Hillbilly Elegy

were the brightest students in the world,
and I did not qualify as such. But that
didn’t end up being the case. Though
there were rare geniuses walking the
halls of the law school, most of my
fellow students were smart but not
intimidatingly so. In classroom
discussions and on tests, I largely held
my own.
Not everything came easy. I always
fancied myself a decent writer, but when
I turned in a sloppy writing assignment
to a famously stern professor, he handed
it back with some extraordinarily
critical commentary. “Not good at all,”
he scribbled on one page. On another, he
circled a large paragraph and wrote in