I met my best friend Anne in 1985.Then the Babysitter's Club kept her friendship alive.Then Emily was born in 1988 and she said, Thanks Aunt Esme, these books are great.Now we're all grown up and we're living our dreams.
As a writer and a scholar and an expert on teens.And we're gonna start again from the very first book because we're stuck.
Welcome to Stuck in Stony Brook, a podcast about The Babysitter's Club.Today we're discussing book 80, Mallory Pike, number one fan.
I did not realize that was the title of this book until just now.What did you think it was called?I didn't think about it, I was just reading it, and I'm like, I don't know.
No, I actually kind of like this game. Like reading it first and then just giving it a title.
We should play that.Diving in.Alternate title.What would you have called it, Emily?Or is it spoiled now because you know the real title?
Mallory Pike, Kind of a Dick.Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.
That goes with Scholastic's naming conventions, just right.
You know what, I think there's legs on this.Pitch it not to eighth graders, but to elder millennials and Gen Xers.For sure.It's on Max. There is sex in it, the parents get downed.
Mallory's like, mama, kind of a dick.Oh man, I do love the idea of like, sexy dramedy starring adult Mallory as kind of a hot mess.Like, yeah.
I mean, she's not not girls.
No, a sexy like, because it has sex in it.Not sexy like, she's sexy, but involving sex.
But why does it have sex?Oh, okay.
They want like a- Because they want everyone to watch it.
Cause it's for us, Ann.Oh, okay.So just like some rated R or is it?
You know, like girls or sex in the city or something like that.
Oh, I was thinking like you just wanted some sex scenes.
No, no, no. We're thinking about audience pitching a whole new offshoot of the BSC.Yeah, Mallory Pike, kind of a dick.Episode title, yeah.
Yeah, she's like an anti-hero.
Not like Mallory Pike sits on a dick, but.No.
Not a porn, yeah.I mean, not not Mallory Pike sits on a dick.
Yeah. Okay, what are our one-sentence summaries for this book?
Well, mine was just a take on the title, really.Mallory is my number one annoying fan.
Very good.Yeah, mine was, Mal is usually a complainer and this book is no exception, colon.Also, there's a play and a sad old author.
It's actually not a colon, it's an em dash, but... Why would you say colon when you meant em dash?
I don't know.I literally drew an em dash in my book.I don't know why I said colon.I got distracted.
Crazy.I think colons and semicolons are anachronistic, outdated, useless punctuations.It's all about the em dash and the em dash. Sorry, this is not the first time I've said that.
No, it's not.I actually love when you go off on stuff like this because it totally breaks down your facade of being too cool for school.
I am too cool for school.I'm too cool for semicolons and I'm too cool for colons.And if you don't know what an em dash is, you can't sit with us. What's your summary, Emily?
Mine is, Mallory makes a school project unnecessarily complicated and manages to get thanked by a famous author even after insulting her.
Yeah, that's true.Somehow things all worked out for Mallory even though she was like quite a dick through most of this book.Yeah, quite a dick. Yeah, I have some developmental thoughts on that.
Interesting.Well, before then, wait.Yes.We should probably back up and tell you about the members of the podcast.I'm Emily Crandall, a feminist scholar.I'm a total individual and I like health food.
Sorry, I'm laughing at the font change again, but not the actual words.It's different from the rest of the script.
I mean, I can hang on for Sesame. No, keep going.
No, just read your part, Anne.This is not good podcasting.
Anne Ishikawa, a freelance writer of a mischievous pragmatist with a sweet tooth.
And I'm Esme Schaller, an adolescent psychologist.I'm kind of bossy, but I have a big heart.If you want to learn more about us and how we know each other, please check out our prologue episode.Also, rate and review us.
It really helps people find the podcast.If you have any questions, comments, or commentary about anything BSC related, you can drop us a line at stuckinstoneybrook at gmail.com.
You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash stuckinstoneybrook.And we have two more new patrons to thank, gals. So a big pizza toast to you, Emily Wack, and Christy Millican.
Yay, pizza toast.Thank you.OK, where are we?You're going to tell us what to put in the book.
Our pizza toast.To our patrons.So Mallory, there's a big school assignment. or they have to, it's like 80% of their grade.
Which is bonkers for a sixth grader.I wrote that in all caps.I was like, what the fuck is going on?
So 11 year olds are not organized enough to put their all into 80%.Yeah.
This reminds us of the state paper we had to do a little bit though.
That was not 80% of our grade.
No, it wasn't, but it was a big practice.But this is about their, also their careers under like 11 and 12, which makes no sense.
And it's like super open-ended in a way that like the vast majority of 11 year olds would be like, uh.
Right.So Valerie decides to write about becoming an author. but her first proposal to her teacher, it wasn't quite there, her pitch.She had to go back and rethink it.Yeah, he did not like it.Yeah.
And she decided she was going to find her current favorite author, Henrietta Hayes, is that correct?Yes.Yes.And it just so happens that she lives in Stony Brook.
Yeah. And then she starts writing, she finds her in the phone book, starts writing her letters.
First she writes them through the publisher.
Through the publisher.But then she's, how does she, oh, and then she keeps on getting back the same letter.
The form letter, yeah.So she writes like three different letters to her asking for other information and keeps getting the same form letter.But really quickly.
Yeah.Yeah, like annoyingly so. Less than a week turnaround, like she's she's being kind of demanding.Is that how mail used to work?
Oh, Emily, you always manage to make me so sad.
