For Shelley, previously happy with her family, life-long friends and working class life, there is a blazing new star on her horizon: a life of the mind. This complicates her psyche and her life because she wants to both keep her working class roots and develop her intellectual abilities. She loves her husband and kids, her family of origin, and her best girlfriends, she can barely stand the strain of not “doing it together.” The upset in her relationships is a mirror of her own gathering ambivalence, her own feeling of being torn—torn not between success and failure in college, but between two
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