Failure To Launch

The spectral presence of a struggling recent graduate brought back Fernanda Eberstadt’s own lost days of postcollegiate life.

New York in the 1970s was a wild, sleazy city, and as a teenager, I found myself exploring its leather bars, amusement arcades, and discos with an intensity that didn’t leave much room for school. On my report cards, the number of days absent was higher than most of my grades. One night in eleventh grade, my best friend and I took our schoolbags to Studio 54, stowed them under a seat in the upstairs gallery, and went straight to our Upper East Side girls’ school the next morning, bleary but triumphant. Hadn’t our parents noticed we didn’t come home the night before? my children asked many years later when they heard this story. Parents didn’t notice much in that unsurveilled era, I said. Teachers noticed, though. When it came time for college applications, my guidance counselor told me that she couldn’t in good conscience write me a recommendation.

Oxford, where I’d dreamed of going since I was a bookish fifth-grader, saved my skin. Oxford in those days couldn’t care less that you hadn’t played varsity hockey or helped build orphanages in Costa Rica; they didn’t even seem to know what an SAT score was. All they cared about was how you did on their entrance exams. Luckily, my enthusiasm for English literature was just as fervent as my taste for nightclubs. When I scraped through the admission tests and was offered a place at Oxford’s Magdalen College, I vowed that I was going to reform. I did.