It had been the honest answer. I did not want to work at Quaker Oats. I wanted to be a writer, which was impossible. I wanted to work in magazine or book publishing, but the starting salary at Farrar, Straus & Giroux was $14,500; a “good” editorial salary was $17,000, and I couldn’t afford that. In those days, moving back in with your parents simply wasn’t allowed. Moreover, my mother had divorced her second husband and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the city. I’d never had a bedroom at my father’s. Both of them literally didn’t have room for me, which was frankly fine.
The trouble was finding an alternative. My bank account was nearly empty. Every check I’d gotten as a child had gone directly into college savings and now college was over. I’d worked on-campus jobs as part of my financial aid package, first helping fund-raise for the school’s athletic programs from wealthy donors and then catering to prominent alumni and other dignitaries at luxury events on campus that rewarded them for their gifts. Both jobs demonstrated that in terms of money there were two worlds at college: the people who had it easy and the people who helped make those people’s lives even easier. I didn’t enjoy that second job, and the first wasn’t right for me.
There was of course the option to stay in school. I’d had one other ambition before graduation, which was to get a graduate degree; I knew I wasn’t done learning. I could keep reading, get a doctorate in history, and stay in school forever. My favorite history professor smiled sadly when I stated my intentions.
“Think about where you’d like to be after grad school,” he said. “Because you won’t be in New York. You won’t be at a school like this. You will teach somewhere in Iowa, and not at the main state campus but at some small offshoot out in a pasture. And unless you have someone to pay for it, you will also owe thousands of dollars.” It wasn’t personal, he assured me. There just were no jobs. The period I was interested in—the world wars—wasn’t fashionable in a grad school market held tight in the grip of deconstruction and post-Marxian analysis.
“You don’t want to go to grad school,” he said gently.
Was I really so predictable? Much as I loved New York, there was something depressing about going off to college only to have a professor tell you that you ought to turn around and go home. It was also depressing to think I couldn’t somehow superstar my way through grad school into a tenure-track position. Perhaps my run of academic successes up to that point—the hard-earned grades, the coveted acceptance to Brown, the scholarships—had used up my lifelong share. Perhaps they didn’t add up to that much anyway. (Third place, third place.)
I must have done something wrong. If a failed interview with Quaker Oats was where my experiences had led, those experiences must have been fairly limited. Perhaps they hadn’t been the right experiences.
Trudging down the main commercial drag on campus, I was plagued with doubt. How were you supposed to make a lifelong decision when you had so little experience? If you weren’t fitting into the future this environment had created, perhaps a new environment was necessary.
And that’s where A Journey of One’s Own fit in. What Thalia Zepatos’s book did was allow me to start an entirely new story for myself, one with no foreseeable ending. You could abandon the career rush altogether—not giving up, exactly, just opting out.
What I had to do, I decided, was challenge all of the assumptions and wrong-footed moves I’d made that led to that Quaker Oats interview. I’d do something that would quite possibly make me miserable. Maybe even try to do something that would make me miserable. I had made a few such moves before: joining the college rugby team because I was bad at sports and the gospel choir because I was an atheist who couldn’t sing. But the field of risk now was much greater than an afternoon extracurricular activity. It was my life. It could end up being a terrible mistake.
But I couldn’t help wondering: What would it be like to pick up and go somewhere else, somewhere I had zero interest in, a place with a different religion, a different ethnicity, an unknown language? A place where I would be in the minority. A place where I knew no one. Somewhere you couldn’t go about your usual routine, diligently checking off boxes and getting things done. A place that challenged each moment of your day: no morning dose of coffee, no New York Times over a toasted sesame bagel, no level-six StairMaster workout, no dispiriting crush on the guy in the next cubicle.
I could go somewhere where none of these activities were even possible, some remote country, a place Cap’n Crunch had never sailed. To me, a history major of the most occidental school, the world was Weimar Germany, Charles de Gaulle, and the Gettysburg Address. I had to get out of there. I needed a place where the mind-set—the whole philosophy—was different, a non–Judeo-Christian culture where each of my moments would be challenged. Asia, I decided. I knew nothing about the entire continent beyond the grossest generalizations. I had never been part of those students who became enamored of Japanese design or wrote papers about Mao Zedong. I hated Benihana.
Reading the motivational passages in A Journey of One’s Own (“Women actively explore the inner as well as the outer landscapes of our journeys—we don’t just take in the sights, we are changed by the things we see and the people we meet”), I hatched a plan for someone else, someone who wasn’t quite me but, rather, the Thalia-like person I wanted to be. Maybe instead of just reading about other women’s stories, I could become a person worthy of my own.
Thalia Zepatos wouldn’t have wound up at Quaker Oats. Thalia Zepatos, whoever she was (she is now a marriage equality activist, according to the Internet), had lived in a tribal village in the Golden Triangle. If only I knew what the Golden Triangle was, I might live there too.
What A Journey of One’s Own started, other books helped along, including the tiny, blurry photographs in the Lonely Planet guides at the college bookstore. Bearded men descending on the Ganges, saffron-robed monks floating in the rain, betel-lipped women folded over sodden fields. What were they thinking about, what were their days like, what did they want to do with their lives? I read these books, marked them down in Bob (yes, travel guides count), and fantasized about their contents before drifting off to sleep. One of these countries would be my destination.