Occidental College

Occidental College serves in the memoir as more than a named institution: it marks a place associated with the narrator’s formative sense of herself and, later, with a community she recognizes as part of her life. Its presence connects an earlier feeling of unworthiness to the relationships and support recalled in the book’s closing acknowledgments.

A Place of Formation

In reflecting on a relationship with Ahamefule J. Oluo, the narrator locates a painful belief about herself in time and place: a decade earlier, on the Occidental College campus, the certainty that she was worthless and unlovable had become deeply fixed. The campus is not described as the cause of that belief; rather, it anchors the memory of when it took hold. Its later proximity to the little yellow house where the relationship unfolds makes the past feel close at hand, as the narrator recognizes how that old conviction shaped what she brought into the relationship.

A Community Remembered

In the book’s acknowledgments, the narrator thanks her Oxy family alongside other people and communities who supported her. This brief mention presents Occidental College not only as a location in a formative memory but also as a source of lasting affiliation. The acknowledgment does not specify the nature or extent of that community’s help, so its significance rests in the narrator’s decision to name it among those she is grateful to.

Narrative Significance

The college’s two appearances frame a movement from an inward, damaging certainty to a wider account of belonging. In the relationship passage, the campus is tied to a self-image the narrator later understands as burdensome; in the acknowledgments, Oxy is named as part of a network of people and places that mattered to her. Together, these references give Occidental College a modest but distinct role in the memoir’s geography of memory and connection.