Tracy Flick came back to haunt Tom Perrotta in the best way possible. The author of Election, which became a cult-classic film starring Reese Witherspoon as the ambitious student body president candidate, was simply working on a new book set in a high school when he realized it would be a perfect avenue to bring back his most iconic character.
Indeed, the book almost demanded it. "As I started to write it, I kept wanting it to be in the form that Election was in, with multiple narrators," says Perrotta, who also penned such best-sellers as Mrs. Fletcher and Little Children. "I was thinking, 'Why am I doing this? I don't want to copy myself; I want to do something new.' And I suddenly realized that the novel needed something else. I was basically summoning Tracy to help me write this book, because she was at the center of all these ideas [I was dealing with] about high school and fame and small-town politics."
The result is Tracy Flick Can't Win, which will be published June 7, 2022, from Scribner. (Get an exclusive look at the cover, designed by Jonathan Bush, below.) The new novel finds a middle-aged Tracy as a hard-working assistant principal at a suburban New Jersey high school. She's struggling with disappointment in the way her life has turned out when an opportunity for a promotion suddenly arises. It's a knowingly "counterintuitive" approach to Tracy, as Perrotta puts it, and a new twist on the ruthlessly driven character we met in Election.
"People think of her as a person of unstoppable ambition, and she's often compared to almost any successful female politician, from Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin," the author says. "But over all these years, I've run into women who say, 'I was Tracy Flick,' and they are not famous politicians. They're just ordinary women who clearly had this drive to succeed when they were in high school, but then found themselves in much more ordinary circumstances. I was really interested in that. It's fascinating to plumb the psychology of ambitious people who have to put their ambitions aside."
The passage of time hasn't just transformed the Tracy in the novel. In the 20-plus years since Election's film adaptation hit screens, Tracy Flick has taken on a life of her own in popular culture, largely powered by Witherspoon's indelible performance. (Even Perrotta admits he "can't think about Tracy without picturing Reese Witherspoon now.")
"It's been a very interesting challenge for me as a writer to reimagine a character who, in some sense, I lost control of," the author says with a laugh. "I very much drew on everything that was in the original book, but I think it was also enriched by Reese's performance, and by the way that the culture has been reinterpreting Tracy through a more feminist lens in recent years."
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And is it too late for Witherspoon to step back into the role? "That would be amazing," Perrotta says, laughing. "I think it's such a rich psychological challenge for an actor to think about how we change as we enter middle age and what connections we have with the person we were then."
Incidentally, he's already sent the actress, and Election director Alexander Payne, copies of the Tracy Flick Can't Win manuscript: "I just felt like Tracy is a shared property of all the people who worked on the movie," Perrotta says. "I'm waiting to hear [their response]."