Sarah Lawrence College

Sarah Lawrence College is presented in the memoir not through a broad account of its institutional history, but through the narrator’s first encounter with higher education as a practical possibility. After motherhood, she researches adult programs, applies to Continuing Education, and receives an acceptance letter; the school becomes a concrete opening toward education and self-discovery beyond the life she has known in the Hasidic community. Her later thanks to the college and its people frame that opportunity as foundational to her development as a student and writer.

A college enters the narrator’s plans

In the fall, after losing enough baby weight for Yitzy to sleep through the night, the narrator begins researching colleges because she is determined that the two of them should have a better life. Hannah, her modern Orthodox neighbor, recommends adult programs as more workable for a mother than a traditional undergraduate setting. Hannah’s own return to study at Ramapo College in New Jersey gives the suggestion a practical example: she has found the institution accommodating. The narrator follows up by looking at nearby colleges with adult education options, identifying Pace, Sarah Lawrence College, Bard, and Vassar.

The choice is therefore made within specific constraints. The narrator is caring for a young child and does not initially present college to Eli as a declaration of a changed life; she describes her plan as taking a business class and suggests that admission is unlikely. She does not tell him she is applying to college. Her explanation places the proposed study within familiar household expectations, while the application itself represents a step toward a wider set of possibilities.

Application and admission

Sarah Lawrence College is the first institution she contacts because its website provides a number to arrange an interview. The person who answers directs her to come in on the first Monday in March, explaining that it is too late to apply for the fall session. The narrator prepares in advance, first handwriting and then typing her essays. Two are autobiographical, drawing on her own experience as material for an application to a school centered on writing.

On the day of the interview, she crosses the campus in a short black wig and long skirt among students dressed in jeans. That difference sharpens her awareness of the distance between her presentation and the college environment she is entering. She privately imagines wearing jeans herself and abandoning skirts, but the immediate task is the interview. Jane explains that the program has no exams or grades and evaluates students through essays; she says admission depends on the applicant’s writing ability. The narrator hands over three carefully prepared essays and asks when she will hear the decision.

Two and a half weeks later, an envelope on ivory stationery bearing the Sarah Lawrence logo announces her acceptance to the Continuing Education program. She holds the letter through the day and imagines herself as a student, even picturing jeans and a J. Crew jacket. The acceptance is not merely a prospective credential: it makes a future outside her existing routines newly imaginable, while leaving the practical question of how study will fit around work and caring for Yitzy unresolved.

Study as self-expression

At an April open house for the summer semester, the narrator looks over the syllabus and decides on the poetry class. She has long wanted to read, understand, and discuss poetry and its poets, and has not met anyone who could introduce her to the subject. Her choice marks a contrast with the business classes she has described to Eli: the course she actually wants is driven by intellectual curiosity and a desire for language, not simply by preparation for a job or a future business.

She asks James, the poetry professor, whether her lack of prior study matters or whether she should prepare. He reassures her that many people taking his classes know little about poetry. The narrator feels privileged to speak with him. This encounter presents the college as a place where unfamiliarity with a subject need not exclude a student from beginning it. For someone whose earlier schooling restricted access to secular learning, the prospect of studying poetry with a professor gives that access a personal and specific form.

Retrospective significance

The memoir later gives Sarah Lawrence College a central place in the narrator’s account of how she began to make something of herself. In her acknowledgments, she expresses deep gratitude to the institution for giving her that first opportunity and thanks Joann Smith for the chance at a quality education. She also names professors Carol Zoref, Ernest Abuba, Neil Arditi, and Brian Morton among those who pushed her to discover herself. Her thanks extend to the classmates and other first friends and allies who supported her in a world that was strange to her.

This retrospective recognition connects the application episode to the memoir’s larger account of change without suggesting that admission resolved every conflict in the narrator’s life. The college’s importance lies in the access it offered: a structured opportunity to study, write, and meet people beyond the social world she had grown up in. By presenting the acceptance letter first as a private object held and imagined over, then later acknowledging the institution’s part in her education and self-discovery, the memoir traces the movement from possibility to lasting consequence.