In Conversation: Sarah Adler and Loryn Cook

Posted on June 28, 2023


In Conversation: Sarah Adler and Loryn Cook

June 2023

Edited for length and clarity

Sarah Adler: Loryn, my first question is: how do we know each other?

Loryn Cook: (laughs) You’re gonna make me do that?

SA: Yup!

LC: You and I met in college, in a little place called the University of California, Berkeley, and we did meet in the sorority system…We met through [sorority name redacted], which is always funny to say.

SA: (screams) We’ve been revealed!

LC: You revealed us.

SA: I did. Do you remember when we started becoming friends? Because at the beginning, I just thought you were really cool, but how did we become friends?

LC: Well I think I kind of blacked out in the beginning. I don’t remember how I ended up in the sorority system at all, let alone [sorority name redacted].

SA: You were like, eating the Jesus wafer or whatever Christian thing we had to do for the ceremony and you were like, “what the fuck? How did I get here? I’m Jewish!”

LC: Yes…how did I get here? But, to my delight and huge luck, you were also there, and a few other friends we slowly started to gravitate towards. I have a vivid memory of you sitting on a bed in that little room that we were exiled to, and you were talking about some philosophy or other, or maybe it was a boy…

SA: It was definitely a boy. 

LC: Or a combination of both philosophy and a boy…and being like, oh, who is this girl?

SA: I recently watched this documentary about Alabama Rush, and they were saying during rush that you can’t talk about the Five B’s, and the Five B’s were boys, ballads, booze, beliefs, and bucks (like money). Pretty much the only things I have ever talked about in my entire life, so I don’t know how we ended up in a sorority. 

LC: God, what else do you talk about? I do remember during rush we weren’t allowed to say the word “weird”, like, about the living situation in the sorority. They also told us to use other words to describe it … but not “weird” or “interesting”.

SA: Rancid. Smelly. 

LC: Inhumane. Well, now that you’ve revealed us as sorority sisters, that is how we met, but it is just a blip in our very long history.

SA: Ok, so my other question – the piece that we worked on together is about high school. I want you to tell me about your high school experience.

LC: You’re really coming at me, aren’t you?

SA: You can come at me after this, you’re allowed. 

LC: I mean my question will be what prompted you to write about high school?

SA: Trauma.

LC: Well yeah, I think high school was a time for me of internalizing trauma and not really dealing with it. I wouldn’t say I had a terrible high school experience, some crappy things happened, and I probably did some crappy things, as one does when they’re young and stupid, but I think that for the most part, high school was just like purgatory. Just not really sure where I was going, or what I was doing, kind of caught in this middle ground, before either, what I called “escaping” or not. Like I’m different from those around me but don’t really understand why, or how to go about fostering it, or wondering if I should foster it. Do you feel like college was an immediate change from that?

SA: I think it was gradual. You know, back to the sororities, one of the reasons I joined is that it was filled with the same type of people I was used to spending my time with from high school. I was very interested in being a top sorority because I was not popular in high school, and I was very enamored with the idea of what that could look like. I was just very interested in status at that time, and I really wanted to reinvent myself, and this idea of who I was going to be was someone who was really popular, and I think that those first few years I really bought into all of the sorority stuff way more than you ever did for those reasons. Which is funny that I was the one who eventually left it, because I think that at some point I realized I was unhappy in high school was because I was in this kind of environment, and I wasn’t unhappy in college –  but once I realized who my friends were, I didn’t really need the whole system. And that’s one of my big regrets of college, that I didn’t realize sooner that these hyper-feminine, elitist spaces weren’t for me.

LC: I want to go back to the original question about high school, and what prompted you to write about high school?

