When I was in high school, I picked up a copy of a book called “Youth in Revolt” from a used bookstore in Olympia, WA. Honestly, I picked it because the cover looked pretty interesting. Little did I know that I was about to read what was quickly becoming a cult-classic in the Bay area. “Youth in Revolt,” published in 1993 and written by C.D. Payne, consisted of the fictional diaries of the teenager, Nick Twisp. I became quite enamored with the book and even created the Official Nick Twisp Homepage (unfortunately – or fortunately – Internet Archive doesn’t have an archive of it online anywhere. I even had the chance to interview C.D. Payne when I was in highschool and down in San Francisco for a school trip. He thought it was great that I had created the very first webpage for his book – and we became friends.
If you’ve read the book (or when you see the movie) you’ll see that there is a theme of Airstream trailers in the book – and in college, my friend Tony (from Queer Messages) and I went on a roadtrip and got to visit C.D. Payne again and we actually stayed in Payne’s Airstream trailer!
The movie, featuring Michael Cera (from Juno and Arrested Development) as Nick Twisp, will be released on October 30th. It looks pretty good – I’m happy for C.D. Payne who has always been talking about his hopes that it would one day turn into a movie. While I can’t recommend the book without some hesitation (it was a little ‘racy’ for a high school student), the movie should be good and worth checking out.
