"I'll Follow You"

Charlene Wang was born in Beijing and, after immigrating to the US when she was three, has lived in seven different cities from Los Angeles to Rockville to Biloxi. Graduating with a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College and a J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law, she worked as a litigator for six years. She participated in Catapult’s Novel Generator workshop. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her fiancé and their dog Winky.

Wang applied the Page 69 Test to I'll Follow You, her debut novel, with the following results:

When I agreed to do the Page 69 Test, I’d just gotten a stack of ARCs — advanced reader copies, which are usually pretty damn close to the final version of the book. Flipping to page 69, I felt a mixture of relief and vindication that there was plenty to talk about. The main conflict was there, between my protagonist Faith and her best friend from home, Kayla, who ghosts her after Faith is accepted into an elite college. There were playful nods to the dark academia subgenre, with Faith walking to her art conservation class while listening to a podcast on Donna Tartt. And there was a deepening sense of mystery and wonder, as Faith steps into the Observatory for the first time, and descends down the stairs to the drift of voices, the smell of turpentine and old canvas.

Then the final hardcovers arrived a few weeks later, and my page 69 had… moved. What had once been page 69 - my page 69; the perfect encapsulation of my themes - was now page 71.

Authors are often asked how similar they are to their characters. It occurred to me, during this mini-existential crisis, that I was more similar to Faith than I’d thought: no matter how arbitrary the test, we wanted to pass with flying colors.

Maybe that’s the point of the Page 69 Test — not the page itself, but what we as authors hope it reveals. Of course, browsers in a bookstore won’t know any of that. What they’ll see on the actual page 69 is a conversation between Faith and her supervisor, a junior named Regina, at the dining hall about rushing sororities. The dialogue is snappy, lighthearted, but Regina is also pulling at the threads of Faith’s reinvention yarn. Faith wants to be accepted, to be seen in a certain light.

Sounds like someone I know.

Visit Charlene Wang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue