Contemporary American Autobiography

Someday, perhaps we will all look back on this point in time as being an aberration in history, a time filled with the self-importance of those who felt an uncompromising desire to tell the stories of their lives to an anonymous public in blog posts on the Internet.

I often think this way about myself, even when I recognize that the stories I tell, while deeply rooted in my own experience, are often told for some reason that sits entirely outside of myself. That is what the genre of “memoir” really does, does it not? It allows us to think about life and art and meaning through the lens of someone else’s experience. It is different than “autobiography,” because anyone, including those who are far from famous, can be the subject of the story that is being told.

My love affair with memoir was consummated when I was 18, but I suppose it began much earlier. It probably began with poetry, when I would read the words people had written about seemingly unimportant scenes or events in their lives while I was standing in the kitchen or the bathroom, because those broadsides from the 70s peppered the walls of my house the same way that tacky wallpaper peppered yours. I would brush my teeth, and Marvin Bell would yell at me: “No more fossils of eunuchs!” My family had inside jokes about the line “in thy infinite mercy let Neil drive the combine” from a poem by someone no one reading this knows existed. My kids eat dinner while looking at this, just like I did when I was a child:

UTAH, by M.J. Rychlewski

almonds or
sandstone on cloudy days
it's hard to say
what she was but she was
smiling and came
in the heat of Moab
with a glass of A&W

yes we have salt and pepper
yes we're open most of the time
(my older brothers are like my uncles)
yes you can take 70 into 89

a girl in Kanab
who threw her eyes
and her hair
a cheap motel
and giggled
why the Starlite everyone goes there


And what does that mean? That, my friends, is a story. A clear picture, an admonition that says, don’t you feel like you were THERE?

When I was 8, I wrote a story about my best friend moving to the Philippines after first grade, and it won an award. I thought it was just a child’s tale, this story called, simply, “Amy.” I never understood why adults would think it was good. I don’t have that story anymore, but I remember writing it, and how doing so made me feel like she wasn’t so far away, at least for the span of six pages.

I loved to read about other people’s lives. If someone could write well, offer me a nice turn of phrase or a really good last line (I still always read them first), I could read a book about someone watching paint dry. It didn’t matter how far removed the person’s experience was from my own. And I always loved to people-watch…not to make up stories about the people I was watching, but to catch the details, the mannerisms, the ways they talked or what they didn’t talk about or how they looked at each other or sideways at me. I was always just there, paying attention.




And then, perhaps in spite of myself, which is another story I suppose, I got into a nice little liberal arts college and was offered a really generous scholarship. We were required to pre-enroll in a freshman seminar; we had assignments over the summer, and the professor of that class would become our de-facto advisor until we decided otherwise once we actually figured out what the hell to do with our lives.

I enrolled in a course called “Contemporary American Autobiography.”

Over the summer, I read a book by Charles Baxter called First Light. I answered some questions about it in short essay form. I showed up at school, all long curly hair and Beastie Boys tshirt and clogs and excitement and romanticism and cluelessness, and I went to that class on my first day.

I loved it. I could write a post about that—about all the books we read, about how much fun it was for me to write short essays about them. I could write a post about the stories that the other students wrote about themselves for class assignments. Each week, the eccentric professor (someone I still write Christmas cards to, 20 years later) would pick one or two stories from the class, and we would spend half of the hour and a half discussing those pieces. There was this lovely intermingling of us kids, and our seemingly uninteresting lives, and the stories of published authors who won awards and hung out chain smoking at independent bookstores.

This post, however, is not about that. This post is about how HARD it was for me to write those assignments about myself. Creative writing, or writing in general, had always been my best thing. I could write poems or essays and get straight As without half trying. Hell, I practically stopped going to my AP English class my senior year of high school. I ditched that class all the time, wandered the streets, hung out in some kid’s pickup truck playing gin and probably having more intellectual conversations than I ever would have had inside those halcyon walls. Then I would nonchalantly consider whatever assignment I had, write some kick-ass essay, and move on with my life.

And now, I would be given an assignment with a theme, and I would struggle to find something to say. The paper would come back with a decent grade, never below a B, but damn! This was ME, writing. Why all the red marks, why all the frustration when the professor would call me in and ask me for MORE? He wanted more detail, he wanted something else. It upset me to no end, to think I wasn’t a good writer. He told me that I WAS a very good writer, but I was struggling with this type of writing. When we were given an assignment to interview someone else in the class and write about her life, I excelled at that. I wrote a really interesting piece about this other girl whom I had never spoken to much before the interview. The professor wondered why I couldn’t write like THAT about myself.

