How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls
A-List Author Zoey Dean Returns With New Fiction Novel
How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls' Megan Smith finds love and a new understanding in Palm Beach.
Things are not looking good for Megan Smith. The recent Yale grad is $75,000 in debt and just lost her job writing captions for trashy tabloid Scoop magazine. When her former boss offers her a tutoring job that pays $12,000 for two months of work, plus room and board, she can't say no.
That same day, Megan boards the private jet that whisks her to Palm Beach, FL, to start her new job. She learns that she will be tutoring two notoriously spoiled rich girls for the next two months so that they pass their SATs. Their grandmother, the girls' caretaker since their parents died, offers her an additional $75,000 bonus if the girls are accepted into Duke.
Dowdy, frizzy haired Megan quickly discovers that she has her work cut out for her. The 17 year old twin girls are nasty to her every chance they get, and refuse to clear any time in their social calendars to study with her. They'd rather lounge around the pool and shop for designer clothes than sit down with a book and actually learn something. Megan tries various tactics, and when the house cook, Marco, tells her that the girls are driven by appearances and suggests that, in order to get through to them, she must become one of them.
When one of the girls Googles her and mistakes her for Megan Smith from Gladwyne, PA -- a society girl from a very prestigious family outside of Philadelphia -- Megan decides to play the part. She transform herself into "Main Line Megan," straightening her frizz with a flat iron and borrowing designer clothes from Marco (aka Zsa Zsa Lahore, the most glamorous drag queen in the county, who just happens to be her size). She gets a makeover from his VSO (very significant other) Keith, who is known around Palm Beach for "turning sows' ears into silk purses" and is booked a year in advance. Suddenly the girls are more amenable to her, and even sit down and even study with her. Megan thinks she has it all figured out, and decides to write an expose piece on the girls to get her journalism career a kick start. But when everyone finds out her true identity, Megan's motives are questioned and she's forced to retreat to New York early, and without the payout she desperately needs.
How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls is about the glamor and glitz of the privileged as much as it is about the middle class; not only does Megan start to question who the girls really are, she questions herself as well. Her stint in Palm Beach teaches her that, while she tries to be someone she isn't, she also isn't the girl she thought she was. The 293-page book is a quick read, but a fun and highly entertaining one.
Dean, Zoey
How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls
New York, Grand Central Publishing, July 3, 2007