And you're not even. that much older than that.
I know.I know.Oh, the mail does not work.It has nothing to do with age.It's like when was the last time you tried to send something or receive something in the mail?I mean, I do it all the time.Yeah, it's hard.It takes so long.
Yeah.Yeah.They have to put it on the pony.The pony has to like. go really long ways and stop for water and stuff.
I am making a critique of the infrastructure of mail in the US as underfunded.It's true.Under resource.I'm not saying that it's like technologically not savvy enough and thus should be outlawed.
I'm just saying I think it used to be faster when it was more funded.Yes.
Side note, sometimes or oftentimes, Maika will order something from Japan, and it literally gets here in two days.Maika, how is it possible that something is coming from Japan faster than, like, from my parents in Sacramento?I don't know.
It's not coming from Japan, it's coming from LA.Yeah.No, I mean, that's funny.
Yeah.Anyway, so then she's like, I'm not getting my answers from Henrietta.So she like bikes to her house, which is- Well, she notices that the return address is Stanford.
And then how does she find out that she actually lives right by- In the phone book.Looks her up in the phone book.Oh, right.She's just hoping she can find her in the phone book.Yeah.
Yeah.Okay.So she rides her bike there and then just knocks on her door. And Henrietta opens the door.And then I don't know.Now, I feel like we're getting too granular with this plot already.I love this we.
You're the only one telling the plot.
Well, go ahead.Take it over.If I were to tell this recap, I'd just be like, Mallory bothers a poor elderly author whose daughter died and then writes a play that insults her entire family.But then gets. thanked in the new Henrietta Hayes book.
And then, yeah, I mean, it so it's weird because Henrietta Hayes is like, Oh, yes.Oops.I know those form letters are not ideal, but aren't they better than nothing?And Mallory's like, Yeah, I suppose.Wow.What a great icon hero.
And then Henrietta Hayes is like, Do you want to work for me? sorting my files, and Mallory's like, yeah, of course, this will be a great learning opportunity for me, an 11-year-old, in my future career as a writer.
I guess the main conflict is that Mallory thinks all writing should be about your own life, should be autobiographical.
Well, right, because she is apparently a big Hemingway fan.
She read one thing that Hemingway wrote once.Yeah.
Yeah, and has decided that it has to be, you should write what you know, which people still talk about all the time now, and she interprets that.
So the only parts I think you miss is that, so she's writing about the Spike family, and they all have names like Renessa and Ricky, and then she also basically,
has a tantrum at Henrietta when she realizes Henrietta actually had this really hard life and did not grow up with a happy, loving family like she portrays in her, what's the girl's name?Anna Anderson?In the books?Alice Anderson.
That she assumed that Henrietta was either Alice or Alice's mom and really she was a foster child and then she had a bitter divorce and then her daughter was killed and
Mallory's conclusion is that she's a fucking liar and she doesn't trust her and she doesn't want to learn about writing from her.
That's the most ridiculous part.
Yeah, by far.Because Mel's supposed to be smart.Yeah.
Does she think that all like fairy tales are based in fact?
What about all those horse books she reads?
Yeah, with horses that have consciousness or like Stacy's example, Stuart Little.Yeah.Anyway, basically her mom explains what fiction is to her and she comes around and then she also, the younger Pikes organize, which maybe Emily's gonna talk about.
Well, and Jesse explains to her what science is.Yeah.
That too.And it all works out in the end.So.
Yeah.Not only does it work out, she gets like acknowledged publicly in. Like a book.I don't know.
I don't know if she was like it.Mallory was a 31 year old in this book.I would just be like, I'm done with you.Yeah, I would find this person so insufferable.So horrible.So annoying.That was literally never want to talk to this person again.
It's pretty rough, I think, because we've all come to the conclusion that we're part Mallory, right?Like we've accepted through the course of the other books that Mal was pretty underrated and we have a lot of things in common with her.
But she is really up and down, and this is like a low point.But thank goodness she's not 31, she's 11.So maybe that helps a little bit.
I sent Anne this thing last week that I saw online of what are your top three Muppets, and that describes your personality.We've talked about which babysitter we are, but do you guys think about what your top three are?
Obviously, I'm a Christy, Anne's a Claudia, you're a Dawn, but who are your rising and moon signs for the BSC?Because before this book, I thought one of them was Mallory, but now I'm like,
I don't know.I mean, probably I would like to be Claudia Stacey and who I am actually.Probably, I don't know.
I mean, are you feeling the same way?Like, I thought all of us would have a Mallory in the mix based on previous conversations.And then now after this book, I'm like, meh.
I mean, practical Anne, like, you know, she's almost got your birthday.Yeah, but I would never behave like that. I know.
Not even at 11.Not even at 11.
I mean, I think that Emily and I have a lot of overlap.I definitely think I have Dawn in there too.And then I guess I'm going to say Marianne instead of Mallory.I don't have any Marianne.
That's interesting because you say on our website that you have some Marianne based on the first 10 books.
But I forgot.You're sensitive.Yeah. Not in a Marianne way.So what do you think?I actually think I have more Stacey than I would have thought.Yeah, I think that's true.
Stacey is clearly like the coolest one.
Oh, Stacey's totally aspirational, but I'm not gonna lie and pretend that I have Stacey.Just gonna be honest with myself.
Yeah, I'm also being honest with myself.Okay, so you're Don, Stacey, and who?I don't know.I almost think I have a little more Christy than Marianne. Yeah, that's fair.It depends on who I'm with, which I think is also both a Stacey and a Dawn quality.
