209/365/Books

When I was 25 and temping as a secretary in DC and worried that I had no brain at all, I decided to test graduate school waters and signed up for two courses at a nearishby university: a poetry workshop, which was kind of insane of me, and a feminist literary criticism course, which was scary, because I hadn’t been an English major—partly because I didn’t figure out in time that I probably should have been and partly because I have trouble remembering detail and plot points and thought I would fail exams—so I was intimidated to enter a graduate school classroom because what if it turned out I was brainless, but in the evenings, before the calendar caught up with the syllabus, Tim read Frankenstein aloud to me, so that when I read it, it was like a second read (I can’t recommend this enough, actually, and what a fucking amazing book—I still have that cheap Penguin Classics paperback from the class, all yellowed), and, as stated in Letter 1 to Mrs Saville, England, “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprize which you have regarded with such evil forebodings,” for even though I was not brilliant, neither were some of the enrolled students, so I held my middlin’ own, and there was this woman in both my classes with big red glasses and an outsized gift* on whom I developed a fan-girl crush and we’re still friends, which is worth the price of tuition.

*I don’t mean to imply that she was all talent. She worked hard. But damn, she’s good.