How to Grow Up (15 page)

“I can't keep doing this,” she said, stressed out. “It's too expensive.”

I didn't get into SVA or Tulane. A hundred dollars down the
drain; spending it all on scratch tickets would have made more sense. I was disappointed, and plagued by a new feeling that would soon become old—the feeling of not knowing how to be in this world. There was a way to get into college, and I didn't know it. I was probably supposed to call someone. Make an appointment, have a meeting. A person who had gone to college would have known the drill, could have told me how the game is played, but I didn't know anyone who went to college. Plus, smart as I might have been, my grades sucked. I hated reading Zane Grey novels in my Mysteries and Westerns class. I was completely lost in trigonometry. I'd failed gym because I refused to go in the pool and get my giant ratted hairdo wet. The only class I excelled at was philosophy, where I was able to study existentialism. Finally, something I could relate to!

After graduation I watched as friends scattered to various schools. I knew that I was smart, and creative, and it seemed like if I went to college, I might be in the company of other smart and creative people. Maybe there I would find a place for myself. So I took a year off to work to save enough money to pay for tuition at a state school. I knew my state school couldn't compare with the big-city art schools I had originally applied to, but I hoped that I would somehow find a path into a life that was a step up from ditchdigging.

For one semester I slept in a dorm room at a school on the North Shore of Boston. It seemed that the terrible people I'd gone to high school with had followed me here—classmates who spotted my tarot cards asked if I worshipped the devil, and boys who called me “faggot” in the hallways. (Faggot? But I'm a . . .
girl. Oh, forget it.) Wasn't college supposed to be a place of “higher learning” where students' minds were cracked wide open and thinking superdeep thoughts? Not this place. I'd opted to stay in the dorms because the college was an hour from home
and
because I'd read way too many young adult books about girls expanding their consciousness at college and having love affairs and best friendships on the rolling lawns of campus. But my experience was not like that. I had nothing in common with my roommate, who snuck her boyfriend in and had sex with him
right there
, with me a foot away, pretending to be asleep in spite of the noisy grunting and fog of sweat that bloomed off the boy's back, turning our cement-block room into a hothouse. Once a week some jerk pulled the fire alarm in the middle of the night, sending us all out into the parking lot in our pajamas. I'd be too tired for class, and was happy to skip anyway.

And while it was awful from a social standpoint, college wasn't the intellectually fulfilling experience I had imagined. My history professor forbid us to use the term
Native American
, and stopped me from doing a study on the lives of women in ancient Egypt, as women weren't rulers so therefore didn't matter. (Um . . . Cleopatra?) My psychology professor showed us a film detailing how gayness in men is “caused by” stress in pregnant women. At the end of the semester, I found I couldn't afford to keep living in the dorms, so I transferred to a commuter university in Boston and moved home. By the end of the year, my cash was spent and my college career was over. Never once had I sat under a tree on a rolling lawn having deep conversations with other students. Never once had I seen anyone else doing this,
either. I remembered what my mother had told me so long ago: Books weren't real. I'd based all my expectations of college on novels written by middle-class women who'd gone to pricey learning institutions, and at the end of it all I had nothing: no new, exciting knowledge; no new, intellectual comrades; no deeper purpose in life; and no money.

Even though my decision to quit is decades old—and even though I'm regularly brought in to teach at colleges around the country in spite of it—I still vacillate. Was it awesome that I didn't go to college, or was it stupid? And is it too late to go now?

Mostly I love that I didn't go to college. When my friends are stressing about their student loans, for instance. I've watched people go to college to study writing, then graduate and get a soul-crushing full-time job in order to pay off that debt, no time to write the book they went to school to learn how to write. Plus, I—and many writers—remain dubious about whether something like writing can be taught. Certainly people learn, they get better and more skilled, but must you pay a hundred thousand dollars for it? I set out to learn to write by writing—something I had a lot of time to do with no debt breathing down my neck. I read my work out loud at free open mic events, learning from the cheers and the boos what worked and what didn't. I read a lot, picking up, mostly through osmosis, a wider vocabulary, an understanding of style, the backbeat of rhythm.

When I'm traveling around, reading my work and teaching workshops, people always ask me where I went to school. I love to watch their reaction when I tell them I didn't. Their expression changes abruptly; I can see a paradigm shift occurring before
my eyes. Having grown up in a place where it was normal to not go to college, I wouldn't have imagined it would be so shocking, but time and time again, I've witnessed how the fact blows people's minds. And this is a good thing. It makes people recalibrate their idea of what a person who doesn't go to college looks like, sounds like, and acts like. Sadly, a lot of people hold on to stereotypes of people who opted out of higher education as shiftless bums, not to mention
stoopid
. But there are lots of ways to be smart, and to learn. As a reader, I'm constantly hoovering information into my brain. Yes, a bunch of it is arguably meaningless trivia about the lives of fashion designers (Did you know that Tom Ford takes
five baths a day
?), but I love reading science magazines, too.

Not going to college does not mean you've opted out of educating yourself. Traveling, paying attention, asking questions, and always, always reading feed your smarts. And self-directed learning can lead you into random areas you would not have found in college, like the dozens of “underground,” small-press writers who have taught me different ways to write and to live. Plus, I feel like a badass telling people I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. While others were studying the finer points of the Western literary canon, I was teaching myself how to book a national tour, bringing two vanloads of feminist writers across the country to perform their work in bars, art galleries, and, yep, universities. This tour, Sister Spit, still travels the country every fall. After a recent show at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where hundreds of students turned out to listen to us talk about class, the performers sat in a beautiful
redwood cabin talking with students about what they'd learned. And I realized: If I had gone to college, none of us would have been there right then. The thought hit me powerfully. There are other ways to create a life built around literature and learning, and mine is living proof.

But like I said, I vacillate. How could I not, in a world that insists that college is the place to be if you value your intellect and want a prosperous life? It's true I would be more eligible for teaching jobs if I had a degree backing me up, and I'd be able to command a higher rate of pay. But even more persuasive is having access to what I've come to believe is college's top benefit: connections. My mother's glum refrain “Money goes to money” is true, and if you don't have any money, one way to get some is by being around people who
do
have money. And those people go to college. I know that for working-poor kids it's not as easy as enrolling, becoming besties with some heiresses, and getting hooked up. Working-poor kids are likely too bewildered and stressed out (and holding jobs in addition to studying) to have a big social life, and friends they make are bound to be others like them, able to offer support and understanding in this scary new world. But I've seen friends who attended university—some on their parents' dime, some at great cost to themselves—make phone calls that produced jobs, internships, literary agents. It's as if there is an inside world and an outside world, and one way inside is through college. I didn't know that then, and I don't know if knowing it would have made a difference—I still wouldn't have had the resources. But as I grew older and my experience of the world broadened, I began to understand how
important networks are, how being part of a network can make your life happen. Understanding this, it's hard not to wonder what my life could have been like with some help from the inside. I could have had a great writing professor take me under his or her wing; I could have had a story passed to a magazine, gotten hooked up with an agent. Perhaps I could have sold my first book for more than three hundred dollars, my second for more than a thousand.

In my early thirties, newly sober, I started wondering about college again. Looking back on my path, all I could see right then was the destruction my prioritization of drugs and alcohol had wrought, the many ways I'd stunted myself. Maybe it
had
been foolish not to have tried harder to go to college. I was engaged in making “amends”—reaching out and apologizing to people my drinking had hurt. One person you make amends to is yourself, because often you're the one most harmed by your boozing. These amends often take the shape of living your life the way you would have if you weren't such a mess. By my senior year of high school, my drinking had already been in full swing. Did I owe it to myself to give college a try?