They both can be Christy if the context requires it, but it's not their, like... Default mode.
Brandy, yeah.Yeah, yep.I think that's true.You probably have some Jesse in.I think your third could be Jesse.You're funny.You're a bit of a performer.Yeah.And Jesse's also really practical.That's part of why she and Mal are best friends.
Yeah. Yeah, she's the more laid back than Mallory.
Yeah, but still practical.
Unless she's trying to be in Peter Pan, in which case she loses her goddamn mind.
Right, yeah, Jessie's cool.So I just have all the cool characters, basically.
Yeah, basically.All right, Emily, do you wanna go first or do you want me to go first?I can.
Yeah, either way.I have like a couple nuggets and then a couple bigger things that are sort of orthogonally related to what's going on in the book.
So one just little note in Chapter two, I flagged this time that I'm finding it increasingly annoying how the different girls explain what racism is.This time, Mal says, you know, the Ramses experienced prejudice or whatever.
They came from a integrated neighborhood.Stony Brook is mostly white.
Comfortably integrated is how she describes it.
Comfortably integrated.But then she says experiencing this kind of prejudice was painful.The Ramseys waited it out and now their neighbors know them as the nice people they are.As though like
racism is just basically assuming that black people aren't nice.Like, I just I find the description of what it is infuriating.And it it has been annoying me.But this particular iteration of it, like, really struck me this time.
I also thought it was funny in Dawn's description that she's into ecology, which I like.Just I'm not sure that now.Now, like, I'm not sure that word means what you think it means. Which is funny, like if that was intentional, right?
Like an 11 year old describing somebody who like vaguely cares about the environment as like into ecology.Like what a great bit if that was intentional, I hope it was.
I think it, I don't think it was.I think that's something that, that was a buzzword in the nineties, for sure. But like, yeah, sure.OK, fine.
Also, I was wondering if today if this if a Mallory book were set in today, there's like a lot of recurring references to her braces, her orthodontics appointments, blah, blah, blah.
Is it statistically plausible that Mal would be the only one of the 10 of them to have braces?No.Definitely not, right?Like a bunch of them.No way.If not all of them would have braces.For a period of time, yes.I just thought that was funny.
It's the first time I thought about that.Yeah, that's a great point.
That she's the only one.It would not be 10%.
Also, we get, I don't know if we've had this confirmation before, but Mal says that Stanford is not just close to Stony Brook, but the closest city to Stony Brook.
Does that mean that it's like the closest big city, so it's still kind of wherever between the big cities?Or does it mean that literally like Stanford and Stony Brook are right next to each other, like share a border?
Oh, I don't think they're right next to each other.
I feel like closest is like slightly more geographically specific than what we've gotten before.
I think it's like Sacramento versus like Roseville or something.
Like Sacramento is the closest city to Roseville, but it's not the next two.
Yeah. Okay.I just, I felt like that was slightly more geographically specific than we've gotten before.Yeah.
I do think Stanford is very close to Stony Brook though.Like it has to be like 20 minutes or something.
Well, right.Cause Jesse's dad works there.Jesse goes to the ballet classes.Like, yeah, it's not that far.
I did also get like very afterschool special vibes from this book, like a lot of the books, but there was one chapter in particular where I think it's the, oh, it's the scene where Mallory is giving her pitch to the kids club to do the play.
And it's like, I wrote down, what's a play?What's acting?What's cancer?Oh my, right?Like there's like all these hits where she's like explaining what it means to act, like how a play is different from a book.
And then like the other, also this kid had cancer in case we forgot what cancer is.And I was like, oh my God.Yeah. very kind of hamfisted with the handholdy, like, here are the lessons that are not so... Yeah, lots of explanations.Okay.
And then aside from the Jesse having to explain what science is to Mal, and what was the other thing we were just talking about?Oh, oh.
Her mom explaining what fiction is to her.
Her mom explaining what fiction is.There were two kind of tangential
things that came to mind for me that were based on what I think is like the central sort of philosophical question of the book, which is like, which is the question of whether or not writing should be autobiographical, which I think you can read as a question about, like writing 101, right?
Like, what is fiction?What is this book that I'm reading, which is sort of how I think the book ends up doing it.But I do think it taps into this, like, really rich tradition of actually, like, philosophy of the subject, right?
What does it mean to be a thinking entity with consciousness?
And what does it mean to be an author, to have authorial intent, and then to write something that goes out into the world and to have it be consumed and read by others who are subjects with intent and consciousness and stuff?
And so Mallory says, it's a lie. right?That she's writing a lie because it's so different from her life.But then the ultimate lesson that Mallory learns is that she creates truth. out of a kernel of something that she once experienced.
And it was called to mind like postmodern lit crit debates about the death of the author, right?So like Roland Barthes arguing that literary criticism in the kind of like early modern period was super obsessed with a text, the truth of a text
it can only be discerned through parsing out the author's intention, right?So like what the author meant is the only truth and the only way to read something, which has to do with who they are, where they come from, right?
And then there was this like postmodern, right?Like cut off the head of the king, right?But also cut off the, like the author is just sort of where the text begins and the reader is sort of what brings the text to life.
So that people can read different things in the same text is part of how we should understand what texts do and what they say.
But then you also have this like other tradition of sort of critical theory that's like, for lack of a better word, like identity politics, right?That like actually where you stand, right?
So this is like in feminist philosophy, what we call standpoint theory, like where you stand actually matters for what you know about how the world works.So the classic example is like how you understand what racism is, right?
Like if you're white and you live in a white supremacist society, what you understand racism to be is different literally because of how you're positioned vis-a-vis the structure of racism than if you are a person of color, right?Of course.
And so then that injects into the question about the author and intention, this whole other layer of epistemology of, well, can you write about something like experiencing racial prejudice if you've never experienced it, right, is one question.
But also that you could write about a racialized experience or write about race and that what it does in the world after you write it takes on a kind of life of its own and it comes to assume some other kind of meaning.So I don't think
that the storyboarding of this book was like, let's introduce 11-year-olds or 13-year-olds to these meaty philosophical questions about what it means to write or what an author is.What is an author?
Not just descriptively or even in terms of a paycheck, right?Who writes?Are you called to writing?I think one of Mal's things that she's really disillusioned with is the life of this woman.
I think she has imagined writing, I don't know, but I'm thinking part of her disappointment is that she imagined writing to be something bigger or more glamorous or more real, and that this woman is sort of shut in, she lives a quiet sort of life, right?
And Mal's like, wait, what you write is not who you are.The books are so engaging to Mal because it's like this family and they love each other so much.And she's like, my siblings would never act like this for me or go to bat for me.
And then that injects a whole weird bullshit into the play she writes about her family, her real family.And so I feel like more than just like,
what is fiction for kids so they can distinguish for the purposes of their like growing brains, the difference between making up a story and reporting the truth about something that there's like these other questions kind of at work here.
And I thought that was really interesting.Yeah.Yeah.I don't think it lands anywhere like necessarily problematic or complicated or nuanced or anything, but I do think it like opens up some of those questions in a way that I was not anticipating.
That's interesting.Yeah.Now I'm trying to think of authorial intent in terms of, like you said, the storyboarding of this book.
I kept thinking that Henrietta Hayes' days sound a lot like Anna Martin's days from the few interviews that she's given over the years.
Well, and in that case, I wondered whether this book is sort of meta, like defensive of like why she has the authority to be the author of this franchise.
The book's about children when she doesn't have any children.
Yeah, when she doesn't have any children.Yeah.
Yeah, like it almost read Loki like a defense of why she deserves to do this or why she ought to be regarded as someone who's capable of doing this or who does it well or something, which I thought was really fascinating.Yeah.
Do you guys have the author note in the... Did you read it on Kindle, Anne?Is there like an author note in this one?
I was going to bring that up because basically the whole author's note is just about how like getting Sam ill.
Yeah, what does it say?That's what I was struck by too, because I have a nice form letter from Anna Martin from when I was a kid.
Yeah, okay.So Mallory Pike, number one fan.Mallory not only meets one of her favorite authors, but she gets to work for her as well.
I don't get to know many of my fans personally, but when I first started writing, I did start several pen pal friendships.
In those days, the babysitters club was just beginning and I received only a few letters every year so I could write back and forth frequently to kids who had written me.
Now I get about 17,000 letters a year, so of course I can't be a pen pals with all the kids who write to me.However, I make sure everyone who writes gets a letter back.
As you can imagine, I need help with this or I wouldn't be able to write any books.Several people work out of their homes helping me answer all those letters.Guess what?One of those people is a former Babysitter's Club fan.
She was one of my original pen pals who is all grown up now. Rebecca helps me just like Mallory helps Henrietta.You never know what might happen when you write something.
Wow.Okay.Well, so maybe it's not a secret defense of why she gets to write these books, but I did think, I don't know, those questions were there for me when I read this.Also, I think it's weird that Mal would pick Hemingway as the
the author or the authority on what writing is given her like proto-feminism, right?That he's like famously misogynist.So I thought that was kind of an interesting choice.And that's all.That's all?
Yeah, I definitely thought that too.I was like, oh, interesting that we're gonna have one of the more feminist members of the club and from Anna and Martin be talking about Hemingway, but yeah.Well, I have a bunch of stuff.
I think the first is just a nugget and then I have a deeper dive on a topic.The nugget is that I continue to be annoyed at the use of dream interpretation in the series as a way to discuss people's anger and sadness. and challenging emotions.
And Mal has a dream about her siblings picketing, which is actually something I thought you were going to talk about a little bit, Emily, in terms of the Pikes organizing.
Again, this is the second time we've seen them in an ersatz labor union after with Mallory on strike.
They're not organizing for better working conditions.
They're just protesting Mallory.They're just protesting the play. I don't think there's much there.
Yeah.But she has a dream about that and says, I guess it doesn't take a genius psychiatrist to say that I was feeling stressed.And the phrase genius psychiatrist I thought was funny.
And I don't think most psychiatrists, even in 1994, were doing a lot of dream interpretation.And I was just like, oh, come on, you guys.Anyway, that's neither here nor there. So that's what it is.
The second topic I wanted to talk about that I kept thinking about during this book was egocentrism, because Mal is not doing a very good job of taking the perspective of sort of anyone else in this book.She has a really hard time
seeing things through Henrietta Hayes's eyes, and that's how she lands on the idea that all of her work is a lie, as opposed to that there can be emotional truth where there is not literal truth and that fiction is fiction.And it certainly
a big problem with her interpretation of her siblings' actions and her sort of story of her as this bedeviled innocent who's just trying to build her writing career and is just put upon from all directions.
