This guest post is from Caroline Leavitt and is part of my Amazing Author series. If you are grappling with college entrance anxieties for you or your loved on, give it a read! Thanks Caroline and Lacy!
Sigh.
The Boy is in the midst of writing his college essays, applying to
theater schools and taking his SATS and ACT for the last time. And we,
his parents, are fried, frenzied, scared, lost. Living in the NYC area,
we hear of kids being sent to Thailand to build houses, in order to ramp
up their community service angle. We know of would-be-thespians taking
acting classes in London, and there is always the $700-an-hour college
consultant some families are fighting over because the price tag comes
with a supposed guarantee the consultant can get their kid into Yale.
Sigh is right.
So when Early Decision: Based on a True
Frenzy, popped through my door, I was nervous. Until I began to read.
Crawford's taken one of the most terrifying and pressure-cooker times in
a family's life--applying to college-- and turned it into art, along
the way exploring how the stress to succeed often has nothing to do with
happiness. I'm thrilled to have her here. Thank you so much, Lacy.
So
what made you want to put your experiences into a novel rather than
into a memoir? is any part of the process fictionalized? (I ask this
with a heavy heart...)
A
memoir would have violated the privacy the families I worked with, and
in many cases the students whose stories I remembered had already been
hurt enough; they didn’t need a book to publicize the wound. And on the
liability front, it would have been crazy to report the true stories of
some of the enormously powerful and prominent families I worked for.
Finally, I wasn’t interested in telling my own story as memoir. I was
interested in the students, in redeeming their experiences and in—I
hope—helping other families to avoid the same pitfalls.
The nuts and bolts of the process as depicted in the book are
absolutely true, as any student or parent going through it will know—the
labyrinth of forms and scores and essays, the bizarre experience of
completing the Common Application. But the characters in my book are
characters, and while they were born of my experience in real life, they
very much took over their own fates in the book’s pages.
The anxiety, too, is real. But one of the reasons I wrote a satire is
to try to lift the scrim a bit, to reveal how this process is causing so
much upset—how we can become so convinced that destiny hangs on a
college acceptance that we forget that life is so much bigger than
this. And that raising a child through young adulthood means giving
perspective to this process, not overwhelming a child with it.
Are
you familiar with the great documentary Nursery University? It's about
what NYC parents do to get their 3 year olds into pre-school, including
hiring a woman at $750 an hour to help them. Do you see any signs that
this trend and all this pressure is ever going to end?
Children
have always borne the weight of their parents’ ambitions, in one way or
another. I think, broadly speaking, that it is the case in the United
States at least that the expectations parents have for their children
have become more specific: that is, it’s no longer to marry a suitable
partner and have a family, or to find a career and support your family,
but to have a very specific sort of life, involving one kind of partner
and one kind of career, and the gateway to those things is often
perceived to be one of about twenty-five colleges (and nowhere else).
Excepting the most status-hungry parents out there, I think that most
parents are motivated by a healthy fear: fear of shifting economies, a
battered job market, the pressures of globalization; all of these
macroeconomic and social trends make it difficult for parents to imagine
the world their children will inherit, and that is terrifying. In the
face of that, you want to give your child the best, most bullet-proof
background you can. Unfortunately, instead of defining that as
self-reliance, authenticity, the confidence of one’s convictions, human
compassion, they define that as Harvard / Yale / finance / law.
It is fascinating to me that some parents, particularly those featured
in films such as Nursery University, believe that a child’s success in
life can be secured by acceptance to the right preschool. It is true
that certain schools are “feeders” for other schools, and so on and so
on, so if you get your child into, say, First Presbyterian Nursery
School in the Village, you have a better shot at Brearley, and from
there a better shot at Yale. But those calculations aren’t at the heart
of these parents’ quests. Emotionally, they are looking to exempt
their children from competition by competing for them; they’re looking
to win them a place right from the beginning, so everything will be
lined up for the rest of their lives. This is a dream, of course. To
me, it signals a failure of imagination, and a reflexive, and very
fear-based, response to parenting in our day.
Is this going to end? I couldn’t say. There are strong, lucid voices arguing for sanity—Madeline Levine in The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well, Paul Tough in How Children Succeed,
and others—as well as the sparkling examples of kids who took
non-traditional paths to prominence. I don’t much esteem Mark
Zuckerberg, but I like that dropping out of Harvard has now become about
as cool as getting in. There are a million ways to make a life, and
the world is astonishingly large and various. The dream, I think, has
to be to raise a child who has some sense of the possibility in the
hands of the young, and who has enough quiet and faith to learn her own
desires and go after them.
