Isabel Kaplan

Media

Los Angeles Times
...Being a novel, Hancock Park and its characters are fictional, but there are more than a few parallels with Kaplan's real life. The author grew up in Hancock Park, also has divorced parents and attended the prestigious Marlborough School -- an "independent, urban day school for young women grades 7-12" that delivers "a college preparatory curriculum in an environment imbued with high ethical values," according to its website.

In the book, he school isn't called Marlborough. It's Whitbred. And the main character is Becky Miller, a people-pleasing bottle blond who's been prescribed more medications than an average geriatric to deal with the ills of the well-to-do -- namely anxiety and depression.

"I think most teenagers, no matter where they grow up or live, probably have a feeling of, "Do I fit in here?" What I tried to present in the novel is that feeling of making sense of the abnormal, and having the abnormal treated as normal," Kaplan said during a recent visit home.

In town to spend a week visiting friends and family, she was also taking Hollywood meetings about bringing Hancock Park to the screen.

Written during her senior year of high school, Hancock Park isn't Kaplan's first book. She wrote her first short story at 7 and her first full-length novel when she was 2 -- a book she tried to sell to Judith Regan, the one-time publishing industry powerhouse with whom Kaplan's mother is friends.

Although Regan passed on Kaplan's first book, she was instrumental in selling Hancock Park -- a departure for the woman best known for publishing celebrity autobiographies.

"She read it and said, 'This is great. Why don't we have coffee this week?' By the end of the week, I had a book deal and I'd only written 15 pages," said Kaplan, who has spent the past school year honing her writing skills with author and visiting Harvard professor Jamaica Kincaid, who has since moved on to teach at Claremont McKenna College.

"The most important thing I've learned is just to keep writing and to read a lot," said Kaplan, who is heeding Kincaid's advice.

Kaplan is at work on a second novel.

-- Susan Carpenter, July 31, 2009