The question led me to a fancy East Coast university, one of the few colleges that has a grad program in literature that's free
and
that will sometimes overlook an absence of undergrad if you have a surfeit of life experience. And did I ever! I'd published three books, memoirs that explored what life had been like for an off-center, working-class girl like me. I'd managed to get them published on small presses that didn't have much to offer me financially, but they got my books into the world
—
a dream come true, a dream I had barely dared to dream. Those books found
readers, and many of them liked what I was writing about. One even got a review—a good one!—in the
New York Times
! This alone seemed more than anyone from my circumstances could hope for, but there was more. In addition to the ongoing Sister Spit tour, I'd also organized long-running literary series, more than a few, the latest one being at the San Francisco Public Library. It meant a lot to me and to the underground writers I worked with to present our writing in such an “official” place. I hadn't gone to college, but I'd done all
this
. Surely it must mean something!

Nervous but excited, I brought copies of my books to my meeting at the creative writing department at the East Coast university. It had taken me more than a decade, but I was finally figuring out how to do what I hadn't been able to do as a teenager: I was visiting a school, observing the campus, meeting with a professor. The man took a look at the small stack of books I'd brought him, then looked at me. “You're actually more accomplished than what we're looking for in our graduate students,” he said.

I didn't realize how much hope I'd put into that meeting until it evaporated. “Yeah,” I said, possibly desperately, “but I did it all outside of the system—no undergrad, nothing.” The professor looked a little stunned at that, a little confused. He didn't respond, except to stammer, “Well, you're certainly welcome to apply.”

Apply?
Do you know how much those application fees cost?
I remembered my mother, stress-smoking cigarettes in the kitchen as I typed up applications to colleges we couldn't afford. And I
understood, suddenly, how she felt. I wasn't going to put all that effort and money into getting into a program I was told would likely not accept me. Once outside the office I let a few angry tears sneak out before getting myself together. It was hard not to feel like I was being punished for being resourceful, for working hard.

I was at a funny crossroads. Having just sobered up, I'd lost the glow that booze can lend to poverty. I didn't want to be broke for the rest of my life—I wanted security; I wanted a nice thing or two. I had enough money trickling in to make me know I wanted more. It was a time when a lot of writer friends, tired of toiling over poems few people read, had decided to return to school. I looked into a program for late-in-life female students at Smith College. It wasn't free, but they did a lot to support you as you entered this new and overwhelming landscape. A Smith graduate was urging me to apply. At the same time, an offer came in from an art publisher. They wanted to publish a collection of short stories I'd written, accompanied by graphic illustrations. I'd have to get to work tidying the writing up and would need to go on a tour once it came out, to promote it. I knew I couldn't do both. The school application would be its own effort, no time to work on my writing and reach the publisher's deadline. If I got in, there was no way I could tour the book, and if you're publishing books on small presses you've got to tour them. Did I take this crazy risk and apply to a school on the other side of the country, abandoning the life I'd built instead of going to college, getting into the debt I'd studiously avoided? Or did I stay on the path of
crazy risk that had become my life, continuing to build the career momentum I'd created?

“Michelle,” my friends observed. “People go to college so they can publish books. You're already publishing books. Why do you want to go to college?”

Huh. They were right. (You may have noticed a pattern—my friends are usually right. It pays to have friends who are smarter than you). Why
did
I want to go to college? I wanted to go because I was scared. I was scared I had made a bad decision a long time ago. That I was missing out on some vital experience that could propel me to increased wealth and glory. But a glance at all my struggling college-educated friends stripped me of
that
illusion. A college education hadn't been the magic bullet that shot them into their dream lives. Life is hard for everyone, a chiaroscuro of awesome triumphs and sucky setbacks. Everyone wants more than what they have and they have to hustle toward it best they can. My path might be different than that of so many people around me, but it's also very much the same. In 12-step there's a saying: Do the next right thing. The next right thing was to allow these stories I'd written about my weird-ass beautiful life to be published, and then do what I could to support that work. What did I want to be when I grew up? A librarian, I'd once thought, so that I could be close to books. It hadn't even occurred to me that I could be the person who
wrote
the books. A writer. And now I was one.