SA: I think that upon further examination of my life, which I’ve done a lot in this program [University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program], because my program was three years long, I realized that was where my experience was the most unique. Having been at an all-girls school from second grade through twelfth grade was a story that people were intrigued by. And you know how sometimes you don’t think of something as an interesting story because it happened in your life and it was so integral that you don’t think it’s something people would be interested in? Also, I’m really interested in mythology, how we mythologize our life, how we do that through rumor and gossip, and a lot of that comes from the type of communication I learned in high school. That was also a time I felt a lot of feelings. One of the things that’s been hard about my project, not just this essay, is that it’s very voice heavy, the narration has to sound like a teenage girl. I think it’s been fun in some ways because my teenage self was just so flawed, not that my adult self isn’t, but I do think I strive to be a better person as an adult than I did as a teen. I’ve always been more interested in characters that aren’t interested in being moral, are just grappling with the superficial things we grapple with, like being a social climber. Also, experiencing a budding sense of being an artist, and reconciling those things. I have a somewhat tangential question. I think my piece deals with, and you and I have talked about this a lot too, this notion of being a “mean girl,” and what it is to be a mean girl. Because I don’t think you or I have ever identified as mean girls, but I think we both sought to be friends with people that would describe themselves as “mean girls.” What do you think that draw was? What does a mean girl bring to the table?

LC: That’s a really interesting question. I think that both of us, or maybe me more than you, both of us really care what others think. Sometimes I think my personality is that I don’t care what others think, but it’s maybe not that I don’t care what others think, but I do care how they feel. And I think with the “mean girl” attitude, I think that there is a desire to control? Validation? Connection? I’m just intrigued with someone who comes off that way. 

SA: I do think a lot of it is like … idealized femininity. The idea of a “mean girl” has changed in so many ways, just like even using “girl” in a loose way, just because the kind of mean girl I thought of then was cisgender, straight, very perfect looking in the most traditional way, but I think it’s changed now because like, there are cool mean girls, but they’re art freaks and different genders.

LC: Mean girl has become more an attitude than an archetype. More of an attitude that anyone can have. 

SA: I think a lot of what I realized of wanting to be in a “mean girl” group was wanting to look more like them, and feeling a lot of discomfort with a lot of my more Jewish features as a kid. I think a lot of it was that even though these people are mean, they represent a lot of what I want to be, and people have told me I should be. And this is how I can be a protagonist in my own story. Like, I think a mean girl is a protagonist, because they are comfortable with being a protagonist. Whereas I often felt like, no one would want to write a story about me, and maybe that is what writing this piece was about. Also, now I don’t think I like people who are just openly mean, I-think-what-I-say mean, I’m referring to people who aren’t interested in people-pleasing.

LC: Unapologetic. Which is interesting we conflate that with mean girls. Because specifically for women, unapologetic is often considered “mean girl.” 

SA: I think what’s been hard for me as a woman is disappointing people. Like realizing I can’t always support someone, or show up for them emotionally, and then realizing to some extent that giving your emotional energy to someone else is a lot, and if you give it to a bunch of different people, then you don’t give it to who you want it to give it to. I think that a mean girl, at least the definition we used when we were younger, is someone who didn’t care if everyone liked them, because they knew they had other things to bring to the table beyond niceness. And I often thought that all I had to bring to the table was niceness.

LC: What do you think your high school self would feel reading this piece?

SA: I think she would be proud and horrified. Horrified a the truth of it, there are some things that are in it that she would be really embarrassed if people knew, but I also think that, you know I’ve always been a writer in the same way you have always been an artist, it just has always been our most true form of communication, and I think that so much of what I was interested in high school was the strange and surrealness of being alive, and I think she would see the ways in which her writing has transformed into this piece. 


Sarah Adler is a Philly-based writer and educator. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. She is currently working on her first book, a collection of interrelated essays exploring Internet stalking, gossip, and Jewish assimilation in America.

Loryn Cook is a New York City-based artist practicing across a wide variety of mediums - from micro-sized ceramic installations to large scale murals; from residential staging to restaurant design. Read more on her website: https://www.loryncook.com