Plot
Flannery Culp is a senior at Roewer High School in San Francisco. Over the course of the year, Flan records the events of her life in a diary - which, after some heavy editing by Flannery herself, some years after the fact, becomes the narrative. She and her seven close friends refer to themselves as "The Basic Eight"; they are an exclusive clique, hosting the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, and regular dinner and garden parties, as they cope with the stresses of their final year of high school. The plot begins in letters written by Flannery to her love interest, Adam, while on summer vacation, and reaches a dark conclusion in which lives of the members of the Basic Eight are turned upside down by revealed secrets, horrifying self-discoveries, and murder. The Basic Eight consists of: Flannery Culp, the protagonist; Kate Gordon, the Queen Bee; Lily Chandly, a classical musician; Douglas Wilde, Flan's ex-boyfriend; V__, whose rich parents have had his name expunged from the story; Jennifer Rose Milton, a name so beautiful that Flan must always write it out in full; Gabriel Gallon, the kindest boy in the world; Natasha Hyatt, Flan's exuberant and beautiful best friend.
In Handler's third novel, Adverbs, Kate is mentioned as the girlfriend to a minor character, Garth, in the chapter "Soundly". In The Basic Eight, Kate frequently gives relationship advice from her only, two-week relationship with Garth, much to Flannery's annoyance.
Read more about this topic: The Basic Eight
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)