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Who: Eliot Schrefer
Why now: His first novel, Glamorous Disasters, about an Upper East Side SAT tutor, has just been published by Simon & Schuster ($23.95).
The buzz: Schrefer's gossipy roman a clef is being compared to best-selling New York tell-alls The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada.
NEW YORK -- Eliot Schrefer says most of the rich New York women who used to pay him to boost the SAT scores of their 16-year-olds had a hard time believing he was older than their kids.
But there was one mother, Schrefer recalls, who would greet him at the front door in one outfit, then change into something low-cut to see whether the tutor and her daughter "needed anything."
Schrefer laughs sheepishly. At 27, the fresh-faced, self-proclaimed "geek" with a charming sense of humor still looks very young. But behind those tiny wire frames are intelligent eyes that saw the makings of a juicy novel inside the Park Avenue apartments where he tutored for three years after graduating from Harvard.
Over grilled tuna at a downtown restaurant near his apartment, Schrefer (SHRAY-fer) says the characters in Glamorous Disasters are composites he created using "all the most flawed and interesting characteristics" of the students he tutored -- and their competitive, overprivileged parents.
Noah, Eliot's fictional alter ego, is a naive 25-year-old Princeton grad from a poor background who is saddled with $81,000 in student debt. Noah lives in Harlem (as Schrefer did for a year) and is paying off those loans with the $395 an hour he earns tutoring spoiled prep-school kids.
In Disasters, Noah is hired to beef up the SAT scores of dissolute club-kid Dylan and his younger sister, Tuscany. Their mother, Dr. Thayer, as drug-addled as her son, alternately flirts with and criticizes Noah when Dylan's scores don't rise.
Schrefer, who grew up in a "lower-middle-income" family and went to a public high school in Clearwater, Fla., says he is "very aware of the suspect morality of tutoring": By tutoring privileged students, it's possible he helped deny spots at elite colleges for kids like himself. But most of the teens he tutored, he says, were good kids.
Still, moral ambiguity, the little-known world of SAT tutoring and pill-popping pediatrician moms make for entertaining fiction, and this Harvard grad has no problem with chick-lit comparisons. "I didn't want to write a rarefied National Book Award finalist," he says.
Schrefer already has a contract for his second novel, The New Kid, about a troubled 15-year-old boy and his sister. He's thinking about taking an around-the-world freighter cruise to see where that journey might lead him creatively.
"I'm always out for the new thing," the single guy says with a smile. "I like to shake things up."
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