“My first car was my grandparents’ old Volvo,” she told the magazine. “I had to jump-start it to get it to go. The bottom casing fell off while I was driving. Oil would spill everywhere, so I always had cardboard to put under the car so it didn’t stain anybody’s driveway.”
This sounds like a typical teen’s first car to me, but, I didn’t go to high school in Los Angeles.
“My school had a small parking lot, and I had to start parking on the street because the parents said they were more worried about their kids’ cars and that my car shouldn’t be in there,” she said, since her classmates were driving new Mercedes, BMWs, and Range Rovers. “It became this very disconnected reality…. I valued different things than they did.” She also added that one guy she went on a date with, his parents said she “wasn’t allowed to park in his driveway.”
Sweeney grew up in a small rural town in Idaho, but her family moved to LA before she started high school so she could get to auditions easier, and also because everyone in her small town was bullying her. Of course, despite the hardships, everything worked out, and now she’s one of Glamour’s Women of the Year!
If I were her, I would buy 100 broken-down old Volvos and plop them in the driveways of all my old classmates’ parents’ homes. Or, at the very least, leave a few mysterious oil stains.