Illinois bar exam three years earlier, the summer after finishing up at Harvard,
submitting myself beforehand to what was supposed to be a self-disciplined two
months of logging hours as a first-year associate at Sidley while also taking a bar
review class and pushing myself through a dauntingly fat book of practice tests.
This was the same summer that Craig was getting married to Janis in her
hometown of Denver. Janis had asked me to be a bridesmaid, and for a whole set
of reasons—not the least of which being that I’d just spent seven years grinding
nonstop at Princeton and Harvard—I hurled myself, early and eagerly, into the
role. I oohed and aahed at wedding dresses and helped plan the bachelorette
activities. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to help make the anointed day
merrier. I was far more excited about the prospect of my brother taking his
wedding vows, in other words, than I was about reviewing what constituted a
tort.
This was in the old days, back when test results arrived via the post office.
That fall, with both the bar exam and the wedding behind me, I called my father
from work one day and asked if he’d check to see if the mail had come in. It had.
I asked if there was an envelope in there for me. There was. Was it a letter from
the Illinois State Bar Association? Why, yes, that’s what it said on the envelope. I
next asked if he’d open it for me, which is when I heard some rustling and then a
long, damning pause on the other end of the line.
I had failed.
I had never in my entire life failed a test, unless you want to count the
moment in kindergarten when I stood up in class and couldn’t read the word
“white” off the manila card held by my teacher. But I’d blown it with the bar. I
was ashamed, sure that I’d let down every person who’d ever taught, encouraged,
or employed me. I wasn’t used to blundering. If anything, I generally overdid
things, especially when it came to preparing for a big moment or test, but this
one I’d let slip by. I think now that it was a by-product of the disinterest I’d felt
all through law school, burned out as I was on being a student and bored by
subjects that struck me as esoteric and far removed from real life. I wanted to be
around people and not books, which is why the best part of law school for me
had been volunteering at the school’s Legal Aid Bureau, where I could help
someone get a Social Security check or stand up to an out-of-line landlord.
But still, I didn’t like to fail. The sting of it would stay with me for months,
even as plenty of my colleagues at Sidley confessed that they, too, hadn’t passed
the bar exam the first time. Later that fall, I buckled down and studied for a do-