Because I am not that interesting, I thought to myself. She is much more interesting than me.

And then, he picked as the class example the story that was written about ME, by a fresh-faced boy whose name I cannot for the life of me remember, even though there were maybe only 350 kids in my graduating class. The professor loved his story. I hated it. He was a nice kid, and he listened intently to me, and asked some meaningful questions. But the only thing that I will ever remember about that story is that he referred to me as “feisty.”

God help all the little women the world over with big thoughts who are called “feisty” when what they really are is opinionated.

I remember wanting to punch him in his handsome face. It was unwarranted, that desire. But then again, desires are often unwarranted.

I continued to struggle, and the professor continued to pester me. A few years later, I would choose to be the preceptor for his class, mentoring freshmen kids on how to write memoir when I was only 20. I would laugh at him when I was a junior, and I took another course from him where he told us, when handing out the syllabus, “Here are the requirements for the semester. Of course, there is a sense in which nothing is required, except death.”

I remember a lot of things about this man, with whom I had a comfortable but distant friendship devoid of any creepy connotations. I remember the disturbed look in his eye when he talked about how much he hated Princeton. I remember how much he loved baseball, with some kind of all-consuming love. I remember the delicious vegetarian chili he made for all of us at the beginning of the semester, when we visited his house and saw his extensive gardens. Years later, when I visited with him on trips to the Twin Cities, I would realize his love for cream soda and pastrami.

I remember how he successfully convinced me to try my hand at a genre of poetry called “dramatic monologue,” wherein the author writes in the first person voice from someone else’s point of view.

I remember him egging me on, asking me: “do you remember in T’s piece when she said X? What about in R’s piece when he said Y?” And I would go on and on, remembering every single thing that other students had written, weaving their stories together, finding commonalities, expounding on themes.

I remember him constantly asking me about “the car accident,” which at that time was one of the truly defining moments of my life, to the extent that it came up in casual conversation just as easily as it became the subject of stories, including the story that enabled me to enroll, in spite of myself, in a pretty good liberal arts college with a generous scholarship. He tried to get me to talk about my family, different difficult aspects of my upbringing, the youthful dalliances and loves that had already begun to form my opinions of relationships. He asked me a lot about trains, cars, methods of transportation. Did this guy see into my future and imagine my eventual masters degree in urban planning? Or did he somehow predict that I would write an essay about Chicago (one of the other subjects he always wanted me to elaborate on, and the one that became the theme of the poetry independent study I did with that professor my senior year) that was half about streets and cars and trains, without me even realizing it?

He asked me lots of questions about what I remembered about other students’ work and the books we had read. He looked at me in an exasperated way, as I failed to get the message.

It was like I was paying attention to everyone’s life but my own.

I was doing well in the class, but the writing assignments left me constantly frustrated. At the end of the semester, we received our final writing assignment. The theme was: write about anything you want, as long as it's from your own experience.

I was stumped. I had no idea what to write. I procrastinated, something I rarely did, even in college.

One day I was sitting in my room, studying for a final for another class. I suddenly pictured in my mind this poem that my dad had written and given to me right before I left for school. It was called “Mnemosyne.” She is the goddess of memory. I called my mom and asked her to find the poem where I thought I had left it, and I wrote it down. And then, I wrote a piece that was loosely, maybe only tangentially, based on the idea behind that poem. I don’t remember, ironically, what is was about exactly. I remember how it FELT to write it though. I felt frantic about it, like there wasn’t enough time or that my extremely fast typing wasn’t fast enough. It was just so…EASY. The essay wasn’t particularly thematic, in my mind--it was snippets of things from my childhood, ruminations from my adolescence, scenes woven together from my life. It was an essay about memory, whether I knew it at the time or not.

My essay was chosen as the last essay to discuss in the last class of the semester. We spent the entire class discussing it. I finally got an A. There were no red marks. He loved it. He discussed at length my use of theme, the very specific sense of scene and purpose, the way that I had written about the only thing anyone could ever write about: memory. After class, the professor said this to me:

That is the best thing you have ever written.

And I said, yes, I know that was leagues above anything I ever wrote in this class. To which he replied,

That is definitely true. That piece is not even in the same ballpark as the others. But I mean, literally, I bet THAT IS THE BEST THING YOU HAVE EVER WRITTEN.

How could you know that? I asked.

I just do, he said.

That day, that last class, something else happened. This professor had never once taken attendance or asked us to sign in or said a word to anyone who missed a class. There were maybe 22 of us in the class. We all assumed he didn’t care about things like attendance. Then, he told us that he always gave a prize to the student with the best attendance. How can you know that? We asked. You’ve never written it down.

