It was a sunny September afternoon when I heaved my suitcase

through Harvard Yard. The colonial architecture felt foreign but also
crisp and unimposing compared to the Gothic pinnacles of Cambridge.
The central library, called the Widener, was the largest I had ever seen,
and for a few minutes I forgot the past year and stared up at it,
wonderstruck.

My room was in the graduate dorms near the law school. It was
small and cavelike—dark, moist, frigid, with ashen walls and cold tiles
the color of lead. I spent as little time in it as possible. The university
seemed to offer a new beginning, and I intended to take it. I enrolled in
every course I could squeeze into my schedule, from German idealism
to the history of secularism to ethics and law. I joined a weekly study
group to practice French, and another to learn knitting. The graduate
school offered a free course on charcoal sketching. I had never drawn
in my life but I signed up for that, too.

I began to read—Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft
and Mill. I lost myself in the world they had lived in, the problems they
had tried to solve. I became obsessed with their ideas about the family
—with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin
against their obligations to society as a whole. Then I began to write,
weaving the strands I’d found in Hume’s Principles of Morals with
filaments from Mill’s The Subjection of Women. It was good work, I
knew it even as I wrote it, and when I’d finished I set it aside. It was
the first chapter of my PhD.

I returned from my sketching class one Saturday morning to find an
email from my mother. We’re coming to Harvard, she said. I read that
line at least three times, certain she was joking. My father did not
travel—I’d never known him to go anywhere except Arizona to visit his