Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

 This passage is adapted from Meg Wolitzer, The Wife. 

Originally published in 2003. The narrator, a student at 

Smith College, a women's college, is enrolled in a creative 

writing class in the 1950s.

"Write what you know," Professor Castleman 

advised as he sent us off to complete the writing 

assignment. 

That night after dinner (shepherd's pie, I 

remember, for I sat there looking at it and trying to 

describe it to myself in a writerly fashion, though the 

best I could come up with was, pathetically, "a roof of 

mashed potato spread thickly atop a squat house of 

meat"), I climbed to the upper reaches of the Neilson 

Library. On tall steel shelves around me were ancient 

bound volumes of scientific abstracts: Annuls of 

Phytochemistry, Sept.-Nov. 1922; International 

Journal of Haematology, Jan.-Mar. 1931. I wondered 

if anyone would ever again open any of these books 

again, or whether they'd remain shut for eternity, like 

some spell-fastened door in a fairy tale. 

Should I be the one to open them, to plant kisses 

on their frail crisp pages and break the spell? Did it 

make sense to try and write? What if no one ever read 

what I wrote, what if it languished untouched on the 

chilled shelf of a college library forever? I sat down at 

a carrel, looking around at the ignored spines of 

books, the lightbulbs suspended in their little cages, 

and I listened to the distant scrapes of chair legs and 

the rumble of a lone book cart being rolled along one 

of the levels of the stacks. 

For a while I stayed there and tried to imagine 

what it was I actually knew. I'd seen almost nothing of 

the world; a trip to Rome and Florence with my 

parents when I was fifteen had been spent in the 

protection of good hotels and pinned behind the 

green-glass windows of tour buses, looking at stone 

fountains in piazzas from an unreal remove. The level 

of my experience and knowledge had remained the 

same, hadn't risen, hadn't overflowed. I'd stood with 

other Americans, all of us huddled together, heads 

back and mouths dropped open as we peered up at 

painted ceilings. I thought now about how I had 

never been in love, had never gone to a political 

meeting in someone's basement, had never really 

done anything that could be considered independent 

or particularly insightful or daring. At Smith, girls 

surrounded me, the equivalent of those American 

tourists. Girls in groups were as safe as shepherd's pie. 

Now I sat in the upper part of the library, freezing 

cold but not minding, and finally I made myself begin 

to write something. Without censoring it or 

condemning it for being trivial or narrow or simply 

poorly constructed, I wrote about the impenetrable 

wall of femaleness that formed my life. This, 

apparently, was what I knew. I wrote about the three 

different perfumes—Chanel No. 5, White Shoulders, 

and Joy—that could be smelled everywhere on 

campus, and about the sound of six hundred female 

voices rising up together at convocation to sing 

"Gaudeamus Igitur."

When I was done, I sat for a long time at that 

carrel, thinking of Professor J. Castleman and how 

he'd looked in class with his eyed closed. His eyelids

had a purplish, nearly translucent quality, making 

them appear inadequate to the task of keeping the 

world out. Maybe that was what it was like to be a 

writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.

 During his office hours the following week, sitting 

on the bench in the hallway, I waited with nearly 

rabid anticipation. Someone was already in there; I 

could hear the dueling murmurs of a male voice and 

a female one, punctuated by an occasional shriek of 

female hilarity, all of which increased my annoyance. 

Was there a party going on? Were drinks being 

served, and damp little sandwiches? Finally the door 

opened and Abigail Brenner, one of the other 

students from the class, emerged, holding her tedious 

story about her grandmother's recent death from 

double pneumonia, which she had been reworking 

pointlessly since the first day of class. From within 

the office, I could see Castleman at his desk; his jacket 

was off, and he was in his shirtsleeves and tie.

 "Well, hello there, Miss Ames," he said, finally 

realizing I was there. 

 "Hello, Professor Castleman," I said, and I sat 

across from him on a wooden chair. He held my new 

story in his hand, the one I'd left in his department 

mailbox.

 "So. Your story." He looked at it serenely. There 

were almost no markings on it, no red-pen 

hieroglyphics. "I've read this twice," he said, "and 

frankly, both times I've found it to be wonderful."