And he said, well…I always pay attention.

Apparently, I had perfect attendance in the class. I was sure I had missed one, but he told me otherwise. He said that he always gave a lot of thought to what the prize would be, and he picked out a book to fit the person who had earned the award. He unveiled it, and I didn’t know what to think. He told the class that the book was a memoir about a woman who was an unwed teenage mother who by the grit of her teeth made it into Harvard.

Is that how he sees me? I remember thinking.

He said that she was a master at developing scene. He said a bunch of things about the book and its contents. Then, he said this.

Sometimes, the theme is right there on the surface. Sometimes, you really can tell a book by its cover. I’ll tell the truth. Half the reason I picked this book for you, Katy, was for the title.

And he looked at me with this gleam in his eye, the gleam you get from people who listen to the things you say and the stories you tell without judging you, without making fun of you or implying that they are unimportant or small. I could have been offended, but the book is wonderful. I still have that book, that prize that I received for achieving perfect attendance in my Contemporary American Autobiography class my freshman year of college in 1993. The book is by Beverly Donofrio. The title is:

Riding in Cars with Boys.

Chicago Haunts

I love Chicago. I love it with an irrational love. I knew when I left at age 18 that I would never actually stay anywhere but Chicago. And yet I hate the corruption, the segregation, the snow in late April, the violence and the messed up school system and the enormous swaths of empty, unused, rotting space on the south side of the city that no one wants to deal with, fix, or utilize. I know my love is flawed. But oh sweet Jesus—he has so much potential!

I have grown weary of defending my love. Usually, trying to explain to someone else why one loves Chicago comes down to talking about shit you don’t really care about that much, like the excellent food, the theaters and museums and other cultural attractions, the access to top-notch universities and hospitals, the insane vibe of the summer, the music fests, the fact that people here still use the word “gala,” the lake, or something else equally inane.

It's hard to argue with those perks. Just look at this view of our gorgeous city from the museum campus on 9/11/12. And no, I don't care if you don't know what the museum campus is, because that's not what I'm trying to talk about today.



Look, I’m going to be honest. Any major city worth its salt has excellent, diverse food, culture, music, universities and health care. They have that stuff in DALLAS, people. That alone does not a love affair with a city make, even if you can just go out to dinner in Greektown and find yourself having a drink amidst one of the most picturesque skylines anywhere.



So what is behind this love? I think it’s this: even after the attempts to make Chicago plastic, even after the gentrification and the hollowing out of once vibrant communities and the fact that basically half of our prior elected officials are in prison, Chicago is an honest to God CITY. A friend from the Bronx once said to me, “Chicago is one of the only real cities I’ve ever visited.” He declared that the other was, in fact, Pittsburgh.

Go figure.

Here are 20 places that I love in Chicago, in no particular order. None of these places are restaurants, bars, jazz or blues clubs, ballparks or museums. Some might be considered tourist attractions, but that is debatable. There are a lot more places that I love in Chicago, but these are the ones that first came to mind. As I said in a poem I wrote when I was 20 (it’s possible that every poem I’ve ever written has actually been about Chicago):

No country landscape could offer such a scene,
could demand the making of a galaxy
of random and created order of
neighborhoods that house many streets that
wake and die and leave us breathless,
and on every street so much love pouring out,
and too many streets to name.

You might disagree with these 20 choices, but remember this: This list comes from a woman who doesn't know how to be a tourist here. When she has tried, she has ended up asking her husband to take a picture of her and the kids in front of the graffiti above the train tracks. So consider the source.



20 Chicago Destinations from the Perspective of LiveChickenonSix

1. The first seat in the first car of any El train on any line as long as it’s not the subway. This is just pure urban bliss. You feel like you’re riding into the edge of the world.

2. The Auburn Park lagoon, which sits in the middle of the neighborhood at 79th street. Many people have lived in this city all of their lives and have no idea what I’m talking about—especially if they live on the north side. So I am here to tell you that there’s a lagoon that cuts through some folks’ front yards, as surely as you have asphalt separating you from your neighbors across the street. Sometimes people fish there. There are bridges.

3. The fountain in Streeterville that shoots an arc of water across the river every hour. I just went to google, and found that it has an actual name: Centennial Fountain and Water Arc, and now I’m feeling vaguely disappointed.

4. The atrium at the Harold Washington library. Go into this odd building covered in gothic owls and figure out how to get to the top floor, and you will not be disappointed. It’s gorgeous, and quiet, and hardly anyone ever goes there. I read many a book there during my lunch hour in my twenties, and I always felt like I had just gone on a mini-vacation.

