When the college admissions scandal broke and was splashed all over the news and social media, I became obsessed. The material was endlessly juicy: The greed. The entitlement. And of course: the nerve. Yet that wasn’t the part of the picture (or the only part) that fascinated me. Underneath, I felt that the scandal was a story about teenagers and their parents, about families, about how the expectations of one generation shape the next. In other words, the stuff of novels.

Reading fiction is often an act of empathy—as is writing it. This scandal set my imagination on fire. I was already almost a year into writing a new novel, but I found myself constantly (inconveniently) thinking about a new character, Chloe Berringer, who one morning opens her front door expecting UPS but instead finds the FBI there to arrest her mother.

I began to cheat (yes, cheat) on my other novel, writing character sketches and thinking through the arc of this new idea. Does Chloe go to Wood Valley, the fictional high school where my YA debut, Tell Me Three Things, is set? (Spoiler alert: She does.) How does it feel for her to realize her parents have so little faith in her that they resort to fraud to make sure she gets admitted to the college of her choice? How much did Chloe know and when did she know it? What does it mean to examine our own culpability and privilege? Soon I abandoned my more-than-halfway-finished work in progress and started writing Admission instead.

This book is 100 percent a work of fiction, and the characters are all born from my imagination, not from real people in the real world. I do not know anyone involved in the scandal, nor did I do any investigative reporting. And though there are a bunch of characters in that half-written novel on my laptop that are probably furious with me for abandoning them, I’m still so glad that Chloe took hold of my imagination and demanded I tell her story. After reading Admission, I hope you are too.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I’d like to thank every single person who has ever bought, borrowed, or recommended a book with my name on the cover. I am deeply, eternally grateful. There are a whole lot of novels in the world to pick from. I’m so honored you took a leap of faith and found your way to one of mine.

Forever thank-yous to Susan Kamil and Elaine Koster, the two women who are responsible for starting my career. I miss them both dearly.

Giant high five and thank-you to Jenn Joel and Beverly Horowitz. Fist bump/prayer emoji hands to Jillian Vandall. You guys rock.