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He was what I thought of as a “real” English major: he memorized poetry, annotated short stories in the New Yorker, and was writing an
incomprehensible thesis on James Joyce.
All I did was write stories about “girls ...
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I smiled, not wanting to tell him I didn’t ski, never had, and that I’d come to Wilder not knowing it had its own ski mountain.
“Well now, why would he hate you?” “No—more like, he hates the idea of me.”
Dr. Cushman’s office was “symbolic of how Wilder treats women: it tucks us away in the basement where our messy female problems can be hidden from view.”
If you can’t make people care about the community they live in, how can you get them to care about anything?”
All I know about writing is you sit down and write, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, the words come. All I know is some people are talented and some aren’t, and some stick with it no matter what. Others give up. The truth is, most of you won’t become writers. You’re here at this fancy school and, let’s be honest, I don’t think your parents sent you here hoping you’d become writers.
Money’s the engine for everything in this world, even if no one wants to talk about it. It’s one of those ‘unpleasant’ topics they avoid at all costs. They hate the nouveaux riches, but they need them to survive. The joke is New York was always a commercial society. Its aristocracy was never based on birth—it was based on money. They just liked to pretend otherwise.”
“We think our stories are personal,” he told me, “but we’re all products of our time.”
That’s why you’re there, so you can get a good job when you’re done.” “Oh, is that why I’m here,” I mumbled.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know what Russian novel you think you’re in, but you’re just fucking a professor. And not even a tenured one.”
