High School: A Memoir

This account of the pains and pleasures of dirtbag queer-girl adolescence is everything you could want from a memoir: honest and hilarious, dishy and sweet, smart and self-aware and utterly charming. What a gift to get this view of Tegan and Sara as sisters, as friends, and as artistic collaborators, as they were becoming musical icons, and-more importantly-themselves
Elegant and evocative . . . High School tells their story from 15 to 18 when they first took drugs, got girlfriends and picked up guitars -- Rebecca Nicholson * Guardian *
What a gift to read the coming of age story of the brilliant Tegan and Sara. High School gives us a glimpse into the struggles and triumphs of both sisters as individuals and an evolving band. Their vulnerability, honesty and compassion, bursts through, and I know will make countless people feel less alone. It is so important for the LGBTQ+ community to have memoirs like this to be able to recognize themselves and be inspired to follow their truth. Oh what I would have done to have this book in high school. I am endlessly grateful to Tegan and Sara for giving so much to this world
To navigate the experiential landscape of high school is always an emotional minefield. To have Tegan and Sara unabashedly share the perspective of young lesbians is a rare and invaluable gift. The kind of empathetic education our society is starved for
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever listened to a song by Tegan and Sara, that while not only are they able to convey the raw and complex emotions of the high school experience, the aimlessness of suburban life and the exhilaration of finding your way out, they also speak universal truths about intimacy between families and sisters, friends and lovers. They've captured a time and a place so perfectly, I can't exactly be sure that I wasn't there
Intense, vulnerable and life-affirming. Tegan and Sara take us back through their whirlwind journey, densely packed with the intricate complications and the envious, unspoken connection of growing up an identical twin
A genius memoir. Tegan and Sara are massively gifted songwriters, so it shouldn't have shocked me like it did. There's simply nothing like it. It's a completely original, utterly gripping, gorgeously written and captivating memoir that must be read. Tegan and Sara are bold, brilliant storytellers. High School is the freshest, most beautiful and fearlessly powerful coming-of-age memoir
With their music, Tegan and Sara offer listeners a glimpse at a specific time and place. In High School, they throw the door open and allow readers the opportunity to become fully immersed in their world. Tegan and Sara's stories of first loves, self discovery, and the insights into their relationship with each other are deeply moving and relatable. They never hold back from the absolute authenticity they are known for. I never wanted it to end
High school is a drag, but it's also a revelation, a space to craft your identity and, for Tegan and Sara Quin, a destiny-defining place. Tegan and Sara have consolidated first experiences, acid trips, queer loves, and losses in their blistering new memoir High School . . . A glorious, warts-and-all coming-of-age story . . . For music fans and young queer people to hold close
Candid, tender, courageously honest, and heartbreakingly familiar; I could see myself and my own experience reflected in these stories, more so than in anything else I've ever read. Reading this book moved me deeply
High School highlights the indisputable fact that Tegan and Sara were never just musicians-they are master storytellers. In reflecting on that torturous span of time spent agonizing over one's body, friendships, parents, and desires, this book highlights how high school is less of a place or memory but a metaphor for uncertainty, and underlines the salvation that can only be found in music. High School foreshadows the beginning of a rich and riveting literary career
This book is one of the most interesting and brave coming-of-age stories I have read in many years. Tegan and Sara reveal the confusion, the unraveling of personal truths, the fear, the excitement, the shame and the seclusion that many of us endure as we make our way through the world. This is also a book about how music saves people, how music gives us a voice and a reason to keep going
This book is the LSD-fueled, wallet-chained, Kurt Cobain-inspired handbook of how to become young, queer rock stars, written by chapter-swapping twins who I wish I had read when I was in high school. This book would have changed everything. I recommend reading it under the covers with a flashlight, and hiding it from your mother
High School embodies the singular gift of words leaping off of the page and becoming feelings, rattling around in the hearts and minds of a reader. The truth of nostalgia is that it must have multiple lenses to operate in its most flourishing form. Much like in their music, in this book, the voices of Tegan and Sara are two distinct bodies of water flowing into the same harmonious river, spilling through the echoing hallways of old high schools, through the bedrooms of first heartbreaks, through the old haunts that remind you of your own. This book is a triumph of memory, affection, and engaging writing
Written with passion and clarity in chapters that alternate between sisters, it's at once testimony to the way life seldom turns out as expected - and the strength of an emotional bond unbroken since birth * Q Magazine *
A transcendent coming of age story for our times * Q Magazine *