You were a college admissions counselor to children of privilege. Do you think it's the same way among those who aren't so privileged?
While
I was working with wealthy clients, I volunteered at local public
schools and, later, for individuals who were sent my way who could not
afford anything like the sort of help I provided. The hothouse climate
of trophy schools and pressure does not exist for students who fall
outside of a very narrow band of income and aspiration. It is, quite
simply, a luxury to sweat Harvard’s 5-percent admit rate; and I wish
more parents had this perspective. One of the characters in Early Decision,
Cristina, is based on a real student, the daughter of undocumented
immigrants, who graduated from a huge and embattled urban high school
and ended up at an Ivy League school. Students as talented as she was
have nothing to fear in the application process; their challenges far
precede competition in the applicant pool. Elite colleges and
universities are keen to find and admit students like Cristina, and the
top schools have plenty of funding for them; but the public education
system fails them year after year. These young people don’t know that
college is a possibility. They don’t know about the top schools, they
have no idea of the fellowships and grants on offer, and they don’t have
anyone to shepherd them through the maze of forms, test scores, and
deadlines. Often their parents are immigrants, documented or not, and
this adds another layer of inscrutability to the application process.
It’s a problem that transcends racial and ethnic lines, and it really
does enrage me to think that after clearing so many hurdles, posting
consistent academic achievement in an underperforming school environment
and with heaven knows what responsibilities and disadvantages at home, a
student could fail to reach a top college because of what are
essentially logistical requirements. I hoped to help sound the drum for
outreach and service to students in settings such as these.
In the middle, of course, is the wide band of young people who have to
worry not only about where they’re accepted, but also about where
they’ll receive aid (and how much they’ll be offered). This is a
grappling with real life that their more privileged peers are spared at
great psychological expense. It’s a rude awakening when, in their
twenties or later, young people whose parents paid their way through
college realize that things like rent and car insurance are not also
free. Also, in my experience, having to face the realities of college
costs makes for more focused students. We value things we have to work
for. Rich kids go, they drink, they network, they read some, they
graduate. But do they take advantage of as many opportunities as they
could? I’d argue that many of them never do.
Let's talk about the writing. What was the whole process like for you? Did you outline? Just fly by the seat of your pen? Was there anything that surprised you in the writing?
After
my first child was born, I found myself thinking about my decade-plus
of former students more than I had in all the years before. I
remembered the interactions with their parents, the long, late,
miserable October and November nights with crying kids who felt they
were going to let their parents down, who were convinced that their
lives were over before they had even begun. And I remembered with a
fresh horror some of the things the parents had said and done. I looked
at my baby and thought, will I be possessed by the same madness? I refuse to visit this on him.
I dreamed up some student characters first, and wrote their essay
drafts, just for fun. But I was home alone with my baby, and my
husband’s job took him out of town every single week, so for the most
part I just took notes for about nine months. My son was colicky and
would only nap in his car seat, so I’d drive around foggy San Francisco
until he fell asleep, and then go park in a parking garage (I had a few
favorites, usually the free ones attached to grocery stores) and take
notes on the book. I didn’t say a word about it to anyone—it was just a
private folly, something I did to entertain myself while working out
those first months with a first baby. Finally I read a few pages to my
husband, and he told me it was time to get serious about the book. We
hired part-time childcare to buy me a few hours during the week, and my
husband took our baby on Saturdays so I could write. I never outlined,
but when a sequence of events came clear to me, or a particular
character’s arc, I would scribble it down as quickly as I could, so as
not to lose it. By the time I started writing, I had been collecting
ideas and intentions for so long that it was like unfurling a sail—it
just billowed out ahead of me, and the experience was of chasing it,
always trying to keep up. I worked on it whenever I could—in the middle
of the night, early mornings, whenever.
Then there was revision, of course, sentence by sentence, constantly—I
work with an entire manuscript, nothing is firm until it’s all done—but
the drafting came to me with great pleasure. I had waited so long to be
able to work on it that it was a treat to finally be able to do so.
I found it fascinating that you wrote that in teaching these kids, you were able to sort out your own life. Could you talk about that please?
