It’s one thing to read books, quite another to presume to be involved in their creation. At Brown, a place swarming with smart and talented writers, to want to be a writer or to in some way participate in the literary world had meant facing a terrifying competition. Rather than risk failing at something, I did what so many college students at sea do: I aimed for something I didn’t really want. The reward would be diminished, but so would the risk. I’d spent twenty-two years responding to fear with caution. Why stop now?
Sometimes it takes a book to jolt you out of where you are. It doesn’t have to be a great book. Just the right book at the right moment, one that opens something up or exposes you to something new or somehow forces you to reexamine your life; the sustained and immersive experience of reading a book can do this in ways not even the best TV show or movie can. It can be altogether transformative.
In the spring of 1993 I needed that kind of book. It was my senior year in college, and I was in a University Career Services office, talking to a recruiter from Quaker Oats.
“Pleasantly sweet, yet tangy,” I chirped with a smile, extolling the virtues of Cap’n Crunch cereal with Crunch Berries. And then I stopped.
In a moment of clarity, I saw myself from a bird’s-eye view, self-conscious and in a stiff J.Crew suit reciting canned oratory about packaged goods. Look at that nervous young woman trying to persuade someone to let her peddle sugar-coated cereal to goggle-eyed children, kids who would surely be better off eating pretty much anything else. She was not the person I wanted to be. I felt a wash of nausea, as if I’d actually consumed an entire box of Crunch Berries. Was this what all the reading and studying and career planning had been for, the reason my parents had forked over tens of thousands of dollars for a fancy education?
Why did I want to work at Quaker Oats? That was the question the interviewer was asking and he needed an answer.
I had found one possible answer at the local bookstore, but it was to the wrong question. That question was one I’d been asking myself over the last few months, and it was even more intimidating. What if I didn’t get a job, not at Quaker Oats, not anywhere? It was a realistic, and frightening, possibility. The economy was mired in a recession. I wasn’t very good at interviewing. I didn’t really want to do what I didn’t really want to do, and it seemed the people interviewing me could tell.
The last time I’d openly admitted to wanting to be a writer was on an application for the Coca-Cola/Martin Luther King Scholarship senior year in high school; I’d won third prize. (“I would like to be a senator, both at the state and federal level. Also, I would like to be a writer—fiction and nonfiction.”) I’d entered dozens such competitions to help supplement my financial aid package—I’d also won third place in the Seventeen magazine short-story contest. For that, my prize was a Brother word processor, useful because I couldn’t afford a computer. After these decent but not stellar performances, I’d made college slightly cheaper but given up openly aiming for a life in letters.
The runner-up jobs, writing for a magazine or working at a publishing house, didn’t pay enough for me to support myself, and I was scared to apply anyway. As for the money jobs, no matter how hard I tried to conform to corporate expectations, I didn’t seem to be what they wanted. They could smell my ambivalence.
But one book suggested a tantalizing alternative: A Journey of One’s Own: Uncommon Advice for the Independent Woman Traveler had been published just the year before by the spectacularly named Thalia Zepatos. “A teacher, spokeswoman, and heroine of sorts to a generation of travelers” (according to the Seattle Times), Zepatos had traveled to fifty countries by plane, train, donkey, camel, oxcart, bicycle, bus, truck, boat, and foot. Then she wrote a book urging other women to do the same. I should have been ingesting passages of What Color Is Your Parachute?, but I bought Zepatos’s book instead.
A Journey of One’s Own offered the life I wanted to be living if only I were a different person. I was nothing like Thalia Zepatos, heroine to a generation, rider of donkey and camel. But I wanted to be like her, to do what she had done, to go where she had gone, to have her sense of freedom and carefree yet purposeful indirection. I coveted her indifference to the narrow and directed path I’d followed, a path that was terrifying to veer off of.
In her introduction, Zepatos asked, “Why do we wait to travel? We wait until the time is right, until the car is paid off, until the kids are grown.” None of those things were problems here. I hadn’t even begun. Unlike many of my friends, I wasn’t graduating college with a boyfriend. I didn’t have kids; my plans were tethered to exactly no one. And I certainly didn’t have a job. “We wait to feel secure and confident enough to go alone,” Zepatos continued. Her soaring next paragraph felt like a direct challenge:
One day I decided to stop waiting and start traveling. As a woman, I had frequently challenged the restrictions others had placed on what I could do. While traveling, I challenged the limits I had placed on myself. I got tired of the way my own fears restrained my ideas of where I could go, with whom and how.
You know that experience of reading thoughts you haven’t yet articulated to yourself? I, too, was about to be trapped by my own fears into a future I didn’t want. I was doing what was expected of me, though I wasn’t sure where those expectations had come from or whose, precisely, they were. Now Thalia Zepatos was saying, Don’t let that happen.
I had to get out of Quaker Oats. Back in the interview room, I looked up at the Cinnamon Life emissary, with his charcoal-gray poise and careful hair and targeted gaze. His fingers, complete with wedding band, clunky class ring, and manicured nails, drummed the desktop with just the teensiest note of impatience. Despite hours dissecting manuals on interview skills, I felt ill prepared—and, worryingly, inappropriate, as if I’d already done something that negatively impacted his bottom line.
“I like our cereal, too,” my interrogator finally agreed with a chuckle. He stared at me with intention. “But really, why do you want to work for Quaker Oats?”
I had no idea.
“You’re right,” I said, beaten once and for all. “I don’t actually want to work at Quaker Oats. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.” I gathered my belongings and excused myself. On the way out of Career Services, I canceled my remaining appointments on the recruitment schedule.