Larry Doyle can seem a little obsessed with high school. He is 48, and the winner of two Emmy Awards for his writing on The Simpsons, but his resume still lists this achievement: National Merit Scholar, Buffalo Grove High School, 1976.
Doyle would also like you to know that he graduated 13th in his class of 513, but that some of the people above him took easy classes. He wrote for the school paper, acted in student plays and was on the speech team (but not debate: he had his limits). It goes without saying that he still has dreams set at his alma mater.
In one that occurred two years ago, he found himself giving a speech at his high school graduation and, in front of everyone, declaring his love for a classmate. The dream became a book, I Love You, Beth Cooper, published this month. And the book has been optioned for a movie.
Holding onto high school, then, has been good to Larry Doyle. But what about the rest of us? Why can't we shake those formative years?
"It seems like most people have one of two experiences in high school," says Doyle, who lives in Baltimore with his wife and three young children. "They either come out of it with a lot of bitter resentment at all the people they need to get back at or it's like the glory days that they can never revisit."
In Doyle's book, names were changed to protect the innocent (he did love a Beth, but his publisher wouldn't let him use her last name). Many of the experiences of the characters, though, are his own: Doyle told scary stories about teenagers, with hooks for hands, who haunted a favorite makeout spot. He raced down a dark country road with the headlights off. And he once had to stop kissing a girl because mosquitoes were ravaging his face.
"I let them bite for a long time before I gave up," he says with a touch of pride.
Doyle's career has been marked by such persistence. As a medical reporter for United Press International in the '80s, he wrote 1,200 stories one year. He kept writing short stories and humor pieces despite continued rejections from magazines like Playboy and The New Yorker (which now publishes his work regularly). He's written more than a dozen screenplays, although only two were made into movies, and they both bombed.
While an editor at Spy in 1992, Doyle suggested the magazine run 1,000 reasons not to vote for George H.W. Bush for re-election.
