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What we know is that teenagers are capable of anything—from setting Olympic records to suicide—and when they recognize the extent of their newfound potential, they are primed, biologically, to act on it.
Piper Weiss, You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession
I am not who I thought I would be, but that is what happens when you look ahead. All you see are the possibilities for change. When you look back, you see what you've held on to, what was stronger than outside influence, what you carried with you all these years. Maybe it's something you need.
Piper Weiss, You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession
You All Grow Up and Leave Me - Piper Weiss
Summary: A combination memoir of Weiss girlhood in the 90s and true crime story of her tennis coach, who stalked and attempted to abduct another student when Weiss was fourteen.
Quote: “Tennis has a renewed sex appeal with a narrative to match. Agassi, the stud; Pete Sampras, the handsome young underdog. The epic rivalry of Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. And the prodigy, Jennifer Capriati—who, a few months earlier, replaced Mary Lou Retton as every little girl’s Olympic hero, ringing in the nineties in her Stars and Stripes windbreaker at the Barcelona games, raising her gold medal as high as her hair-sprayed wall of bangs. In a year, eighteen-year-old Seles will be stabbed on the court by a deranged Graf fan, and in two years Capriati will become a cautionary tale, but in this moment, both represent tennis’s emerging new star: the teenage girl.”
My rating: 4.0/5.0 Goodreads: 3.28/5.0
Review: Weiss balances the two sides of her narrative well. She presents a heart-aching portrait of what it was like to be a teenage girl, vulnerable and in desperate need of approval. It is also an open-eyed portrait of her tennis coach, Gary Wilensky, a man that she once had great affection for but now understands as a predator. She isn’t sympathetic to Wilensky—as the scope of his crimes become clear throughout the story it becomes more or less impossible to be—but she’s honest about the appeal he had as a coach and mentor when she was young, using the evidence of her experience to reinforce the factual narrative about how Wilensky operated as a child predator. It can feel rambling in places, but the two narrative threads coalesce into a surprising and powerful conclusion.
The audiobook, narrated by Brittany Pressley, is full of personality.
Read-alike: For a similar mix of memoir and true crime, try We Keep the Dead Close - Becky Cooper
Reluctant Reader Wednesday: You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession by Piper Weiss
When Piper Weiss was 14 years old, her tennis coach killed himself after attempting to kidnap one of his students. Piper was filled with questions about what happened, both when she was a teenager and then years later when she started thinking about him again. Along the way she had a lot of time to think about her choices, his choices, and how people’s choices could shape or even destroy their lives. She uses this book to reflect back on her own life as a teenager and adult, as well as discovering how Gary Wilensky became such a dangerous and unstable man.
Even though this book is in adult collections, I feel that this would be equally valuable to a high school audience. A large portion of this book focuses on Piper’s experiences as a teenager, as she spends time with her friends, fights with her mother, and finds a friend and confidante in her tennis coach. Give this book to teens and adults who are ready for a compelling true crime story that will grab their attention from the very first page.
Sometimes, what you believed you’d grow out of, you end up growing into.
- You All Grow Up And Leave Me by Piper Weiss
I have always been drawn to the company of my own obsessions—dissecting the reasons behind them, following the trails they leave behind. Not all obsessions are destructive. Some force you to confront your privilege. They project your fears through a clearer lens and reveal patterns you hadn't noticed before. Some even come alive in your mind, so that neither of you are ever really alone.
Piper Weiss, You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession
When you grow up, you're supposed to stop believing in monsters, but there is one inside my desk drawer, buried under a stack of police reports. She is folded at the limbs and flattened onto a torn-out magazine page.
Piper Weiss, You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession
The onus is on us to change, be better, be less like who we are. We're at fault for carving to our impulses and encouraged to steer ourselves toward more calculated decisions. Once we called this pursuit purity, now we call it evolving. But as much as women are expected to override their own urges, men are expected to cave in to them. If they do, we wonder if we are somehow to blame. If they don't, we wonder the same.
Piper Weiss, You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession
