I hurl so much unsolicited writing into the world, and in return have often heard: “you should write a book!”

I usually take this to mean “wow, you write…a LOT. Shouldn’t you put it somewhere?”

So for years I’ve chosen to receive that comment as kindness but didn’t think much else of it.  I had a job, and I didn’t have a book in me. I’ve always just been glad I get to write every day and sometimes share it. I’m sincerely grateful that anyone reads me, anywhere, ever.

But then 2020 came, and I realized two things.

1) The number of people asking me to write a book was…not small.  Some of them were friends but some were strangers, and some have asked multiple times.  There was a small chance they might not just be saying it out of startled politeness.

2) I DO have a book in me: one book, specifically.  And thanks to encouragement from writers I respect like Donyae Dillman, Kazim Ali, Krista Vernoff, Chris Markus, Alanna Lin Ramage & Juli Crockett…I am writing it.

Here is the story’s story:

*

I grew up in Buffalo New York, and attended three separate private schools in the 1970s & 80s.  Two of these are schools my parents also attended in the 1950s & 60s. 

Private education was the closest thing my parents had to a shared religion.  They were both the intellectual youngest children of striving parents, and both of their fathers went bankrupt after their older siblings had gone to Ivy League colleges.

They met at Syracuse University: a fine school, but not where either of them had pictured themselves.

My parents didn’t actually have much money themselves.  Neither one ever owned a house.  But they put the money they had toward what they valued: sending their “gifted” only child to private schools.  They never said it out loud, but it was clear they hoped I would avenge them by going to an Ivy League college one day.

By the time I had graduated from my third private school (4^th, if we count Westminster Presbyterian Church preschool) my parents were divorced and my mother was dying.

Like many teenagers, I had a “behavior” problem and a newly acquired cynicism about the institutions I was raised to revere.

So I left town for an excellent public university, where I met a whole new batch of people, saw the world in a different way, and my adult life began.

Many years of that life later, I have my own child who has inspired my own anxieties about the responsible way to shepherd his future.  I can suddenly see clear as day how AMERICAN these anxieties are, and how overwhelmingly generational. 

Like my parents, I am not wealthy, but am usually culturally sorted in the upper middle class…as a result of my education.  This has always felt like a mixture of privilege, death sentence, and collective national lie.

My father often asks me why I don’t send my son to private school, and I never have an answer except to acknowledge that just the idea of doing so causes me intense, immediate revulsion.

Vertiginous class anxiety and its relationship to the question of education is certainly not an under-explored topic.  We talk about class in America all the time, and we are obsessed with private school.

But in this story, as I am across the country contemplating my son’s education, the actual schools in my actual hometown start to face reckonings.  In two cases, completely predictable but devastating sexual improprieties are revealed.  I personally know people involved in both cases.

Within a few years, a Catholic school many of my closest friends attended has a change in leadership and experiences protests, mass resignations, and media scrutiny. 

I realize for the first time how deeply embedded my Buffalo family and community are in the centers of private education. My high school friends are now sending their kids to the schools I attended.

Meanwhile, the pandemic is happening. George Floyd is murdered 6 miles away, in the city that is twin to the one I’ve recently moved to. I reconnect with an old classmate, and hear hair-raising details of her experience at my small, beloved all-girls high school.

These details continue to explode in my mind and my heart and my history, creating a mushroom cloud that slowly envelops my internal emotional world.

So as I often do when in distress…I go looking for a book.

Specifically, I look for a book about what private schools promise and what they deliver in terms of class mobility.  About the power of private schools as mechanisms for the transfer or reinforcement of social class and power.  About how this mechanism guarantees that abuse of power within these schools is a feature not a bug. Etc. 

I don’t find the book. I realize how much fiction and writing exists AROUND this topic, but how little has looked directly at it. I wonder how the existence of these schools might clash with the modern project of improving equity. I wonder if private education should exist at all.

This thought immediately sends me into a spiral of fear: the book I’m looking for can’t be a screed or an exposé. Private schools aren’t BAD. I need my fantasy book to acknowledge how deeply we are committed to the romance of class mobility in this country, and highlight how successful these schools often are at reinforcing the American dream. I want it to acknowledge how many “excellent” kids are in fact plucked from their modest circumstances and given their shot at their proper place in the meritocracy. 

But.

In my dream book, I also want to hear about excellent “underprivileged” kids who are given their shot, and still don’t get where we tell them they’ll go, because of other systemic failures.

I want this book to be scholarly, but I NEED it to be personal.
It will probably be a little bit funny, because any time big important issues run into tiny human feelings, the result is at least partially absurd.

I realize that Buffalo has always been a crucible for class stress – aspiration, failure, Niagara Falls, Bethlehem Steel, the Bills…the river, the railroad…being the OTHER city in New York. I think about how Buffalo has lately been Ground Zero for the burblings of revolution: India Walton’s campaign, the Starbucks unionization, etc.

I realize how much I would love to see a re-examination of the role of private education in American society start in Buffalo. This would require someone to take a look at the state of private education in Buffalo, in a way that mixes memoir with creative nonfiction, criticism with interviews and research and journalism.

It hits me quite hard that just imaging this project makes me feel like I am betraying my family.

And I realize that once you’ve identified the book you’re desperate to read, searched for that book, and found that the book doesn’t exist…you might have just identified the book you’re supposed to write.

I remember how often I’ve been told that the art you’re terrified to make is the art you should be making. I remember how many of my favorite books have required their authors to betray their families.

And so finally, I begin to do as I am told.