Immediately
after graduation I tried my hand at a few things that I thought I would
love to do, only to discover that I was in the wrong place. I taught
high school English, but I wasn’t a very good instructor. I interned in
public radio, but I wasn’t hungry for leads and I wasn’t really that
turned on by narratives of sound. I started a PhD program in English
Literature, but I didn’t really want to be an academic. After a time,
this experimentation began to feel like floundering, and soon thereafter
like drowning. I can see now that I was trying things because I loved
them, not because I loved doing them. Not a bad way to
experiment, and I was very lucky to have the opportunity to do this, but
loving your English Literature studies does not translate to loving a
classroom full of teenagers on a Monday morning, and listening to a lot
of NPR does not mean that you’ll find your groove in a newsroom. In a
sense, I was performing a version of adulthood rather than working my
way toward it; I wanted to be something before figuring out how to do something.
As I aged through my twenties, I began to panic. I worried there was
no place for me, that I would never hit upon the run of steady, small,
cumulative successes that leads to a career, that allows someone to move
from apprentice to practitioner in a given field.
All of this time, I was working with high school seniors. So many of
them had been trained to present themselves in a certain way,
particularly in writing, that it could take quite a lot of conversation
for me to come to understand the things that mattered to them most.
Sometimes, without even knowing it, these kids were voicing their
parents’ dreams rather than their own. My job was to listen to them
intently, to infer their interests based on how those things were
expressed or hidden. Terrific essays and a clear academic direction
would always follow. They’d say, But I can’t DO (biology / calculus /
Latin). There’s no WAY I can become a (dolphin trainer / video game
designer / classicist). And I’d reply, let’s just put one foot in
that direction, let’s just knock on a few doors, and see what happens.
And they’d be off and running.
It took a very, very long time for me to figure out how to apply this
to my own life—how to admit what I really wanted to do and have the
courage to go after it. Some of my kids were emotionally savvy enough
to detect this, and they’d provoke me a bit—So, are you loving this tutoring gig?—and it used to infuriate me. Of course it did; they were holding up the mirror.
But really I discovered that I needed to calm down, make some clear
choices, and let the gods handle the rest. It was a lesson in both
resilience and conviction.
So what's obsessing you now?
You might have read about, or seen, the new documentary Blackfish about
the keeping in captivity of killer whales. My family relocated to San
Diego last year, so Sea World is a regular day’s outing for us. I’ve
long been ambivalent about wild animals in captivity, and I usually find
zoos to be terribly depressing, but I found that my resistance lessened
when I saw the way my children reacted to the orcas and other animals
at Sea World (and the San Diego Zoo, the aquarium, and so on). I
regretted that these magnificent animals weren’t roaming the open
oceans, but I was able to imagine the thousands upon thousands of
children who come to see them, and hope that if just one in every ten
thousand children discovers his dream thereby, is overwhelmed by passion
for these animals and set on a path toward oceanography, environmental
research and preservation, even philosophy and the ethics of our
association to the natural world, then there is a net positive here.
This film has thrown my precarious acceptance back into question, and
I’m wondering if instead of offering my children a path to stewardship
of the natural world, I’m instead modeling for them that humanity always
has dominion over that world, even (and especially) the most powerful,
exceptional animals, the ones who, in many ways, are most like us.
Which opinion most accurately reflects the truth? I don’t know, but it
seems to me that between the well-being of these animals and the
preservation of the natural world (which task soon falls to my
children’s generation), the stakes are very high.
What question didn't I ask that I should have?
So should the parent of a college-bound senior hire someone like you? Can my child compete without such a tutor?
There is absolutely a place for independent college applications
counseling. In-house (high school) college counselors can be
overwhelmed, with far too many students to know everyone well and help
them make good choices, much less be in useful dialogue about essay
topics and other ideas. There are wonderful college advisors out there
who really know the schools and can offer support with the deadlines,
forms, financial aid processes, search for grants and scholarships, and
so on—all really critical logistical help for busy parents who may feel
horrified by the anxiety and manic energy that attends every aspect of
this process.
That said, as with any profession, there are splendid practitioners and
there are lesser ones. Any applications advisor who is packaging a
student instead of listening to him will insult a young person just as
independence beckons. It’s a tender time. Choose wisely, lest your son
or daughter be dropped into an applicant-molding process that will take
care of everything except for taking responsibility if it doesn’t work
out. In other words: find your friends and stay above the fray, and it
will all end up fine. Really, it does.
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