5. Lake Street, under the El tracks. As teenagers, we referred to it as “Yellow Boulevard,” because of the color of the overhead lights at night, or during the day, for that matter, because it is always—ALWAYS—dark there.

6. On that note, I have to give it up for Augusta—a street that always provides a good alternative route to cut through the city from west to east or vice versa if the traffic on the Ike makes you want to give up on the whole of humanity.

7. The few remaining independent bookstores, like Women and Children First, Myopic (memories from my dating days…extra points to the dudes who came up with that one!), Powell’s, and, my personal favorite, Sandmeyers in the south loop.

8. The Midway Park area of Austin, where the homes are more beautiful than just about anywhere else.

9. The sunny and scenic room in the Chicago Cultural Center where you can get married, just as you would at City Hall, except, well—it’s beautiful. My mom and stepfather got married there. She was wearing pants, but there were women in full bridal getups waiting for their 60 second ceremony to commence, and the photos they took probably rivaled any taken at a much more expensive venue (as in one that isn’t entirely free).

10. The South Shore Cultural Center and Rainbow Beach. I’m angry that the City has turned so liability-averse that you essentially can’t wade into the water past your shins at this point, because this beach is shallow for seemingly miles and is great for families. E-coli? So what? You can turn around and look at that gorgeous building (which houses an excellent restaurant run by student chefs, but I’m not talking about food here, remember), then turn back around and see one of the best views of the city available. If you are going to complain about a little bacteria, you might want to live somewhere else.

11. Bubbly Creek, because it’s disgusting, and there’s really interesting graffiti on the buildings surrounding it, and the bakery factory smell is cloying and acrid at the same time, and it’s right in the middle of Chinatown AND Bridgeport and people fish in that foul water (again with the fishing!), and I learned how to row a long skinny boat there.

12. Lower Wacker Drive. Just stop trying to compare whatever supposedly interesting thoroughfare you have in your city to this. Lower Wacker connects to Lake Shore Drive, and you’ve got nothing in comparison to that either, and the Blues Brothers drove through it and people live there, or at least they used to, before the City cracked down on what had to be one of the more interesting urban subcultures around.

13. State street downtown, not because it is particularly interesting now, but because I remember when it was closed to traffic, and we would take the train down, look in the windows of the department stores, buy churros y chocolate from a street vendor and call it a date. You can open up a Forever 21 store, but you can’t take that memory away from me.

14. The “canyon” in the loop, because for years I worked in one of those historic skyscrapers, and that supposedly touristy view of some of the oldest high-rises in the country was simply what I had to walk through to get to my office. Also, these buildings house amazing treasures such as old-school shoe repair shops, milliners, and barbershops with names like “Frank’s.”

15. Graceland Cemetery. It’s like someone took the word “nostalgia” and turned it into a place.

16. Ball courts in the summer, especially when they're not actually courts, but a pole and a rim with boys or men gathered around playing hard or at least playing HORSE. Sometimes there are girls or women, but not very often; perhaps because girls and women are too busy being equally athletic in double dutch competitions in the middle of the street.

17. The underground tunnel system that can keep you out of the elements as you walk from one end of the central district to the other. It’s even better because it’s practically a secret.

18. Garfield Park Conservatory. The place is just lovely.

19. All of the diagonal streets on the north and northwest sides of the city that have those wonderful blonde brick structures where the edge of the building is maybe 18 inches wide at the corner and you wonder if anyone but Alice from Wonderland could possibly open the door.

20. The wide open porch that sits on top of a hill on Longwood drive, where I can drink a cup of coffee and watch my kids play in the yard before I go inside to the impossibly sunny landing that is as large as the bedroom I had when I was a little girl, in the house where I live right now, where I can watch both the sunrise and the sunset every single day without having to leave.



You might live in a nice city. You might live in a city where it’s easier to get rich or famous, where it’s safer, where there is less chaos and inequity. Your city might be lovely, but our lovely is famously REAL.

Chicago was my first love. I still haven’t gotten over her.

Intersection

Recently, I wrote a blog post about my cyclical depression related to hormone changes as a result of coming out of chemo-induced menopause. I have been (pleased is not the right word) interested in the response that post generated from women who go through the exact same thing. Besides being glad that this forum allows me the opportunity to discuss things that are often pushed under the rug, it made me think about how we as a society are often wary of facing harsh truths or difficult realities. We talk about things that are painful as things that are "depressing" and then we don't talk about them anymore, as if denial of those things makes them go away. We do this with illness, suffering, death, and fear.

