My Year of Sidecars and Self Actualization
On The Princess Diaries, my fondest childhood memories, and feminism being cool for the first time.
Happy Birthday Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo!
Ten years ago I was nine years old; I found a box set of five books at my small town's annual library book sale. They were sitting under the boiler, as the kid’s books were relegated to the dank boiler room, while the adults got at least flickering lights over their heads in the recreation room. The boiler room was an unfinished basement, lit by lamps plugged into extension cords, causing a spiderweb to be made on the floor out of extension cords.
I had tripped on one of the extension cords, which was how I had ended up on my hands and knees on a floor so damp and cold I thought it must be dirt. As I began to get up, glancing left and right for spiders, I saw it. A sparkly, purple box, embossed with golden words spelling THE PRINCESS DIARIES I-V. I pulled the box set out and clutched it to my chest, more carefully making my way across the booby-trapped floor to find my mother.
My mother, predictably, was sorting through the books with single-mindedness as if one of them contained the cure to cancer, or her loud-mouthed nine-year-old daughter. My little brother and my father were nowhere to be found, presumably having picked out a book each and left. But my mother and I were no such fools. We knew that the gems of the book sale were hidden, not on purpose, but by the accidents that drive all fateful encounters.
To this day, my parents (my father) refuse to let me pay for my books— not that I’m complaining— and at the book sale, this is especially true. All kid’s books are .50 cents and all adult books between $1-3 ($1 for softcovers; $2.50 for hardcovers with no dust jacket/considerable wear; $3 for a regular hardcover). It was a magical place, and one of the only times of the year it was 100% guaranteed that my mom would buy me what I wanted.
I waited under the checkout counter —a white folding table currently manned by my favourite substitute teacher, Ms Ralph— while my mother finished perusing the books. She gave me $2.50 (obviously this was a cash-only establishment) and I handed it over to Ms Ralph, who gave me a free bookmark and a pat on the hand in return for my troubles.
I walked with my mom to where we had parked our car (in my crush’s driveway) and put the books in the trunk. I put the Princess Diaries into the backseat and walked back to the festival with my mother, holding her hand and asking about maple cotton candy.
Once at the festival, I forgot all about my books, too busy playing the game my friend’s older brother ran (free of charge but with the prize candy). A rotating cast of third graders sat underneath the wooden game that Walter had built himself and tried to mess up stranger’s games, causing a ruckus until Walter drove us out; he was in sixth grade, and therefore very scary.
We sat behind the tent now, pushing candy wrappers into our sweater pockets and learning how to blow bubbles with our gum. Those who had older siblings were at an advantage, having seen a bubble blown before, and before long I gave up, running up the hill to roll back into my group of friends, laughing as their knees buckled and we created a pig-pile.
Four apple cider doughnuts made by the cute Boy Scouts later, we were sitting behind Walter’s game waiting for our parents. Our sugar highs were crashing, the October breeze tempting us to shiver, but being cold was uncool in the fourth grade, so we clenched our jaws and toughed it out.
My dad was the first parent to show up, my brother wanted to go home. I put up the customary fuss before blowing my friend’s kisses as I skipped down the hill to my dad. I stumbled on Walter’s tan cashbox and caught myself on my dad’s arm. He hauled me up as stalls packed up for the night, making sure I had my Duct Tape wallet and my tag sale finds: a green, floor-length velvet skirt, a stranger’s old photobook, a French stamp collection, and a chipped pink mug.
My dad shook me awake when we pulled into the driveway, in the fifteen-minute ride home I had fallen asleep. I stumped through the mud room, kissing my German Shepherd on the head as I toed my purple sneakers off. My dad grabbed my arm before I went upstairs, grabbing my coat from my shoulders and my scarf from around my neck.
On my bedroom floor were The Princess Diaries, put there by my mother. I had forgotten about my discovery in the autumn afternoon. I changed into my pyjamas as quickly as I could, shutting my door after my cat waltzed in to curl up on my laundry basket.
I settled into my twin bed as my parents began the nightly argument with my brother about tooth brushing. The book was pink, the spine was cracked, and the pages dog-eared— it matched every other book on my bookshelves. The Princess Diaries and I were meant to be.
I have recently been voraciously re-ingesting The Princess Diaries. I have always been a bookworm, but how I felt about The Princess Diaries was different. I read more greedily than ever before. The connection was instant; I was fourteen at nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. The books were the epitome of ‘girlhood’ before writing ‘girlhood’ became cool. Mia was self-actualizing before Tiktok was a glimmer in Addison Rae’s eye. The books are remarkably different from the movies. The movie was released less than two years after the publishing of the book — 21 December 2001 & 30 May 2000 respectively—Mia was quickly adapted by Hollywood in a way her novel self would have hated; here’s an easy list of the key differences.1
It’s set in New York, specifically Greenwich Village, not San Francisco. Manhattan is a prominent figure in all of Mia’s profound familial moments.