Because some of the parts of her play, when she first starts writing it, I was just like dead because it was so dramatic.Hold on, I'm trying to find the first chunk of it that we get.
where she's Valerie Spike and she sits at her writing table and looks out her window longingly.
And the first, the opening line of the play is, how I wish I could write something truly great, something that would change the world and make people happy, especially children.And that's just, she's sitting thinking that to herself.
And then all of the things her siblings do are just like terrible.And her mom is like, oh, Valerie, can you please do these 10 chores?I know you're trying to write.
But they're not even terrible.They just, they say like, oh, I could never be as like beautiful as you.
She's like, what?Also, I feel like if Mallory is the author, her writing should have been better, even as 11 or 12.
I was like, we were probably all writing better than that at that age.Yeah.
Right?I was like, this is so boring.Are you kidding me?It's not good.It's not good.Although she does say by the end, it gets much better because she learned about emotional truth, but we don't get to read the better version.
But we don't get any of it.And then all the parents are like, wow, what a great play.And I'm like, was it?
Show me receipts. So when you guys think about egocentrism, do you have any thoughts about it and children, or do you have any thoughts about it more generally, like what comes to mind when you hear the phrase egocentrism?
I mean, I think like the trope of someone who's egocentric is like somebody who just only talks about themselves, but I think it's more, nefarious is not the right word, because that implies intent, but I think it's like more like insidious than that.
It's like, actually, I'm like incapable of viewing any like emotional context or situation from anyone else's perspective other than my own.
How about you, Annie?Like, what do I like the definition of it?Or just associations you have?
Well, I mean, just in the context of this book, I feel like probably, I would guess that children are supposed to be somewhat egocentric, because what else do they have to think about? That's a funny reason.
It's just like their needs and it's like, you know, like it's the world is very small at that point still.So also like Mallory's has a lot of siblings.
So I figured that her sense of maybe she has to be have more ego to be more of an individual or like she has to have more like, I don't know, like boundaries or guardrails over certain things.
Who's Mallory?Where does Mallory start and end?Yeah.
Yeah.Because it's like, I don't know.It seems like I feel like if you have to share life with so many other people all the time, it's like a power struggle a little bit, right?
And then you can carry over that power struggle into other situations that are not your family.Yeah.Into like friendships or whatever.Yeah.Yeah.
Yeah, neither of you are super off base.And so I think we do use it colloquially as kind of a proxy for narcissism and as kind of an insult, like that guy's super egocentric.
But in developmental psychology, it's long been viewed as normative at different ages and stages. Right.
And partly, I think partly for what you said, Anne, like, of course, you're a kid, that's your world is smaller, you're going to think that you're pretty important in it.
But partly because it corresponds to like the different tasks of development at different ages.So like preschoolers are pretty egocentric.They're trying to get, you know, get autonomy and define who they are and where other people end.
And then that comes up again in adolescence.And a psychologist, David, so
Actually, back to Jean Piaget first identified egocentrism as a normative stage that kids go through at different times, kind of peaking in preschool and then again in early adolescence.
But the psychologist David Elkind in the late 60s did a lot more to kind of flesh out what he saw in the adolescence that he worked with, and particularly that it was thought to be at its peak around 10, 11, 12.
So in that way, Mallory is kind of right on target.And he identified two different pieces of egocentrism that come once people enter the cognitive Piagetian stage called formal operations.That just means abstract thoughts.
That means able to like form arguments and talk about abstract concepts and things like that, as opposed to like, you're a baby and you're working on object permanence and understanding that things are still there when they're not in your sight view, right?
It like builds over time.So formal operations starts to come on board around 11 and supposedly most of us get there fully by 15, although Newer data says some people don't get there by 15, which will not surprise Emily in the least.
So the idea being that there's sort of two components of egocentrism in adolescence.And this has been measured in a lot of samples over time.So even though the original work was done in the 60s, it mostly seems to hold up.
And that was one of my questions today.It was like, is this actually, this is what I learned in school.Is this still true? So I have a couple more recent studies.But one piece of it is called the imaginary audience.
And that can operate both positively and negatively, that young teens sort of assume that everybody's paying a lot of attention to what they look like. and what they're wearing and how their hair is done.
Oh, yeah.We've talked about that before, I think.Yeah.
And that perspective has a big impact on how they carry themselves in the world.And the other piece that we haven't talked about as much is what's called personal fable.And you can see this a lot in literature.
You can see it with the babysitters at times, but in classics like in Catcher in the Rye with Holden Caulfield with this idea that like, your life is special in some particular way and you're destined for something important.
A lot of teens keep a diary not just to learn about their thoughts and emotions, but because they think it will be valuable someday once they're the president or they've won an Oscar or whatever it is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.Really?Yes.You know why I never kept one, right?I was like, what if someone reads this someday?
So we see examples of this personal fable with Mallory though, right?
Of her imagining her teacher's gonna be so impressed with her proposal and how everyone's gonna throw- Yeah, she's gonna offer to thank him in her first book and then she's like, actually, no, that's a bit much.
I'm just gonna say thank you.Yeah.
Right.And she's picturing them throwing roses on the stage after the play and all of this stuff.So that's actually a very common developmental task.Not everybody, and of course, this came out in 1967,
I haven't looked at David Elkin's sample, but I'm assuming it's mostly white, and I'm assuming it's probably male-biased.So there's some things about this that strike me as more white and male than other things.