We do this when world events break our hearts. It's only natural. But the reality of life for most people in the world is to live with suffering, right there on the surface. The history of most of the world is the history of people living their lives right in the shadow of death, and acknowledging it. Part of what "depression" is (though not all of it, not by a long shot), is the inability to push that shadow away.

Last week, when I was in the midst of a depression that was exacerbated by my (realistic) fear of cancer recurrence, I had a dream. I woke up and told my husband about the dream, and then I wrote this. I thought it was too morbid to show anyone, but then I heard from all those other women, and I realized there was no shame in it. And then there was a bombing, and there are always bombings, aren't there, all over the world? And I began to think about why random acts of violence have such strong effects on our collective consciousness--because they are reminders of just how the world ends when one world ends.

And that's much deeper than most LiveChicken posts, but, well, there it is. Or, I should say, here it is:

Intersection
By Katy Jacob

In dreams, we do things that would be impossible
in waking life, like drive when we know we are sleeping.
The world looks the same as the real world;
or, more accurately, it looks like the real world
that someone else lives in—so we’ve been led to believe.

Something is always just a little bit off:
the streets are wider than they are anywhere;
no one is behind you or in front of you;
noise and light are filtered artistically;
the car you’re driving is much too clean.

Still, you are yourself, singing along to the radio.
Rain is pouring so hard on the windshield
that you can’t see, but no one pulls over in dreams.
You notice bus shelters and dogs and skyscrapers
and you slow down, but you are not afraid.

Suddenly, then, the rain turns to snow—
so much snow that it falls with a crash on the windshield,
which cracks from the weight, and the car stops.
All the power goes out, everywhere, all across the world.
Somehow you know this is true.


Everything is still, and there is nothing but silence,
because time has stopped, just like that,
and all the other people have disappeared.
You consider exiting the car, but you know it wouldn’t matter.
There is only one thing left that you must do.

You tilt your head up so that you can see your reflection
in the rear-view mirror, and you smile and say out loud, to yourself,
because nothing exists anymore in the world but you,
“This is what it will be like.”
And then you do the second thing that you must do.

You wake yourself up and listen to the rain
pounding mercilessly against the window
of your bedroom, which miraculously actually exists
in a real city in a real country in a real world
where everyone dies alone.

Husband Hunting, Higher Education, and Hubris

It's not like me to be snarky. OK, it is, but I try not to wade too deeply in the waters of condemning other women for putting their perspective out there. Until, that is, they put something out there that is just ridiculous, and a lot of people comment that they are just speaking the TRUTH, people, FINALLY.

Have you ever noticed that when women say mean and vaguely paranoid things to other women, they start with saying something along the lines of "now I'm just being HONEST?" That's often the phrase that comes before statements like "yeah, that does make you look fat," "he's out of your league," "you're not getting any younger, you know," "you were asking for it," or "you're such a slut."

This letter written by a past senior class president of Princeton strikes me as being along the same lines, so I'm going to respond to it. I know I'm late, but this piece contains almost everything that I hate about everything, so I have to try. Besides, that poetry post from earlier today didn't get any traction (but hey...I tried!).

Everything in italics is from the original letter. I would not want to be accused of taking anything out of context, so the entire letter is here, in order, start to finish.

Response to Advice for the young women of Princeton: the daughters I never had by Susan A. Patton

Forget about having it all, or not having it all, leaning in or leaning out — here’s what you really need to know that nobody is telling you.

Again, you're not the only one out there speaking the ugly truth. EVERYONE is telling young women how to find and keep a man. You see it in every Glamour magazine article titled "We asked 50 different men what's sexiest about you!" (and got 50 different answers! you're welcome!) and every creepy old dude who is a sports commentator talking about how hot the quarterback's girlfriend is so he comes up with some line like "hey young fellas, if you want to get the prettiest girls, you'd better start throwing that football around!" This is why we have pole dancing classes and articles in today's Redeye extolling the virtues of college students getting sugar daddies to pay tuition because, as one of those MARRIED daddies told his sugar baby (so much ew factor in all of this) "You will only be young and hot once." Unfortunately, you are just one of many in this idiotic refrain.

For years (decades, really) we have been bombarded with advice on professional advancement, breaking through that glass ceiling and achieving work-life balance.

This is true, though not everyone has been bombarded with that advice--it's been mostly highly-educated, upper middle-class women. Everyone else has just had to deal with work-life balance forever, because that's how it is.

We can figure that out — we are Princeton women. If anyone can overcome professional obstacles, it will be our brilliant, resourceful, very well-educated selves.

