High School

Overview

High School is a shared memoir by Sara Quin, written together with her identical twin and musical partner Tegan, recounting the years before either of them had an audience. Set in Calgary, Alberta, during the grunge and rave-saturated 1990s, the book moves between their two voices, chapter by chapter, as each sister narrates the same stretch of adolescence from her own vantage point.

The twins' teenage years were marked by their parents' divorce, slipping grades, and the disorienting work of figuring out who they were apart from each other, even while sharing a house, a school, and eventually a guitar. Drugs, alcohol, crushes, and friendships fill the pages alongside the earliest, clumsy attempts at songwriting that would later become their career.

Because the chapters alternate, readers see the same arguments, parties, and heartbreaks refracted twice, once through Tegan's memory and once through Sara's, often disagreeing on small details. The effect is less a tidy origin story than a portrait of two people growing up side by side yet separately, each discovering her own sexuality and sense of self on her own timeline.

A Memoir About Memory and Becoming

What distinguishes High School from a conventional celebrity memoir is its refusal to smooth the twins' adolescence into a single, agreed-upon narrative. By letting Tegan and Sara each tell the same years independently, the book treats memory itself as unreliable and personal, even between people who were present for the same events. That structure also lets the book function as two coming-out stories rather than one, since the sisters' paths toward understanding their sexuality diverged even as their daily lives overlapped.

The book arrived well after Tegan and Sara Quin had become established recording artists and visible advocates for LGBTQ causes, and it was read by many fans and critics as an attempt to reclaim the messier, uncertain parts of their history that their public image had largely left out. Rather than framing their teenage years as a triumphant lead-up to success, the memoir lingers in the confusion, boredom, and risk-taking that preceded it, offering a more candid counterpoint to the polished narratives often attached to musicians once they've achieved recognition.

Why High School Has Been Challenged

The book's unflinching accounts of teenage drug use, drinking, and the chaotic parties that filled the twins' high school years have drawn the most scrutiny, with critics arguing that the material normalizes substance use for the younger readers who might pick up a book associated with popular musicians. Equally central to objections is the memoir's treatment of adolescent sexuality: both sisters describe their early same-sex attractions and relationships in direct, sometimes explicit terms, and some reviewers have characterized this content as too mature for school library collections serving minors. Underlying many challenges is a broader discomfort with a memoir that presents queer identity as something explored through trial and error during the turbulent teenage years, rather than something settled or sanitized. According to records in this catalog, the book has been the subject of challenges in 1 state and 3 school districts.