I’d come to BYU to study music, so that one day I could direct a

church choir. But that semester—the fall of my junior year—I didn’t
enroll in a single music course. I couldn’t have explained why I
dropped advanced music theory in favor of geography and comparative
politics, or gave up sight-singing to take History of the Jews. But when
I’d seen those courses in the catalog, and read their titles aloud, I had
felt something infinite, and I wanted a taste of that infinity.

For four months I attended lectures on geography and history and
politics. I learned about Margaret Thatcher and the Thirty-Eighth
Parallel and the Cultural Revolution; I learned about parliamentary
politics and electoral systems around the world. I learned about the
Jewish diaspora and the strange history of The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion. By the end of the semester the world felt big, and it was hard
to imagine returning to the mountain, to a kitchen, or even to a piano
in the room next to the kitchen.

This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music, and my desire to
study it, had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My
love of history and politics and world affairs was not. And yet they
called to me.

A few days before finals, I sat for an hour with my friend Josh in an
empty classroom. He was reviewing his applications for law school. I
was choosing my courses for the next semester.

“If you were a woman,” I asked, “would you still study law?”
Josh didn’t look up. “If I were a woman,” he said, “I wouldn’t want
to study it.”

“But you’ve talked about nothing except law school for as long as I’ve
known you,” I said. “It’s your dream, isn’t it?”