me and mia - sara
Author’s Note: This letter is addressed to New York City-dwelling, romance novel-writing, forever climbing the Jungian tree of self-actualisation Mia Thermopolis from The Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot.
Dear Mia,
I’m writing this letter because I wanted to thank you for writing your diaries. My first one, which was really your fourth, was given to me by my Grandpa. He’d actually bought it to read for himself, but left it on the coffee table in the living room. I snaffled it up before he noticed and read it in a hazy rush. I remember laughing out loud (a feat only previously achieved by Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging) at your complaint that the palace you were staying in had a terrible internet connection.
I kept reading and realised that being a princess was the least remarkable thing about you. You were funny, kind, unconfident and clever. You lived in the coolest city in the world and were terrible at maths. I laughed at your observations on Britney Spears, The OC and made-for-TV films starring Tori Spelling. I liked you and I felt like I was like you.
I crossed my arms and sulked when Anne Hathaway (I love her but she’s not you) donned a Genovian tiara. My teenage tirade against The Princess Diaries films, to anyone who would listen, had four main strands:
Mia lives in Greenwich Village, not San Francisco.
Why isn’t Tina Hakim-Baba, Mia’s romance novel obsessed second-in-command best friend, here?
Mia’s dad isn’t dead.
Grandmere is supposed to a louche European aristocrat who chain-smokes, speaks exclusively in French and drinks Sidecars all day in her suite at the Plaza.
In my mid-teens I dismissed you: the endless chatter about your boyfriend — Michael Moscovitz may be one of the greatest love interests ever written, but after six books I was pretty done with your circular worrying about him — and your insecurity about unpopularity was boring me. I relegated you to the back of my bookshelf, then to a box in the garage, but couldn’t bear to send you to the charity shop.
Bits of you stayed with me. When boring men at parties asked me how I knew about psychology, I would shrug and give some throw-away line, but I knew it was because I’d absorbed your diary’s jokes about Freud and Jung. Even now I make jokes about self-actualisation on Twitter and know that nobody but you would find it funny.
It was another girl who pushed your diaries back into my hands. I was in my second year at university watching Jean-Luc Godard films and trying to get into Thomas Pynchon (a failed attempt); you had changed too. Michael had moved to Japan, your best friend, Lilly, had turned her back on you and you were in therapy. All those tics, obsessive thoughts, constant worrying and writing down your feelings were clues towards your nervous collapse.
Then, with a little distance from you, I started to understand: your diaries are a complex portrayal of what it feels like, really feels like, to be a teenage girl. All the class anxiety which I felt growing up in a newly-built big house in a working-class town was mimicked in your life as you attended an exclusive private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan whilst you were from a single-parent artistic family in Greenwich Village (which, as I know from Gossip Girl, is class struggle at its most desperate). The imposter syndrome which sometimes made me want to hide under my desk was there in how you constantly felt like you had only been given opportunities because you were royal. You gave me a strong backbone when dealing with society’s shaming of girls who love popular culture — a major theme of one of your diaries is battling with an English teacher who tells you to stop relying on ‘slick pop culture references’. And you were lonely. But you made me feel less lonely.
I read your final diary, which was sombre and sadder than I was expecting, in the dead days after finishing my final university exams. You hadn’t written in your diary for over a year: you were contemplating dumping your boyfriend, who was obsessed with the filmic oeuvre of Sean Penn (I’ve never been able to watch one of his films without smirking and thinking of you), you were hiding your college acceptance letters and had written your first historical romance novel. Your final diary, Forever Princess, is a victory for teenage girls who feel like they’re battling against the whole world: you won’t grow out of it, you’ll grow into it and change it.
I went to New York for the first time last year. Me and my fellow Princess Diaries fan, Louisa, devised a walking tour dedicated to you. We stood outside the Plaza hotel and imagined your princess lessons, we walked along the Upper East Side and wondered where Lilly and Michael lived, we went to Rockefeller Centre to see where you went a dommed ice-skating date, we picked out your mum’s loft in Greenwich Village. When stuffing ourselves with pizza in Bushwick, we planned our Netflix adaptation of your diaries. It’ll be filmed on location in New York and will star Tom Hiddleston (have you seen his beard? He looks like he could play depressed European playboy prince very well) as your dad and Catherine Deneuve as Grandmere. There won’t be a makeover scene, Grandmere will be pantomime cruel, you’ll talk about Riverdale and Ariana Grande with Lilly and Tina and you’ll be played by a gangly unknown actress.
I hope you’re keeping well and the princessing is going OK (are you head of state now?). Did you go to Harry and Meghan’s wedding? Is Kate Middleton's hair as shiny as it looks on the telly? Are you still writing romance novels? What did you think of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before?
Write soon. I really wish you were on Twitter.
Lots of love,
Sara x
Sara Sherwood is a writer and reader living in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. She has a TinyLetter, Young Adult Affliction, where she talks about books and her feelings and you can find her on Twitter @sarasherwood.