Chris Colin

by Interview by Natalie Hope McDonald

Just like on the old Walkman, Chris Colin, a former Salon.com editor and McSweeney's contributor, hit reverse. He stepped into the way-back machine to find out what happened to his fellow graduating class of 1993. After doing exhaustive interviews 10 years after the pomp and circumstance, Colin manages to do what the history books couldn't possibly: Characterize a generation one person at a time with What Really Happened to the Class of '93: Start-Ups, Dropouts, and Other Navigations Through An Untidy Decade (Broadway Books, 304 pp., $22.95). And while Colin's own class may be an unlikely petri dish to cull from, the stories manage to create not only a retrospective about an era characterized by a saxophone-tooting president and a suicidal grunge-rock god, but also a moribund lesson about expectations — that none are guaranteed.

Colin's mission may be uncannily reminiscent of the glut of Generation X essays from the 1990s, but his hindsight provides a valuable glimpse into a lesser-analyzed population of — surprise — not-always-floundering 20-somethings. He picks up with nonfiction where Douglas Coupland left off years ago.

City Paper: To many people, especially those in their late 20s, 1993 doesn't necessarily seem that long ago. What convinced you that following up with your old classmates would be significant?

Chris Colin: As one of the classmates in the book observes, more happens in a year — in a single day — than ever before; for technological reasons, for media reasons and for general shrinking-planet reasons, history seems to proceed nowadays in fast-forward. So while a mere decade out of high school shouldn't be that much time, these particular last 10 years ushered in about a dozen entirely new eras. When we graduated, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, O.J. was the worst thing many of us could imagine, the Internet was right around the corner and we had this swell young president with a saxophone in his hands to get excited about. … My classmates saw their worlds redefined several times over since graduation.

CP: How was your graduating class different — or not — from other classes of 1993?

CC: A lot of people ask if my class can really be considered representative of other classes around the country, since ours was such a peculiar school. Absolutely not, I say — this was a science and tech magnet school, and we were total geeks. But the more I talked to people, the more I realized that all high schools — public, private, magnet, charter, rich, poor — have something fundamental in common. We're all teenagers there. … We're all crammed into our boxes — sometimes quite willingly, of course — and we all spend the next five or 50 years trying to crawl out.

CP: Which classmate surprised you the most?

CC: I was shocked by all our stories, because every human story is shocking if you listen to enough of it, but what I hear again and again from readers is that my classmate Matt Farbman's 10 years were perhaps the most incredible. Matt described himself as an unhappy kid in high school. A brilliant but somewhat antisocial computer geek is how others recalled him — uncomfortable, they said, in his skin. Well, 10 years later Matt has become Anne, a wonderful, happy, decent, thoughtful person who devotes her life to improving the world. It's an incredible story, the way she describes the transformation, and certainly not the sort of adulthood we'd expected at 16.

CP: How do you think the current political climate will inevitably influence the class of 2004?

CC: I have no idea how the class of 2004 relates to Bush, and if it's anything like the relationship my class had to Clinton. I'd like to think he makes people just as mad and just as happy as Clinton made us — and that this will get people to vote — but I'm such a fuddy-duddy these days that I'm skeptical. And don't get me started on low-rise jeans …

CP: Your conclusions are not particularly optimistic. You characterize the swing from then until now as a "marked descent." Why?

CC: I'm not always optimistic about the world in general — did I mention low-rise jeans? — but I am optimistic about my classmates, and my generation. A lot of things are going wrong in the country now, and my classmates have been rocked back on their heels to some extent. But seeing how we've begun to deal with our personal issues, I think we have deep reserves of fierceness.

CP: How was your 10-year reunion received?

CC: The book was a kind of buildup to the official 10-year reunion, which is the last chapter. It was a strange thing — everyone expects high school reunions to be the site of huge confrontations: A fistfight in the parking lot with the old bully, or a big, sloppy kiss from the person with the locker next door. In reality, reunions aren't nearly that intimate, which is why I did my interviews elsewhere. There is a confrontation at the high school reunion, but invariably it's a confrontation between the new self and the old.