorker. He attended the City College of New York & the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked as a video store clerk, a Shakespeare tutor, & the “YA of Yore” columnist for the Paris Review; he was most recently a theater critic at Vulture. Idlewild is his 1st novel.