Alyson Gerber '98

When Alyson Gerber ’98 graduated from Pike, she shed her adolescent insecurities, literally. In March of her sixth grade year, she was diagnosed with scoliosis and needed to wear a back brace for 23 hours a day throughout the rest of her Upper School experience. For years, she didn’t tell anyone about what she went through.

Today, she’s sharing her story with everyone by publishing her debut middle-grade novel called Braced. “The book is so much bigger than my story. It’s the story of every adolescent who feels like people can actually see his or her insecurity,” said Gerber. She cherishes the memories of her Pike experience but also remembers the way she felt as she moved through life at school wearing a brace.

Pike is where she learned to write.

“The education I received at Pike was amazing,” said Gerber. “I learned how to read, write, and study there. If you don’t know how to do those things, you cannot learn.” Gerber attended Pike from first through eighth grade and remembers her teachers fondly, including Mrs. Candace Alsop, Mrs. Vuvu Maqubela, and Mr. Doug Roehm.

“Mrs. Alsop truly believed in me. She saw me for who I was,” said Gerber. Using the skills she learned at Pike, she went on to The Governor’s Academy and thrived. There she, like many teenagers in a new environment, reinvented herself. She never mentioned the back brace she had worn for the past three years.

“It was almost like something that never happened to me,” said Gerber. “High school is a great time to be whoever you want to be.” Though Gerber didn’t talk openly about her experience, she did keep a journal. “I entered college as a theater major, but changed my mind,” said Gerber. “In my junior year, I took a studio class at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. I quickly realized that I didn’t want to act. I wanted to sit in the back and write scenes.”

After graduating from Connecticut College with a B.A. in English, she followed her passion for writing to the New School in New York City where she received her M.F.A. in Writing for Children and Teens. That’s where she got an assignment to write about her most humiliating experience.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is easy and horrible at the same time,’” said Gerber. “My experience wearing a brace has a universal appeal to all adolescents. We all have that ‘thing’ that we think is wrong with ourselves and, as an adolescent, we think everyone is talking about it. Often, people can’t actually see what we think is so obvious. In my case, the ‘thing’ that bothered me was visible.” Her work earned her a creative writing scholarship.

When she sat down to write her first novel, her experience was the starting point for the plot, but the story quickly became fiction as the main character, 12-year-old Rachel, works hard over the summer to contribute on the soccer team only to find out that she needs to wear a brace because her scoliosis has worsened.

“I always thought I’d write an autobiography, but it didn’t turn out that way,” said Gerber, who poured all the emotions she felt at Pike into her book’s character. “Every adolescent can relate to Rachel. We all struggle to fit in, to do our best, and to make friends. In the book, the brace becomes a character in a way.”

Gerber hopes all adolescents have the opportunity to shed that “thing” that takes up so much mental energy. Braced is in stores now.