GirlGI | Girl Gone International Issue 8 | Page 74

G

raduates in Wonderland is the true story

of two best friends. Written with raw emotion, this
story will take you back to your early years as a girl
gone international when the world was your oyster
and the hangovers weren’t nearly as brutal.
Fast friends since they met at Brown University during
their freshman year, Jessica Pan and Rachel KapelkeDale vowed to keep in touch after their senior year
through in-depth - and brutally honest - weekly e-mails.

After graduation, Jess packs up everything she owns
and moves to Beijing on a whim, while Rachel heads to
New York to work for an art gallery and to figure out her
love life.
Each spends the next few years tumbling through adulthood and reinventing themselves in various countries,
including France, China, and Australia.
Through their messages from around the world, they
swap tales of teaching classes of military men, running
a magazine, and flirting in foreign languages, along with
the hard stuff: from harrowing accidents to breakups and
breakdowns.

How did you turn your correspondence
into a book?

Jess We made a pact to stay in touch by writing each

other at least once a week after university. We spent
those post-college years making big mistakes, travelling,
falling in and out love – and through it all, we always
wrote to each other.

‘I’m a Girl Gone International
because as long as I have a little
bit of cash, comfortable shoes and
a notebook with me, I can be happy
exploring anywhere.’

Rachel Eventually, Jess and I both ended up in Lon-

Jess

don for very different reasons and one day over coffee
we were recounting at what a long, strange trip it’s been.
We thought other young women must be going through
the same kinds of things that we had and that it would
be a fun project for us. We ended up selling it to Penguin
a few months later.