Where to begin? I know I just have to ignore the unbelievable pomposity of your language, but it's hard. Are you sure you are brilliant? What about all the legacy admissions? The George W. Bush's of the Yale world? Getting into college, even a really good one, really doesn't speak to resourcefulness at all. And how about the entire history of worker's rights, which did not emanate from women like you? All those pesky professional obstacles that others have overcome, like the 80 hour workweek and faulty building codes that kill factory workers and sexual harassment and age and weight requirements for female flight attendants and on and on? How about the brilliant, very well-educated kids who can't find a job today at Whole Foods? Or the ones who have spent their lives hearing how brilliant they are, only to find out that no one in the working world really cares, because there are a lot of other qualities that are important in real life?

I hear the words "professional obstacles" and I wonder how I, just a normally-smart, resourceful, not yet well educated 19 year old, dealt with a summer job as a secretary in the office of the building of a mammoth of an office structure right by the river, where the owner was a leg man and required us to wear skirts and would feel up our legs to make sure we had nylons on, and his son was a junkie but they let him wear the union electrician uniform anyway and you never wanted to be alone with him for a second because he would rob you blind and run to get his next fix. I wonder how it was that I was in charge, that I carried a radio and gave orders over an intercom to a bunch of highly skilled workers, all of them men, how I knew what to do when one of the guys almost severed his finger in an accident, while my boss was out golfing? I hear "professional obstacles" and I think of myself at age 23, lying on the basement floor of the apartment building where I had taken a second job as building manager, attempting to fix an industrial-sized boiler with a common wrench and then reaching for the blowtorch and thinking shit, I'm not getting paid enough to risk some kind of natural gas explosion, and calling the building owner and telling him to find someone else for the job. I think about myself at 16, when I was hired to work as a "package girl" in a luxury apartment building and my job was to do light paperwork and answer phones and make deliveries to rich dudes all while looking cute and learning when to just LOCK THE DAMN DOOR when that one guy came around. Or the time when I was 12 and I got an obscene phone call while I was babysitting...and the call was from the kids' dad. I could write a book about professional obstacles, just based on shit that happened before I turned 20. And my life isn't even that interesting compared to most people's.

A few weeks ago, I attended the Women and Leadership conference on campus that featured a conversation between President Shirley Tilghman and Wilson School professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, and I participated in the breakout session afterward that allowed current undergraduate women to speak informally with older and presumably wiser alumnae. I attended the event with my best friend since our freshman year in 1973. You girls glazed over at preliminary comments about our professional accomplishments and the importance of networking. Then the conversation shifted in tone and interest level when one of you asked how have Kendall and I sustained a friendship for 40 years. You asked if we were ever jealous of each other. You asked about the value of our friendship, about our husbands and children. Clearly, you don’t want any more career advice.

OK, I'm going to put this out there. Maybe they did want career advice--just not from you. Maybe their eyes glazed over because you're boring, or because you spent the whole time talking about yourself. I don't know--I wasn't there. I do remember that when I graduated from grad school (from a public university in a big city! where I went to classes at night because I worked full time! and it didn't make a damn bit of difference for my career...as evidenced by me getting hired for my current job over someone who went to the London School of Economics!), our commencement speech was given by a woman who droned on and on about HERSELF, giving us no advice about what to do in the exciting wide world, because it was like she was reading her resume or writing her own letter of recommendation or something. So...maybe it was like that. And maybe they asked if you were jealous of each other because they were getting a vibe. No one has ever asked me that question about any of my female friends, not ever, so that's just weird. Maybe it's an Ivy League thing. Who knows.

At your core, you know that there are other things that you need that nobody is addressing. A lifelong friend is one of them. Finding the right man to marry is another.

I'm with you here. There are so many things that no one is addressing. The nature of hubris is one of them. And lifelong friends are amazing, but I don't think it counts as lifelong if you meet at age 18. That's a good long friendship. But call me when a woman you've known since kindergarten buys you groceries when you're going through treatment for an aggressive form of cancer. And as for finding the right man to marry, well...it's definitely important to find the right man (or woman! you've heard about that, right?) as opposed to someone you can't stand if you're going to get hitched for life. Somehow I doubt they were asking for advice about that, though.

When I was an undergraduate in the mid-seventies, the 200 pioneer women in my class would talk about navigating the virile plains of Princeton as a precursor to professional success. Never being one to shy away from expressing an unpopular opinion, I said that I wanted to get married and have children. It was seen as heresy.

You went to undergrad with the pioneers? Like covered wagons and shit? WORD. And the virile plains! I WANT TO GO THERE. Especially with the heresy, and the people who answer the question "what would you consider to be professional success?" with "I want to get married and have children." That's a fine thing to want! But that wasn't the question, right? ANSWER THE QUESTION.



