Tracy flick8/3/2023 ![]() M., the pathetic student council adviser who will try to steal the election from Tracy (played onscreen by Matthew Broderick), is the only other point-of-view character in the book who knows about the relationship he sees Tracy as a seductress. ![]() While neither the book nor the film treat that subplot with the glibness you’d expect from a property written in the 1990s, neither one puts full blame for the relationship on Tracy’s teacher, either. Those who’ve read or seen Election will remember that Tracy had a sexual relationship with a teacher when she was just 15. As the new book opens, the #MeToo movement is swirling-prompting scores of women, her included, to recontextualize their encounters with predatory men. Perhaps unlike those two men, Tracy’s also grappling with lingering trauma. Think about somebody like Tom Brady-he can’t quit, because then it would be over. “ personality that’s defined by competitive desire is just pretty much bound to be frustrated. “Self-doubt is inevitable when you’re in middle age, unless you’re Trump or somebody,” he says. Even though this grown-up Tracy is, by many measures, a success-“she has a PhD she owns her own home she is a well-paid professional,” Perrotta points out-she’s plagued by regret and insecurity. It’s a poignant moment, and one that brings new shading to a character who’s often reduced to caricature by those comparing her to real-life ambitious women. What would people say? She’s an assistant principal. “I kept imagining what would happen if my old high school started a Hall of Fame and my name came up for consideration. I wasn’t even the principal of Green Meadow High School,” she thinks to herself during a particularly low point in Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Tracy being Tracy, it’s difficult sometimes for her to accept the direction her life has taken. Paul”-the nice-guy jock who launches a late campaign for student council president, played by Chris Klein in the movie-“was her football-playing nemesis in Election, and Vito is sort of the more recent iteration of that.” “I kept feeling like Tracy wants to be part of this,” Perrotta says, “because this is her nemesis. Perrotta, who went on to write Little Children and The Leftovers, was embarking on a project about a CTE-addled retired football player named Vito Falcone when he began hearing a familiar voice inside his head. Perhaps, then, it’s no wonder that Tracy refused to let Election be the end of her story. As Elisabeth Donnelly noted in Vanity Fair a few years ago, the goal-oriented presidential wannabe has since transcended her source material to become a much-referenced archetype: “a specter haunting all women of ambition, no matter what that ambition may be.” Since Perrotta’s book, a satirical spin on the 1992 presidential race set at a New Jersey high school, was released-and especially since Reese Witherspoon’s powerhouse performance in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated 1999 adaptation-Tracy has muscled her way to the forefront of the story. “So Tracy was the last character to come in.”īut Tracy, as we all know, is not accustomed to coming last. And then I had this idea of siblings who ran against each other” in a contentious student council election. His original idea for that 1998 novel, Perrotta tells me over Zoom, “was to tell the story of the teacher who destroys himself. Hell, he hadn’t even planned on Tracy being the central player in Election. Tom Perrotta never intended to write another book about Tracy Flick.
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