The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life

by Richard Russo

And so, badly shaken and far from home, I set about developing a strategy for surviving at an institution determined to make me understand that while I might be as good as anybody, I was certainly no better. The gist of my plan was this: I would (1) pretend to know things I didn’t rather than risk the humiliation of ignorance and (2) conceal, as far as humanly possible, who I was and where I came from. I’d figure out what I was supposed to like and admire, and would do so even when I didn’t. In other words, I would lie through my teeth about everything. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only liar there. College is, after all, where we go to reinvent ourselves, to sever our ties with the past, to become the person we always wanted to be and were prevented from being by people who knew better. Actually, none of this is quite as bad as it sounds. Many years later, giving a commencement address at the college from which my younger daughter was graduating, I would compare going to college to entering the witness-protection program. You’re supposed to try on a new identity or two. Indeed, it would not only defeat the purpose, it would be downright dangerous to leave the program easily recognizable as the person who’d entered it.