For most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

I would like to go back to school right now and write a thesis about this sentence. Look, if you are going to get married, happiness with the person you choose is high on the list of important things. And many studies have shown that people are happier if they have friends, if they have companionship (including, for example, pets) and if they have lots of sex. These are basic human needs. Of course this is not to say that people need to have these things all the time or forever or with one person. Having a friend, companion and lover whom you like a lot and is no farther than the other side of the bed is a huge plus of marriage. Unless, that is, your marriage is abusive or empty or loveless or more like roommates or dragging you down into the depths of despair because all he can talk about is Princeton. I like being in love and I like sex and I'm glad I'm not dating. But I dream, every day, of the days and months and years I spent living alone, which was a kind of happiness that has stuck with me, and one I wouldn't trade for the world, one I can imagine having again, even though I love my family to pieces.

I will even grant you the fact that college, and high school, are some of the only places where you are surrounded by thousands of people in your age group, and you get to kind of hang out together casually just by stopping by each other's houses or rooms in a way you will never do again. These are times when--if you are lucky enough to have this kind of life, which most people are not--part of your job, part of your WORK, is learning interesting things and finding yourself. I was a double-major in college, and chose English as one of those majors because I knew I would never again have the privilege of reading so many good books and writing about them. In college I chose the early shifts for work, bought the paper on sundays and read it with my coffee, took walks by myself, cried with happiness over the sun streaming through my window when I was studying one day alone. I became myself, in a way, and I am still that person. And my boyfriend lived hundreds of miles away, and there wasn't a single person at my entire college I wanted to invite into my bed--not one.

I can't even get to the part where you discuss men who are worthy of you. Ah, the worthy men! Those with high SAT scores! And loads of money! Are they also rugged and handsome? Geeky but chic? Do tell! I'm one of the unwashed masses I guess, so I don't know what exactly you're talking about there. At age 21, I wanted to be with/continue dating/potentially marry a young man who was a bike messenger; he had gone to art school. That "only" worked out for six years or so, and we didn't get married, though I couldn't have been prouder to have been with him.

Here’s what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate. Yes, I went there.

No you didn't! Oh yes you did. That's the whole point of your letter, so we know you went there. I'm happy for all my friends who found awesome husbands in college, high school, and even grade school. I'm happy for the ones who got divorced when it no longer worked. I'm happy for the ones who found someone any way they found him or her, and I'm happy for the ones who are happy without partners or who are happy sleeping around or whatever makes folks happy and isn't killing someone.

I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians. My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone.

I want to name my next hamster Princetonian. And are you sure he could have married ANYONE, mama? ANYONE? The tattoo artist at the place where he drunkenly got his first ink? Chelsea Clinton? Any of the girls he talked down to because they weren't worthy? Me? WHOA NELLY. Definitely not me.

My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless.

Um...not anymore.

Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It’s amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman’s lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Gah! Oh, where to begin...maybe with the premise that intelligence and education are the cornerstones for happiness, especially if you gauge intelligence by some weird false pedigree? Or with the notion that one can't be smart and pretty (there's one reason to be glad to have only a brother--I never got typecast as the smart one or the pretty one or the tomboy or the girly one--I got to be all of those and a lot more!) or that men care about nothing but looks? Now, there are dudes like that out there--sure. And Princeton women--you don't want those dudes. No one should want them. They're morons. If you all are in a situation where you are pricing yourselves out of the market, what's the price for that poontang, if I might ask? And that limited population of men who are as smart as you, or smarter...they are coming out of the woodwork now, from the military and their three jobs and the community colleges and the homes where they are raising children by themselves and everywhere else where fascinating men dwell, and they are ignoring the hell out of you--because you're not worthy. You're not worthy because you think your shit doesn't stink.

Of course, once you graduate, you will meet men who are your intellectual equal — just not that many of them. And, you could choose to marry a man who has other things to recommend him besides a soaring intellect. But ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn’t as smart as you.

Speak for yourself, sister. Now, I KNOW you're not speaking for me. I'm not in your Ivy league, clearly. And I was crazy enough to marry a guy who was born on a commune and never met his father and has less education and makes less money than I do. I guess I have to ask myself why when we SEEM happy, and we are making plans to see a show, I don't ask him how I can possibly go on like this since he doesn't have a masters degree. We SEEM to have good conversations and great sex and cute kids. We SEEM like we've gotten through a lot together. Damn. This whole time, I've been living a lie.

Here is another truth that you know, but nobody is talking about. As freshman women, you have four classes of men to choose from.

