A Brown education may have prepared Andrea Siegel '01 well for her flourishing career as a novelist - she's published two books since graduating - but her Brown days were defined just as much by an obsession with grilled cheese sandwiches from the Sharpe Refectory .
"I ate a grilled cheese sandwich at the Ratty every single day," Siegel said. "I was obsessed with them. I ran my day around them. I loved them more than I love some of my relatives."
In the four years since she left College Hill and her beloved grilled cheese sandwiches behind, Siegel has authored two novels, the second of which takes place at Brown.
An Irvine, Calif., native, Siegel lives in Los Angeles and is working on a master's degree from Bennington College while teaching a course at the University of California, Los Angeles Extension.
At Brown, Siegel concentrated in modern culture and media studies and hoped to pursue a screenwriting career. She spent the first few months after graduation trying to win back a college boyfriend in New York City, but less than two weeks after her move to the city, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred. Though Siegel was working at the CBS soap opera "As the World Turns," she had difficulty finding a desirable job in post-Sept. 11 New York and soon moved back to Los Angeles.
Her screenplays were not always well-received, and agents often said her scripts' characters were too developed, leaving little room for a director's interpretation. Siegel then decided to try her hand at writing novels instead.
"I tend to dwell on small details, which is not particularly your job when you're a screenwriter," Siegel said. "I really wanted to be responsible for the entire image of what I was putting out. Screenplays are more of a sketchy enterprise, an outline for someone else."
In April 2002, less than a year after graduating, Siegel started her first novel.
Like the Red PandaSiegel's first novel hit stores in May 2004. Titled "Like the Red Panda," the novel is set in her hometown of Irvine and is inspired by her own high school experience. Though she attended the town's public high school, Siegel said the school's culture is more like a private school.
"I was an AP student. That's kind of what the novel is about: the stupidness of AP - working so, so hard to build your future at 16 or 17, when you don't even know what your future is," she said.
The book focuses on a suicidal teenage girl, Stella Parrish, struggling to cope with her final two weeks at an Irvine high school.
"I had always wanted to write an iconic female character," Siegel said, adding that few books detail a female protagonist's psychology. "I wanted a psychologically troubled book, not like the Brontes and Jane Austen girls I read in high school who are just concerned with things like marriage."
The book's emotional honesty received a strong response from Siegel's young audience.
"It got a crazy response," she said. "I got a lot of e-mails from suicidal teenagers. ...The first (novel) is somewhat autobiographical, and it will always be closer to my heart ... but the second one was definitely more of a challenge."
To Feel StuffAfter finding creative inspiration in her high school experience for her debut novel, Siegel looked to another familiar place for her second book.
"I like setting books in places where I've been so they have more personal meaning to me," she said. "I don't think I could have written the novels had I not gone to Brown. I spent so much time studying how narrative and language work."
Her second novel, "To Feel Stuff," which hit stores nationwide in August, is set at Brown - specifically, inside the University's infirmary.
The book's main character, Elodie Harrington, is a Brown undergraduate who gets sick so frequently that she permanently moves into the infirmary. During her time there, a boy named Chess Hunter also comes to be treated for knee injuries, and the two students begin an affair. The book also involves a fictional University professor, Max Kirschling, who works toward resolving Elodie's perpetual illnesses.
Siegel said the inspiration for this novel came from a friend of hers at Brown who slept with a prostitute while traveling in Amsterdam and returned to Providence with what Siegel referred to as a "mysterious disease."
"He lived in the infirmary for a while," she said. "He had endless surgeries and they didn't know what it was ... I went to visit him and discovered this new world - I had no idea an infirmary even existed."
In addition to its setting in Health Services, the book also has a scene that takes place at the Verney-Woolley Dining Hall and another at Commencement.
"I really kind of miss (Brown)," Seigel said. "When I was there I kept having this fantasy of 'the real world' that I wanted to be in. But now that I'm out, I really value that luxury and great education."
Seigel said one of her fondest memories of Brown was driving the latest shift of the SafeRIDE shuttle.
"On Thursday nights, I'd get to watch men come into CVS on Thayer and secretly restock it like Christmas elves. There was usually a drunk guy in the back of the shuttle, trying to convince me he was sober," she said. "I liked those nights."
