ABIGAIL JONES

Abigail Jones is the co-author with Marissa Miley of the New York Times and Boston Globe best-seller Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School (William Morrow). The shocking book exposed the sexual behaviors of privileged teens on the campus of an elite New England prep school and sounded a clarion call about the new era of sexual promiscuity. It received critical recognition in the New York Times Book Review, O the Oprah Magazine, the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and on Time.com, among other publications. Jones and Miley appeared on the Today Show, Star Jones, Inside Edition, NPR, numerous radio shows across the country, and gave several talks about the book. Jones has also spoken about Restless Virgins at national conferences. Jones and Miley can be booked together or separately.

Based on hundreds of interviews with students who graduated from Milton Academy in June, 2005, Jones and Miley (both Milton graduates) follow a small group of young women and men (pseudonymously) through their careers at Milton, careers that witnessed a scandal resulting in several expulsions that were covered in regional and national media.

Jones and Miley provide an intimate, sensitive depiction of the struggle of today’s teens and the way they can succumb to the myriad pressures assaulting them from all angles. By telling the story of Milton Academy’s sex scandal through the eyes of those who were there, Jones and Miley shine a penetrating light on the drama and emotions of the students’ social and sexual lives.

Before writing Restless Virgins, Jones was a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly. She has a Masters in creative writing, with Distinction, from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and she graduated from Dartmouth College in 2003, cum laude with Honors in English. She received a James B. Reynolds Fellowship from Dartmouth for graduate study abroad. Jones attended the Southampton Writers Conference in August 2007, and the Columbia Publishing Course in 2005. She lives in Boston.

Praise for Restless Virgins:

“What [Jones and Miley] discover – the power plays, harassment, and all-consuming pressure to be “the best”… as they chip away at the pervasive climate of unrelenting promiscuity and out-of-control partying, it is clear that something is very wrong in the life of contemporary teens...as Jones and Miley expertly document, today’s teens have come a long way from simply worrying about a date for the prom.”
—O magazine

“Restless Virgins takes a shocking look at the sexual behaviors of privileged teens… It brings up the important subject that everybody should be talking about with their kids at home.”
—Natalie Morales on Today

“As I was reading, I had to keep flipping back to the beginning where it says Restless Virgins is a work of nonfiction because it’s written in such a way that you’re telling people’s stories about real people. It’s written like it’s a…novel, but all of the things in the book really happened.”
—Gayle King on her Oprah & Friends XM radio show

“The book offers a student’s-eye view [and] reads like a compendium of the big gossip of the year. We hear it all...The students discuss their lives in detail – the hookups, the weight obsession, the spoils of popularity…. There’s so much casual sex happening so rampantly that after the scandal breaks, the kids feel the adults are overreacting.”
—New York Times

“There are startling scenes in Restless Virgins that are bound to – and meant to – shock readers... Restless Virgins takes the reader into the locker room, dorms, parked cars, basement parties, hotel rooms, bars, and on spring break. The boys’ demands and the girls’ deference is a common theme; of the 28 interviewees, only one girl was in a healthy relationship, the authors say. They write in a highly personal, omniscient ‘we-were-there’ style, reconstructing racy scenes – and interior thoughts – that they... pieced together from multiple interviews and sources.”
—Boston Globe

“What the authors do find... are girls who are willing, eager even, to submit to boys. And to their credit, Jones and Miley don’t gloss over how sexist, and humiliating, this state of affairs is... The authors sensitively convey how these particular kids explore sex.”
—Washington Post

“It’s a safe bet that copies of Restless Virgins, a new book about the Milton Academy, won’t be handed out at this week’s orientation at the elite coed prep school. But students are sure to have copies of this racy tome squirreled away. The controversial book chronicles the school year of 2004-2005, when a sex scandal drew unwanted nationwide attention to the 200-year-old academy.”
—Time.com

“Part MTV drama and part investigative reporting on a worrisome trend.”
—Boston Globe Book Review