The graduate school memoir I never wrote

I wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling embarrassed when I tell people I’m writing/have written a memoir. A memoir! Who do I think I am??

Maybe I’d feel less self-conscious if I didn’t come from academia, and particularly from classics, where until fairly recently there was a pretty intense firewall constructed between the scholar’s self and the scholar’s scholarship. Thanks to the tireless work of marginalized scholars, that firewall is finally crumbling. But it still feels unseemly, somehow, to be turning my analytical focus on myself and my life instead of on the ancient civilizations I was trained to study in graduate school.

But I was actually in graduate school the very first time I thought about writing a memoir. When I was procrastinating from working on my dissertation, I sketched out a concept for a memoir-in-essays that I provisionally titled Feminists Don’t Bake Cheesecake: And Other Lies I Was Told in Graduate School. Each essay was going to be based on something I’d actually been told, like “Graduate school is a great time to have a baby” or “we love interdisciplinary work” or “graduate students don’t have anything original to say about Aeschylus” or “Having an alcoholic adviser is good, actually because if you want to meet with them they’re always happy to go to the bar” or “your fellow grad students don’t know what they’re talking about, nobody in this department has an alcohol problem”.

My idea for the title essay came from an experience I had very early on in grad school. When I was a young, energetic, bright-eyed first-year PhD student, a friend (who was actually good at baking) and I (a self-taught mess) offered to co-host a departmental coffee hour. Every week, she and I got together and baked for our colleagues. Not only did our baking skills improve dramatically, we also became inexplicably popular among our fellow students and professors. (Ok, maybe it wasn’t that inexplicable.) 

I also spent a lot of time taking pictures like this

Within weeks of starting my PhD program, everyone in the department knew my name. Every Thursday afternoon, the reading room was packed with classicists jockeying for the last piece of pie. Actually, that’s a lie. 75% of whatever we made would disappear within the first ten minutes, and then for the next 45 minutes people would carefully cut slivers off the last remaining piece until only a bite-sized, oddly-shaped chunk remained.

The coffee hours were stunningly well attended, and, by all accounts, a huge success. So when the time came to publish the yearly departmental newsletter, my co-baker and I were asked to submit a recipe from coffee hour. It was a little outside of usual range of newsletter content, which typically features faculty biographies, recent publications, and dissertation summaries. But the editor thought the recipe would add some personality, and we were happy to contribute. We polled the department, and the almost universal favorite was a pumpkin cheesecake we made right around Thanksgiving. We sent the recipe in.

A few weeks later, we were pulled aside by the editor and told that the newsletter would not, in fact, be featuring our recipe. Apparently — much to our surprise — our cheesecake was controversial! Several professors felt having a recipe alongside the usual newsletter content was inappropriate and ill befit our department’s dignity. One person said that she would judge another Ivy League school classics department if they had a cake recipe in their newsletter. Feminist concerns were also raised  —  how did it look to have two female graduate students submit a cake recipe?

I’ve sat in on some faculty meetings, and having any debate about the content of the newsletter at all is pretty remarkable. Honestly, this incident is the only time I can remember anybody caring what was in the newsletter, period. Anyway, the cheesecake got cut.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the concerns. After all, the cheesecake recipe wasn’t directly relevant to either Classics or our department. Its inclusion was a nice but unnecessary idea. (Also… it was just Rachael Ray’s cheesecake recipe. We hadn’t really adapted or tweaked or made it our own in any way. Which felt a little like plagiarism, maybe?)

But I felt rankled by the tone of the objections. Why was baking cheesecake bad feminism? I was too young to see all the nuance. I didn’t yet understand how hard it can sometimes be to write feminist scholarship and show up in the academic world in a way that feels consistent with your politics. I didn’t realize that, five years from then, professors at my dissertation defense would be telling me they remembered how good my baked goods were instead of asking me questions about my work.

There are so, so many reasons why I’m glad that I didn’t try to make this memoir happen. Not that I could have even if I’d really tried, because there’s literally no audience for a book like that. The only people who would have found it even remotely interesting are in academia, and they probably wouldn’t have liked or agreed with my analysis. Everybody outside of academia would, I assume, have responded with a resounding, “So quit, then.” (Which I did, eventually.)

But the bigger issue, of course, was my lack of perspective. From where I sit a decade later, I can see that grad students are indeed often neglected, exploited, gaslit, and sold a bill of goods about the academic career that awaits them. Usually, this lying — if you want to call it that — isn’t intentional. I mean, yes, it’s a little misleading to say that grad school is a great time to have a baby, but also I can’t blame that faculty member for not going deep with me on a topic as complex as the penalties female scholars face for motherhood and the possible fertility risks of waiting until you’re securely tenured to start trying to get pregnant. It definitely hurt when my advisers seemed to think that me having a baby meant that I was de facto dropping out of school. But I have a better sense now of the systemic issues that caused that neglect, and a lot less resentment toward any individuals, most of whom I now see were genuinely trying the best they could to guide me on a path toward (their definition of) success. And look what a failure I am now! Writing memoir instead of scholarship!

I might never stop finding it cringe that I’m doing that. But then I try to remember my favorite passage from Couplets: A Love Story:

After college I stopped writing
about sex and then stopped writing

the word I and then stopped writing any word
at all. For a time, I thought I had matured,

and felt, if not exactly pride, at least the pretty,
riskless pleasure of conformity.

But this was never my nature.
For freedom, I have learned, I’d barter

virtue every time. For any fierce, untrammeled feeling,
now I know I’d give up almost anything.

I do feel, sometimes, that my writing has been Benjamin Button-ing, maturing in reverse. My writing probably sounded a lot older and smarter and more sophisticated ten years ago than it does now. It’s scary, sometimes, because sounding mature and smart and sophisticated was pretty much the entire point back then, and it’s hard to give that up. For what? Authenticity? Come on.

But I also feel a little sad for my past self, the one who thought she was only worth listening to when she was talking about Euripides. I wish she’d written down her stories and given voice to her confusion about graduate school. I suspect it would have made a pretty interesting read.