Teen Life Among Manhattan’s Ruling Class

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A How Long Gone listener was nice enough to give me a subscription to her excellent newsletter, Ruby’s Recs, in which she, a voracious reader and alumni of the Manhattan bookstore Three Lives & Company, doles out book recommendations. The descriptions are concise and easy to parse, so when her “Best Reads of 2023” list hit my inbox, I bought a few titles that struck me. The first was My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin, which I devoured. It is an excellent coming-of-age story with a few good twists and turns.

I also bought Quiet Street: On American Privilege by Nick McDonell, a graduate of the Buckley School, Harvard, and Oxford. McDonell was educated in rarefied air. Significant (and often old) money, secrecy, and legacy surrounded him. His mother, Joanie, is a writer, and his father, Terry McDonell, was a top editor at Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. His family was cultured and interesting, but unlike most of his classmates, his father didn’t run an international bank or hedge fund.

McDonell published his first novel, Twelve when he was 17. The book focuses on disaffection, despair, drug use, and violence among a group of wealthy Manhattan teenagers during winter break, material that McDonell was uniquely qualified to write. Hunter S. Thompson, a family friend, blurbed it. The book was a massive success and, in 2010, was adapted into a film starring Kiefer Sutherland and Chace Crawford. Since then, he has published novels, reports on several wars, and even an illustrated book about climate change.

Quiet Street is short (144 pages); I read it on a flight from New York City to Los Angeles last week. McDonell places a microscope on his privilege, exploring how the ruling class hoards wealth and power. He talks about taboo subjects directly. He interviews his Buckley classmates, reveals how much he was paid to write the book, and writes about volunteering at the morgue and taking a safari in Tanzania. Many of us are fascinated with the 1 percent, and McDonell is happy to tell the reader all about it. McDonell was home in Brooklyn, enjoying his time as a new father, when I called him from Los Angeles to discuss his motivations, the replication of the status quo, and the human condition.

GQ: Many people who grew up in Manhattan live in Brooklyn as adults because they want to escape a little bit.

Nick McDonell: It's not that far away.

No, it’s not. Living in New York exposes you to the kind of stuff in your book at some level, if you're in a creative industry. But it's a departure from what you usually write about.

Well, first, thanks for reading. I decided to write this book because... I talk about it a little bit in the beginning, but I had been working on conflicts abroad and in the summer of 2020—the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic—these things were in the conversation. I was in New York, thinking about the inequality that I grew up around, so the larger conversation was inspiring and returned me to these questions that I first addressed a long time ago but had yet to be as focused on for some time.

Did you feel like you were exposing something, or thinking, like, This is my story to tell?

A little bit. There are no great revelations in the book. Partly, it was about using my life as material that I would report on to illuminate a world that is not so often discussed critically from the inside.

One of my favorite parts was when you talked anonymously to your former classmates. That puts it all in perspective—how you can have the same experience as someone else but have entirely different takeaways from that experience.

That was one of the most interesting parts of doing the book. And for anybody, if you'd like to give yourself something to think about for an afternoon, go talk to your ninth-grade classmates.

Do you think any of them were surprised that you were doing this, or were they resistant? Or was everybody down to play ball?

Of the 15 guys in my class, nine responded to my query. And of those nine, I think, six agreed to be recorded. I got a pretty good hit rate. Everybody was happy to talk about it, and were, in their different ways and to different degrees, thoughtful about it.

It felt like they considered it versus just giving you whatever to get you to leave them alone.

Yeah. And that's what's complicated about being in this world. People have affection for each other for so long after. The ties are so tight because [that school community] was so small. That can make it difficult to have critical conversations.

From what I could understand, there was a lot of cultural cachet with your parents and upbringing. It was cool, but different from My dad's the president of Merrill Lynch. Everybody wants to be who they are not. If you're a finance guy of the right kind, you respect the arts, have affection for them, and participate in them in the best way you can. And I think that that allows for things like this to happen, where there's another, not like a scholarship student, but another world where the George Plimpton of it all is so attractive that it lets you in.

Yeah, that's true. And that goes back to the Medicis in Italy in some ways. From what I can tell, at these schools, because it has gotten so much more expensive in Manhattan… because the inequality is so much greater, magazine editors like my father was, tend not, I think, to send their kids to Buckley anymore simply because they can’t afford it. I think it has become more finance-oriented like all of Manhattan has over the last 35 years.

Yeah, that's true. Maybe I romanticize it a little bit, but as a person who—I love my parents, we get along great, etc.—but they aren't cool. Money is a “leg up,” but I also think that in your case, being raised by your parents as you described them, that's why you turned out this way, not because of money.

Are any parents cool? [But] I know exactly what you mean. They’re remarkable people.

Cool is maybe the wrong word, but the idea of being able to relate to what I'm into at that high school age—that idea is so foreign because I was into punk and hardcore. My parents thought I was insane. It's like there was no common ground. And I think it allows you to develop differently when you're being exposed to good things and have a little help there versus seeking it out all the time.

Where are you from?

Atlanta. Pretty idyllic suburban upbringing, 30 minutes outside of the city. And I got into my own stuff that caused some tension in the parental relationship during this age that you talk about in Quiet Street, but that's common.

Did this book set you on a new path as a writer, or are you returning to some of the more heavy topics?

I'm back doing what I was doing beforehand. I spent a lot of the last year in Ukraine and am working on a project about that conflict right now.

Did this feel almost easy compared to what you usually have to deal with, or was it even more challenging because it's personal?

The personal element of it is different, and I hadn't done that much of it, so it was a challenge in that sense. But Quiet Street and this [next] book are, I hope, part of the same larger project, which is about the uses of power and elite power and how that affects people or not. The previous book, Civilian Casualties, was in some ways about that, too. Even though they look at different geographies and groups, the concern behind many of the things I'm doing boils down to the same kind of problems. So, I hope it's all on the same beat. At least I tell myself that when I'm off doing these different things. I'm trying to stitch it together.

As Manhattan and these schools go, what changes do you think have happened since you were there, besides the prices going up?

I think that the language around inclusivity and diversity has changed, but that the core of these schools is the replication of the status quo and the maintenance of power among a certain set of people in a certain economic class. And so both things are important to recognize. There can be change, but also essential stasis.

Do you have a family?

I do, I actually recently became a father. That’s why I was 25 minutes late.

How recently are we talking?

A little over a month.

How’s it feeling so far, besides the lack of sleep?

It feels good.

Would you put your son or daughter into one of these schools that you talk about in your book, or would they be better served elsewhere?

I am not going to send them to these schools.

You’re not.

I don’t know. That is far in advance. I’m considering the next diaper change. I try not to future trip, but in this case, there are ideas I have about how to try to participate in the community that, I think, will preclude me from sending these kids to a school like that. I don’t know what it will look like, and it will depend on the kids.

I ask because I assume it was a decision you had made.

When I talk to people about this book, especially in New York, where the question of private education is so alive for a certain economic group, people really want to talk about it. I think people are trying to figure out if they feel okay about sending their kids there. That has been one of the reactions to this book. People of means want to talk to me, and I get the sense that sometimes they want me to say what they're doing is okay. It always depends on the situation, but I think that if people are feeling uncomfortable with those kinds of decisions, it's worth examining why they might be.

Have a lot of people wanted to talk to you about their experiences?

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Do you see a world for you with a use for that, or are you done with this topic?

I think there could be. I'm having some really interesting conversations with people about it, and I don't know that I'll be writing about those things, but it all feels like interesting stuff.

You just started a conversation that people probably wanted to have, and now they have a reason to talk about it, whereas before, it might not have felt as comfortable.

This is the little tiny part of a much bigger conversation going on about inequality in the country. People do talk about it, and the question is being around people who do.

Because there always is the option to just not talk about it.

Yeah. And that’s where to generalize. As a country, I think we are encouraged not to talk about it. Not necessarily by people who get on a soapbox and say, ”Don't think about this,”" but there is so much other noise and entertainment around politics.

I also think we're at a point, maybe more so than ever before, where “every man for himself” is the vibe.

Did you see the movie Leave the World Behind? I saw that the other night, and I thought it was fun. Dystopian end of the world, with every man for himself.

That's how it feels. I wonder if that's going to change or just get worse.

It sounds to me like a human condition question.

Originally Appeared on GQ