And Edna, whose schooling finished in Scotland when she was fourteen, vividly understood the advantages that the upper classes in Edinburgh enjoyed because of the higher education that was their socioeconomic birthright. Bob, born into a working-class immigrant family in Detroit, saw how his degree from MIT opened doors. Our parents sent my sister and me there because education was everything to them.
All you have to do is break just one of the cardinal rules: no leaving campus without permission, no alcohol, no drugs of any kind, no cheating, no sex, and, above all else, no breaking of the school’s beloved honor code.īut that’s not why I ended up at Thacher, an elite boarding school in California, though my trouble with rules did contribute to why I got kicked out. It’s easy to get kicked out of most boarding schools. Sometimes, the intervening decades can feel all but gone. What happens to you as a teenager matters. As I leafed through it, the words on the page brought me powerfully back not to the lessons in the classroom but to the countless letters I’d written to my friends in those years. It looked just like the one I’d been assigned in boarding school long ago. Hinton’s The Outsiders caught my attention. I ran my fingers absently over the spines of books, picking up one classic novel and then another. Looking around the store, an extraordinary tribute to reading and writing as surely as the Musée d’Orsay was to art, I could see why. Tara had told us on the way over that this English-language bookstore, founded in 1951, had long been the center of expat literary life and that many famous writers had visited and even slept there over the years. I’d never seen so many books packed into a space. More books were heaped on tables crammed into corners.
Inside, thousands of books both new and used lined the shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling. Shakespeare and Company’s green-and-yellow facade and weather-beaten sidewalk book bins telegraphed old-world charm.