The Time of My Life: Writers on the Heartbreak, Hormones, and Debauchery of The Prom

by Rob Spillman (Editor)

Remember the ill-fitting tuxes, regrettable dresses, wilting corsages, cheap beer, and rented limos that marked the biggest, most-anticipated celebration of the school year? Remember when the whole world hung in the balance of just one night? Well, lots of your favorite writers do too, and they share the good, the bad, and the embarrassingly ugly in this wonderful compendium of personal reminiscences about prom night.
Rob Spillman has collected the prom memories of Cintra Wilson, Walter Kirn, Steve Almond, Samantha Dunn, Susie Bright, Mike Albo, and many others, capturing the magic, the misery, and the atrocious attire in a hilarious look at the simultaneously sublime and ridiculous event that has become the American right of passage.
Whether prom night is something you fondly remember or long to forget, The Time of My Life will bring it all back, capturing with wit and poignancy precisely what it was like to be young, hormonal, and dressed like a butler or bridesmaid.

219 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Rob Spillman is Editor and co-founder of Tin House, a sixteen-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon) literary magazine. He is the 2015 recipient of the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing as well as the 2015 VIDO Award from VIDA. Tin House is the recipient of the 2015 Firecracker Award for General Excellence and has been honored in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, O’Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and numerous other anthologies. He is also the Executive Editor of Tin House Books and co-founder of the Tin House Summer Workshop, now in its thirteenth year. His writing has appeared in BookForum, the Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Guernica, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Time, Vanity Fair, Vogue, among other magazines, newspapers, and essay collections. He is also the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, which was published in 2009. He is on the board of CLMP (the Community of Literary Magazines and Small Presses), the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council, Narrative4, and is the Chair of PEN’s Membership Committee. He has guest taught at universities around the world, including Queensland University in Brisbane, the Farafina Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria, the SLS Workshops in St. Petersburg, Russia and Nairobi, Kenya, the Catholic University of Santiago, Chile, the University of Florida, New York University, Brooklyn College, Amherst, Williams, and is currently a lecturer at Columbia University. His memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties, will be published by Grove Press in April, 2016.

Reviews

[Shana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do you ever pick up a book that looks amazing, but later realize that it’s just not that great? Well, this weekend’s let-down book was The Time of My Life: Writers on the Heartbreak, Hormones, and Debauchery of the Prom. The title and description caught my eye, but the stories were so disjointed and some were so abstract that I didn’t really get a prom feeling from it. Perhaps that was the point, but it wasn’t the guilty pleasure read I was seeking at the time. If you pick this book up, I’d recommend skimming.

[Eve · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so disappointed in this book. Some of these stories of writers' prom nights were just so outlandish. Many of them were hard to believe. The first story involves a man who takes BOTH of the exchange students to the prom, and OF COURSE a menage a trois ensues. Come on.

[Kacper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never been to the prom, and I've never even danced with anyone nor have I ever even touched alcohol so it was nice to read this book to see how the other 97% of the population lives. Just a suggestion: there should be a unicorn themed prom ;-)

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this for the essays by Rachel Resnick and Samantha Dunn, who know how to conceal a knife in folds of velvet.

[Therese · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't even finish this book. I didn't like it at all!

[Crystal · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm disappointed that I spent $4 on this book. There were only 2 or 3 essays that really held my interest. Most of the submissions had very little to do with Prom at all.