Becoming

teenager. Perhaps as a result, she seemed unhooked from any single cultural identity. People we ...

M This is doable, of course—minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it ta ...

homey than institutional. I loved the feeling of being there, of having office work to do. I loved the lit ...

I you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean o ...

efficiently, how to think critically. I’d inadvertently signed up for a 300-level theology class a ...

in their path. Another girl we knew had six friends over to her dorm room one night to celebrate her ...

“H I see now that she provoked me in a good way, introducing me to the idea that not everyone nee ...

Once a week or so, if I found a quiet moment, I’d pick up the phone and dial the number for our ...

always asked if I needed anything—money, for instance—but I never said yes. ...

H 7 ome gradually began to feel more distant, almost like a place in my imagination. While I was ...

“the South Side.” I knew that if those words conjured anything at all, it was probably stereo ...

The hum of those insects and the twisting limbs of the live oaks stayed with us long after we’d gone ...

H polite, go-nowhere small talk, accompanied by a hot, hearty South Carolina meal, which we shoveled in ...

And we do. We run through that field. We dash from one end to the other, waving our arms like little kids, ...

one, and married another Princeton classmate of ours. At the time—and unfairly, I think now—I judged him fo ...

Each spring, corporate recruiters descended on the Princeton campus, aiming themselves at the graduating seniors. ...

interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll lo ...

B 8 arack Obama was late on day one. I sat in my office on the forty-seventh floor, waiting and not waiti ...

minute of the day. Which put me back at my desk, alone with my documents. If I had to spend seventy h ...

Her sigh was audible. “Girl, no,” she called back. She was amused, I could tell. She knew how tardiness dr ...