Mia’s father isn’t dead, he has testicular cancer, and is a serial womanizer with an Oedipus Complex.
Mia herself is a diehard leftist and vegetarian who forces her father to donate $100 to Greenpeace every day she is to be a princess.
She is fourteen.
Her mom has her Algebra teacher’s baby after a month of dating, and they then elope in Cancun; this is orchestrated by Mia’s aforementioned (alive) father.
Clarisse Renaldi is not the graceful, mattress-surfing dame Julie Andrews makes her out to be.
The rest of the movie is pretty spot on, with some epic characters absent— Tina Hamkin Baba, Boris Pelkowski, and Lars van der Hooten to name a few.
I fell in love with Mia, I felt connected to her. I would continue to for my entire adolescence. I was 5’9”, flat-chested, had big feet, and an awkward disposition with boys. I was flunking math, wrote a diary, bit my nails, and lied a lot about things I didn’t need to lie about. Rereading The Princess Diaries at age nineteen had me wondering how much the books had impacted me, a decade ago.
I know this: I started biting my nails and lying around nine or ten, two things which Mia is constantly lamenting are her biggest flaws, but never seems to fix. She navigates her flaws with an uncertainty borne from the same insecurities I have. We even shared the same dorky habits; reading Nat Geos, knitting, and writing silly listicles:
(Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries II, 2001) 337.
Mia also had a crush on a guy many years older (of course she got the guy, and I didn’t, as I was not Regent Princess of Genovia) and was told by her parents to stop telling strangers her political opinions, lest we get our fathers in trouble at his job. All in all, our lives were about as different and similar as they could be. New York City, rural Massachusetts, princess, not princess, … and that’s about it. Every other characteristic of Mia feels as if Meg Cabot stole it from my diary, or my mother’s.
I was very close to my grandmother’s growing up. A couple of years before I read The Princess Diaries, my maternal grandmother had died, and it left a hole in my heart in the shape of a dragonfly.
Mia is always at odds with her Grandmere, who assigns her pointless homework and is a terror to be around. Clarisse Renaldo drinks Sidecars, tests Mia on inane subjects, lives in the penthouse of The Plaza Hotel when not in the Genovian Castle; wears a lot of mink, draws on her eyebrows and got eyeliner tattooed on in the 1970s, and she smokes 24/7, no matter that she is always accompanied by her hairless (due to canine allergies) chihuahua named Rommel; she waltzed on her wedding day with a 103.7 fever.
(Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries I, 2000) 136-7.
My grandmother was not an oddball with cruel tendencies like Grandmere, but she was an odd, European, cultured woman who made me sit up straight, told me to never chase a boy (or even let him know I like him), and took care of me over the summer. Mia’s adventures with her Grandmere kept my grandmother far out of my mind, where she needed to remain for a couple of years; I take a long time to process things. Mia was constantly intimidated by her Grandmere, and for good reasons, she was a fierce lady. My grandmother had also been fierce; she was good at math and was the first woman ever honoured with a Hertz Foundation fellowship. All in all not qualities it looked like I had, what with my C+ in tenth-grade geometry. She was one of the first female engineering professors at Princeton University. She was an intimidating woman to live up to, just as Mia’s Grandmere was to her. Because of this I felt connected to Mia in ways I didn’t feel about other characters in books I read, she was everything I was worried about being in a way that was relieving to me as a nine-year-old and as a nineteen-year-old; we had the same struggles and her life was far from terrible.
If you read The Princess Diaries through the lens that I quite literally modelled myself, —consciously and unconsciously, positively and negatively— on this girl and her eccentric friend group, you will understand a lot more about me. Why did I say words like “libidinous”; “patriarchal family cult”; or“empirical” in the fourth grade? The answer: the Moscovitz siblings.
Mia Thermopolis taught me that it was more than okay to be a feminist, that it was in fact, really freaking cool. Being a feminist was to me, at age nine, something weird my mother did on the weekends. Mia brought it to the table in a meaningful way for the first time for me; her insistence on leftist rhetoric (protesting animal fur) inspired me in ways Hermione Granger’s S.P.E.W. never did.
Meg Cabot has achieved something with her series I do not think many authors have, she has captured a consciousness so universal (I say, a white upper-class young woman) that it changed my life at nine, and again at nineteen. She brings me down to Earth, reminds me why I am the way I am, that it’s okay to bumble around sometimes, and recently, Mia and Meg reminded me to get my shit together. Because I had forgotten some of Mia’s perpetual wisdom, I had forgotten to self-actualize; I will leave you with her TO DO list from the 15th of October.
(Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries I, 2000) 171.
Still from the happiest years of the author’s life, Desdemona Fels-Smyth and Margaret Fels, year unknown, (dir. childlike joy)
This excerpt from the 6th Princes Diaries is funny to me: