79a daughter of her own, Sophia, the
product of a brief affair she had with
a married professor while she was pur-
suing a Ph.D. in education. Nothing
has turned out as planned. But Tracy’s
sense of ambition reignites when she
learns her boss is about to retire. Why
shouldn’t she step right into the top
job? She’s earned it.
In considering where the modern-
day Tracy Flick would end up, Per-
rotta says, “I didn’t think she had
taken over the world. I’m much more
interested, anyway, in thwarted ambi-
tion and midlife malaise than I am in
people who are running the world.”
It made sense, he says, “that Tracy
would end up in her old battleground,
still fighting for these small prizes.”
After all, this is still a world where me-
diocre men often have an advantage
over smart, hardworking women. And
if Perrotta was cognizant of that injus-
tice in Election, he’s even more keyed
in to it now.
While Perrotta doesn’t dig
into Tracy’s politics in the new book,
he notes that she’s probably rather
‘As I get older, I’m so
aware of the way we
constantly alter the
narrative of our past.’
—TOM PERROTTAconservative. Yet he’s sure that she is
still, in some sense, a feminist. “I don’t
think she’d use the word patriarchy,”
he says. “But she’s aware that these
men get all these unearned advantages,
and that she’s constantly being put in
the shadow of men who are her inferi-
ors. She’s appalled by unearned male
advantage. She wants to compete on
an equal playing field. That’s what fem-
inism would be for her.”
And in the midst of her career
quandary, Tracy Flick has something
else to contend with: the memory of
her sexual relationship with a teacher
when she was still a teenager. If that
plot development was eye-opening
enough in 1998, in the wake of the
Monica Lewinsky scandal, it has taken
on a whole new dimension today.
In Election, Tracy adamantly insists
she wasn’t victimized by that relation-
ship: she was in control; she ended the
relationship; he was the one who fell
apart afterward. But the Tracy Flick of
2022 is more reflective. She still won’t
call herself a victim, yet she does won-
der what on earth her illicit paramour
was thinking, embarking on a relation-
ship with a teenage girl. And she won-
ders if maybe the experience damaged
her in ways she doesn’t even see.
Perrotta says that when he wrote
Election, in the early 1990s, he “was
drawing on these currents in feminism
at the time. These brash Madonna-
esque ideas that women can have ev-
erything men can have. They can have
sex whenever they want to and be
unapologetic about it and walk away
from it and go on to the next thing.
Tracy was embodying this particular
early-’90s sex-positive ‘girls can have
it all’ mentality.”
But there’s no denying the power
imbalance between an adult teacher
and a teenage girl, a reality Perrottareckons with in the new book. “There
were so many #MeToo stories of often
prestigious private high schools where
teachers had abused their students
for years and years. There were some
people blowing the whistle and saying,
‘I was abused by this teacher.’ And
there were other women who would
say, ‘I thought at the time that it was
a consensual relationship,’ and now
they’ve had to revisit that from an
adult perspective, in a very different
cultural climate.”
That was another reason Per-
rotta was drawn, even if only subcon-
sciously, to revisit Tracy Flick’s story.
“One of the really fascinating things
about writing a book like this almost
30 years later is you realize just how
powerful these cultural lenses are,” he
says. “Tracy’s an administrator. She’s
in charge now of policing these sorts
of things. As an administrator she
feels one way, but she does not want
to surrender her narrative completely.”
It would be a different book,
Perrotta says, if Tracy simply said,
“I was a victim.” But her feelings are
more complicated than that. “She’s a
middle- aged person with regrets,” Per-
rotta says. “She’s trying to figure out,
How did I get here, when I expected
to be somewhere else entirely?” Not
even Tracy Flick can have it all.
“As I get older, I’m so aware of the
way we constantly alter the narra-
tive of our past and choose to leave
out whole chunks of it, or turn some-
thing complex into a simple thing,”
Perrotta says. “You say, ‘Oh, that was
my 20s! That was when I had terrible
jobs!’ And you just leave it at that. But
we also know that those simple nar-
ratives leave out a lot of rich experi-
ence and decisive moments and often
a lot of pain.” Young people are, after
all, unfinished people. When Per-
rotta is asked if maybe the ending of
Election —in which Tracy reaches a
kind of accord with the man who tried
to cheat her out of her presidential
victory—was an inadvertent setup
for a sequel, he considers the possi-
bility. But the answer he ultimately
gives is—like Tracy Flick herself—
multidimensional: “I would say that
any story that ends when a character
is 18 is just crying out for a sequel.” □