Teen Queen Training
forthcoming with Autofocus Books, February 17, 2026
Preorder your copy here!

It takes a lot of work to erase the rules of being a teenage girl.

Desperate to know what behaviors would produce the “right” adolescence, during the late 1990s Kristine Langley Mahler sought instruction from outdated etiquette guides and Seventeen magazine to subdue her central fear: how to convince someone to choose her. Twenty years later, married and mothering three adolescent daughters of her own, Mahler stumbles upon a 1963 edition of The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining—elegant, archaic directives that push her right back into her old frustrations and propel the creation of Teen Queen Training: a series of 26 erasure essays created from its 26 chapters, illuminating the differences between what she was told and what she really learned.

PRAISE FOR TEEN QUEEN TRAINING

“From the chapters of an overwrought 1963 etiquette manual for girls, Kristine Langley Mahler has gifted us with a series of concise, insightful, and often playful texts that turn the mirror back on the contrivance of its source material. In Teen Queen Training, Mahler serves as a different kind of guide from the original—wise, knowing, and experienced in navigating the minefield of instruction, expectations, and limitations that American girlhood can be. ‘The real problem for every unattached female,’ she tells us, ‘is the expectation that a kiss has value.’ Mahler finds the pointed needles of language in each haystack of admonition, reminding us that the messy and problematic artifacts of our past can—and perhaps must be—inverted, subverted, and made new.”
—Mary-Kim Arnold, author of Litany for the Long Moment

 “Using subversive technique, Mahler’s Teen Queen Training transforms the prescriptive advice of a mid-century etiquette manual about how young women are taught to be. Form meets content in these essays, where the act of crossing out becomes a critique of the very lessons meant to shape girlhood. Inventive and haunting, Teen Queen Training is a bold look into the possibilities of the genre.”
—LaTanya McQueen, author of And It Begins Like This