But it has been shown, and again, this is something that's continued to be studied, that a significant number of teens at least go through a stage of this, of having this personal fable.And it can go in both directions.
It can also, for a teen that leans more toward depression, it's like, I'm uniquely cursed.Nobody can understand my pain. My pain is unique to me and is super special and unique and not like this pain that other people have had.
Yeah, so that's personal fable.And I think we see examples of both of them here in this book, pretty well represented.But it's just a part that's been in like intro psychology books forever, and I wasn't sure what the latest was on it.
And it does seem to hold up pretty well.I found one article, there's not a lot of brand new work on this, with the exception of one thing that I found that I'll tell you in a second, a lot of it stopped in the mid 2000s.
So people are not really asking these questions in the last 10 years.
But the work that I found from 2008 in an article by Schwartz, Maynard, and Uzalack called Adolescent Egocentrism, A Contemporary View, looked and studied and used a lot of the measures that Elkin developed and normed over time and found, actually, this happens in late adolescence too.
There's a lot of interactions between gender and age and onset of puberty having an impact of when these things occur.And so, Elkin and Piaget had both said like, 10, 11, 12, this is when it happened, and then it's better by 15.
That's really interesting, because I think that framing that it's about the narratives that people have for placing themselves is sort of how I'm interpreting what you're saying, if that's right.I think I fucking see that in college students.Yes.
Like a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.So I'm shocked that it's like,
10, 11, 12 is the- That was what this more contemporary thing.
So you might, like the final paragraph of this 2008 article, which says, from an academic perspective, faculty might also consider the influence of their college students' egocentrism on classroom instruction.
Specifically, teachers ought to be aware that first-year students may sometimes act as if they were privileged and not constrained by the rules for reading, class attendance, and handing in papers that hold for other students.
In addition, what may come across as informality or a sense of entitlement on behalf of the student may in fact be an egocentric coping mechanism for all of the changes and transitions happening in the first year of college.
Yeah.So I love that you said that and picked up on it right away because that's what this more recent view says is that actually this happens across adolescents and is more likely to happen in transition times.
Oh, the personal fable is also, the reason they thought it might happen later is that it's often related to adolescent risk-taking because it's like, oh, that's not going to happen to me.
So they give the example of like people not taking contraceptive precautions because like, well, my girlfriend's not going to get pregnant or I'm not going to get pregnant.That happens to other people.
And then they're like, oh crap, it happened to me.Or like, I'm not gonna have a serious drug addiction problem.I can just use these drugs at a party and it'll be fine.
And so that personal fable can also lead to invulnerability, which can interact with risk-taking.
Is this only for like, is this study within the US?
Yeah, but it's a pretty, this is a pretty diverse sample.The 2008 study, yeah. It's in, I think they collected the data in New York City.So yeah, I have the numbers.
Yeah, I was wondering like culturally, it's like that personal, this fable thing is more like- Individualism.Individualism.
So that's what I thought too.And I found two studies.This is a really beloved contrast in psychology in China.And I found one in Hong Kong and one in mainland China that found similar time, periods, so like similar peaks for personal fable.
Now, what people do with that is different, but again, it's about the self-concept and defining the self over time.
But is it also, so interesting, okay, so, but it's both kind of like a cognitive stage and it seems like an ideological.
So it's sociocognitive.Yeah, it's sociocognitive.So there's a lot, obviously we can't separate completely emotional development, social development, cognitive development.We think of them as, but they obviously impact each other.
So it's all three of those and it's affects how you think, but your self-concept and how you see your place in the world.
Yeah, I guess I would have put that in socio and emotional rather than in cognitive.I was thinking of it as actually a way that you think, not just something that you think about, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think the idea, going back to Piagetian theory, is that it's tied to formal operations, that you can't have this kind of observing self and this sort of metacognition about your own relationships and your place in the world until you're capable of more abstract thought about other things as well.
Yeah, so then the only other piece that I found that I thought was really interesting was just in 2020, there's a group of researchers who looked at the adolescent egocentrism scale that's been used for a number of years.
This is by Tajmarahi, Ta, and Ickes to see if actually egocentrism might be a trait-like personality attribute.
And can they adapt the scale to test it across age groups, including adulthood, to see are some people just higher on this and some people are lower on this?And they found that it holds up psychometrically.
So basically, the scale they created has good psychometric properties, meaning It's reliable.You can get the same sort of answer over time.It appears to be valid.It correlates with other measures that are related, but it doesn't correlate.
It's not a one-to-one agreement with, say, narcissism, which is more insidious.So it sort of it separates and converges with the things we would expect it to separate and converge with.And so that's sort of the latest in this area.
And I would assume, because they just developed this measure, that people might be using it now to study this more broadly.Like, is this just a part of personality development?
And maybe all adolescents go through it to a certain extent, but some people kind of stay there.And some people are more prone to it than other people.I think of like Brett Kavanaugh keeping all of his calendars from when he was in high school.
It does the personal fable stick with some of us and others of us shut it and kind of are very clear like, oh yeah, I'm not that special, let's move along.So anyway, I think it's an interesting direction for it to go.
And I'm always kind of interested when theory, psychology theory from sort of the mid-century where everybody was just like writing down what they were seeing when it sort of holds up empirically, I find that interesting.
seems like this is still going pretty strong and is being looked at more cross-culturally as time goes on as well.Interesting.Yeah.
So don't be too mad at Mallory because she's not 31, but maybe because of this new scale, she would still be high on it at 31, but we'll never know.
Yeah, she's still pretty annoying though.Yeah.
I was saying, I can think of people I knew at that age who are still annoying now.
Well, annoying is a much broader umbrella. There's lots of ways to be annoying.
What's the scale for annoying scientifically?I can look into that in another book.
Yeah, I do like that.An annoying scale.We can write the babysitters.
I was just gonna say we should come up with one.
Yeah, like least to most annoying.Well, Mallory's probably the most annoying.
No, no, no.Emily wants to write a self-report so people can self-diagnose how annoying they are.
Yeah, on like a bunch of different vectors.Yeah.Yeah.That's too hard for me.Too much like school.To be clear, I'm not gonna do it.
So I'm gonna talk about the skippit. But also before that, so this book came out in 1994, which is like right before, well this is, we still, I think we had email at this point, or like.
No, I think some people had email.
Some people in the world had email, but we as 16 year olds did not have email.
No, I'm just saying that like there was email at this point.
Yeah, but at like universities and companies and stuff.
Yeah, but there was email.
Someone's being annoying right now.You said we.
I thought you meant you and me, not we as the human race.
Oh, the royal we.I do think my dad had email at that time.Okay.But my dad also worked in like telecommunication.Yeah.So but we had in our house, like he had like an email account and stuff.
Anyway, so this is like the precipice of like, going into the internet.And also being like, in like, AOL and email and like spending more time in front of your computer in front of the screen.
But until I like whatever 96 probably like we're fully just like hanging out. Like doing, playing with weird shit like a Skippit.Like just all these toy companies were just making up shit.
Giving us something to do.
Giving us something to do, right?To pass the time.For sure.Can you think of other things besides the Skippit?I remember the Pogo Ball.
Pogo Ball was the first thing that popped into my mind.
That thing was impossible to do.
What was a Pogo Ball?It looks like Saturn. Yeah.And you put your feet on either side of the rings and then you try to bounce on it, but there's no stick to hold on to or anything.So like you have to have a core strength of legend.
You know who is weirdly good at the pogo stick is my Erin.Oh, that's not a surprise at all.Yeah.
She can go all the way around the block as bananas.Yeah.Yeah. Yeah, I feel like you were good at pogo ball, Ann.
Yeah, but it was still hard.I don't think I could do it.I don't think I could do it more than like 10 or 15 times, probably.Yeah.That seems like a lot of times.
Honestly.I could do it like 26 times.I don't know.
I don't know, maybe like 82.Yeah, but we had skippets too.
We had skippets.Well, they said something about squiggle ball, and I didn't know what that was.
I think that was like a dog toy. It was like a battery-operated dog toy that just kind of moved around.But they did also mention like the Velcro thing, which they call Skatch, which I've never heard, but maybe it's a regionalism.
What the hell is Skatch?Anyway, sounds like snatch.So anyway, a little history on the Skiffit. So Skip It was not the original Skip It.There were several iterations of it.
Did someone steal from a woman of color?
I actually, I don't know, but okay.So the first, so in the sixties, there was something called the jingle jump, which is basically a skip it, but I think it just had a little bell on it.
And like, you just kind of did the same thing.You just put it around her ankle and jumped over it with her foot.That was trademarked in 1963.Okay.And then in 1968, a Montreal based company released a similar toy called the footsie.
And it was amazing.F O O T S E E. Oh, footsie.
Supposedly, the founder of this company was in Jerusalem and saw an quote unquote, Arab child play this game.And he thought I was like, what?Okay, this is also this heavy quotes here.Because This is just from the Wikipedia.
Hold on.Foot see.It seems like a knockoff foot finder.
I don't know what that is.
Oh, it's like. It's like a site where you sell pictures of your feet.Oh, I only know that we can do that.It's more like OnlyFans than it is like an encyclopedia.But it's like, if people want to see your feet, they have to pay and subscribe.
but like foot C, like literally.Oh, yeah, yeah.
Bring it back.Hey, patrons, if you want to see some foot content, no, I'm just kidding.
Yeah, we'll just post Emily's feet.Well, you won't know whose they are because there's no faces.
The foot C was a big hit in Canada, so big that another company released the skippet. Also in Canada?Also in Canada.Okay.And these two companies were kind of like, what the fuck?Like, I had this first.
But really, it was like, the Jiggle Jump was really the first.Anyway, they came to an agreement where they could both sell them.And then in 1975, there was another similar toy released called the Lemon Twist, where they all look like a lemon.
I would buy a lemon twist today.I feel like that's maybe a good way to get me to exercise.
Really?Yeah. You know, I'll make you one.
Make?Make.Anne thinks this is Anne's toxic trait.She thinks she can make anything.She will see a designer garment and she'll be like, I can make that.And she doesn't ever actually do it.She just is confident in her ability to do so.
Okay, but you think you can make Audrey 2 out of snow?
I have a proven track record and my ability to craft characters.I'm sorry, what have you made?I have made like hundreds of costumes actually.Yeah, but I could do it.I understand how it would work.Oh, see?Now who's toxic?
Whatever, you're not getting your lemon twist now.
See what she did there?Because she was never going to make it.
Okay, so Lemon Twist 1975.Finally, in 1988, Tiger Electronics acquired the rights to Skip It, and that is the form of Skip It that we know today from the early 90s with the little mechanism that counts how many times you're skipping it.
Um, I don't want to skip it.Yeah, there's a lot of there.It was like, apparently the commercial I didn't have cable, but the commercial was played repeatedly on Nickelodeon in the early 90s.
Vanessa, who is playing with the skiffet, is not very good at it.I try to look up the world record for skiffet.Oh. There is no definitive, it is not in the Royal Guinness Book of Records.
But maybe we could try with just us three who could do the most in a minute.
And do you think if we took- I don't buy a skippit.
Okay, we'll do that on our retreat.How long do you think it would take if we took a skippit to McCarran Park before everyone in Brooklyn had a skippit?
I don't know, I like this idea though.
This is good.This is good bonus content of just Emily by herself in McCarran Park using a skippet and seeing and just like collecting data.I just sent you a lemon twist on eBay, but it's $350. Oh yeah, I can make it.Worth it.It's still in package.
I could make it, she said again.Yeah, I know.I'm telling you, she really thinks she can.
Okay, but out of all things, this really doesn't seem hard to make.Okay.I'll go to Wishing Well, get a lemon, a plastic lemon, get some string.
Sometimes you make references that there is no way anyone could possibly get.That is the defunct party store in downtown Sacramento from the 1980s.That's what Wishing Well is.
Of course not!Okay, wait, do you have more to tell us about skippets?
No, that's it.All right.Was there any candy in this book?No, Claudia just had Doritos.
I thought I did actually think as a follow up from the mystery we just read, it was interesting.There's a lot of Claudia in this book, but also she doesn't really do anything.
She's just like in every scene and in every every like sentence where Mal mentions the girls, she like mentions Claudia by name and then says like the rest of them.And I was like, what is this like course?
Do you think it was an intentional course, correct?From her absence in mystery 17 or whatever we just read.
Yeah, well, what I noted that when Claudia did her like journal entry, she says, what a blast to be back at the elementary school where she spelled elementary like really wrong.
Like, oh, maybe you need to go back to elementary school.
I'm sorry.I know we did this before, but she has like she misspelled something like every four words or something.
Yeah, we yes, we we've been this is well-worn territory.All right.Tally's almond sticking around shy and health food.We're getting fewer and fewer tallies in general.
Like most, you know, in the earlier books, it was like 10 per book, and now it's usually three.So but I don't know why almond is so robust.I get why shy is so robust.But almond is just needs to die.
Yeah, like, why is that still happening?
Isn't just saying that she's Japanese-American enough?I would think so.Well, I don't know.
Then how are we supposed to know what shape her eyes are?
I know.Well, they could use, like, maybe something else.
No, they like describe like the eyelid.I don't know.
There's another way to do it that's less offensive.
Yeah, it doesn't sound less.
No, there's no way.Like her eyes look... No, I guess there's no good way to say that they're small. Amazing.I mean, it's okay that our eyes are smaller.Our eye shape.It's not that our eyeballs are smaller.Keep going, Anne.
It's just, I feel like you also have almond-shaped eyes, depending on the almond size.Sure, yes.Like, my eyes are... Actually, they are kind of all mental.
Also, been done before on the podcast.Sorry.
Okay.Okay, we're done, I think.Okay, we're doing the best line, weirdest line?
Yeah.What did you have, Anne?
I just like the, is it the Renessa Spike or like whatever?So stupid.So stupid.
Yeah, I put Valerie Spike as one of mine, but then I also really liked toward the end when she's letting the kids make edits so that they are fine with the play and Nikki makes her call his character Ed and he says, that's the coolest name a guy could have.
Yeah, I did that because my dad's name is Ed.
Cool.Name a guy could have.
I liked when one of the pikes mispronounced defaming as deflaming, deflaming our characters.Yeah.He's Mallory of deflaming the character.
We want to be gayer in this book now.I know.I know.Good.He's trying to straight wash us.
Yeah, so my proposal is deflaming our characters.That's fine with me, Ann.Yeah, that sounds good.
Okay, great.What should we pizza toast to?
To, I don't know.I feel like there isn't even anything like saccharine to pizza toast to in this book.
Yeah, I mean, Mrs. Hayes losing her daughter.You want a pizza toast to that?You guys just jump all over me. No, the reveal was very cinematic, though, of Cassie's bedroom.
Sorry, I did want to say one thing about when the Cliplets are dressed up as ninjas, and they're saying, ha, ya.Little, I know about that.
Tell us more about the shape of your eyes, Anne.
All right, what are we pizza testing to?Oh, Logan's hair is curly?Did we know that before?
I don't know, I try not to think about Logan. I don't think so.I think that's new.
Also, Mal invites Claude over for hot chocolate and brownies, which sounds disgusting to me.That is too much.Too much.One or the other.Can't have them both.
Although in high school, Millie used to make brownies and we would take them out before they were done and put Neapolitan ice cream on top to watch the OC.
That's still got a different flavor in there, though.It's not just like chocolate and chocolate.
Right, right.That's true.Yeah.And did you just say that sounds good?Yeah, she did.
I mean, I also think it was a missed opportunity that the Pike picket line was not called the Pike it line.
Well, yeah.And we could pizza toast to picket lines.Oh, yeah, that's true.
OK, that's good.A pizza toast to picket lines, picket lines.
This episode of Stuck in Stony Brook is now adjourned.
Thank you to Anne and Martin for everything.Stuck in Stony Brook is edited by Emily Crandall.Theme song written and recorded by Gary Schaller, performed by the band KidKid.
You can follow us on Instagram at Stuck in Stony Brook or find us on our website stuckinstonybrook.com.Need some books that we mentioned?
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