everything i know about love i learned from pop culture

plus the book cover reveal I've been waiting months to share!

I grew up in a suburb far enough away from Chicago that going to “the city” was something that happened twice a year when you boarded a school bus and endured a ten-hour trip to the Field Museum. Life in Rockford, Illinois was strip malls and chain restaurants, and for an unpopular kid whose parents weren’t all that interested in dragging her around to activities, I spent a lot of time consuming media.

I preferred the hallways of Sweet Valley High and 90210 to my actual high school. The hilarious Huxtable family hijinks to my own family drama. I watched Sixteen Candles, Grease, Dirty Dancing, and The Cutting Edge on repeat. From the pages of People, I became encyclopedic about Hollywood’s hottest men. (And Cosmopolitan provided an education for how to turn them on.) I studied pop culture like a roadmap that would lead me out of the suburbs and into the fabulous life I was sure was waiting for me. The directions seemed clear: be pretty, be thin, be fashionable, be charming, be sexy (but…