All of this impressive schooling, and no one taught you not to end a sentence with a preposition? The only thing worse is TWO SENTENCES IN A ROW ending in prepositions! Now, I do this all the time, but damn, woman, I went to a liberal arts college. What did you expect?

Every year, you lose the men in the senior class, and you become older than the class of incoming freshman men. So, by the time you are a senior, you basically have only the men in your own class to choose from, and frankly, they now have four classes of women to choose from.

Is this the new math? I'm confused. I remember the last few weeks of my senior year when my roommate brought this freshman kid over all the time, and I was definitely convinced that would never work out, because they were both so damn tall I couldn't imagine how they could fit in the twin sized bed together. Also... AGAIN WITH THE PREPOSITIONS. Jesus!

Maybe you should have been a little nicer to these guys when you were freshmen?

Not if they were spending their time doing the new math.

If I had daughters, this is what I would be telling them.



And this--THIS is why your letter went viral, Mrs. Patton. Not only do you have sons (those flawless, unbelievable Princes of Princetonians who could probably do no wrong as boys will be boys and all that) and not daughters, so you really shouldn't talk, but those of us who have daughters know way too many people like you who absolutely will say this kind of trifling shit to our girls all their lives. We know too many people like you who will attempt to instill in happy, interesting, bright little girls some kind of false sense of desperation and desire, a hardness and a coldness that looks at the world and the people in it as if they are goods to be consumed and notches to mark on their frilly garter belts. You speak of jealousy among women and shallowness among men as if those are the standards with which all the other possibilities compare.

I'm writing this, and this, and so many other things, precisely so that my daughter, and my son, know this: They are not better than anyone, though they are loved more by me and their father than anyone else we love. They are not entitled to anything, though I would love for them both to have the world. They are not owed happiness, nor success, and achieving either of those is less important than being a productive member of society who does something to make the world a little bit of a better place for other people living in it. They are worthy because people are worthy, not in the Orwellian sense in which some animals are more equal than others, but in the real sense of the word. The vast majority of people in the world receive no education at all, live in abject poverty, struggle immeasurably every day, and yet when they whisper in their daughters' ears, they just might have something to say that I'd rather hear than this.

National Poetry Month: Why Poetry?

Why do people write? Moreover, why do people write poetry? People are led to believe, from a very young age, that poetry is an esoteric art, reserved for the "big" topics of life, such as love, death, sex, and revolution. I, on the other hand, was brought up in a house that had poetry on the wall of the bathroom. Poetry could literally be the thing you read to pass the time while sitting on the john. This is why I love the Poetry in Motion concept. Poetry on public transportation! How fitting! I think of poetry as a sort of photography, a way to remember my life. I never thought I couldn't do it. I think everyone can do it. All you have to do to write a decent poem is pay attention. I actually don't think I am a particularly good writer--I think that I pay attention to details and write them down, and that fact of me stealing imagery from the world leads some to think that I write well, when what I actually do is remember well. Most of the poems I've written are about things that happened to me, in the world, in real life.

But sometimes you have to remember that people write poetry because they love to read poetry. I'm thankful to the people who write interesting poems, because they have been entertaining me since I was 4 years old. I wrote this years ago, maybe when I was in my late 20s. It's still true.



Juvenilia
by Katy Jacob

I like to read the ones written before anyone knew
they were supposed to be good,
when the presently famous or long dead and immortalized
had a myriad of day jobs and dreams,
had whole lives ahead of them and
couldn't see how they would be,
so they wrote it all down just in case
it turned out to be interesting.

I like knowing there was a time before they had time
to ponder insects and big words, when mortality was a concept
they didn't want to get too close to,
when it was just life, and they could see it,
and they kept asking for it, even in absence
of anyone else caring, even when it was boring,
or hard, or less than they thought they wanted.

Once they arrive, once there's a Pulitzer or Nobel or Tanner
in their names, they can write about anything and get paid for it--
they have the privilege of self-absorption
and isolation if they choose, and no one says,

Here's a new collection, ever so much more remote
from the insignificance that made her great,
that made him write in subways and at bus stops
on the way to work, that made them write
anyway, even though, in spite of, because it was just
something to do while the world opened up,
almost by accident and without anyone paying attention.

I like the incidentals present in all the early ones,
the surprise, the flaws, the endless presence of the mundane,
the way you read them and think

Maybe that bar was where he fell in love,
maybe that waltz was the first dance she ever learned,
maybe that sky was the one that said,
you can write about me, you can mourn my expanse,
you won't be young that long, you know,
and I, even I, won't last forever.