My Education

1992

ince arriving the previous week I d kept hearing about a notorious person, and now as I entered the packed lecture hall my gaze caught on a highly conspicuous man. That s him I declared inwardly, which of course was absurd. It was a vast university, of thousands of souls. There was no reason these two kinds of prominence scandalous noteworthiness, and exceptional, even sinister, attractiveness must be long to the same human being. Yet they had. The man was Nicholas Brodeur, though I knew it for sure only later.

That first time seeing him, even before being sure who he was, it was already clear that his attractiveness was mixed up with a great deal of ridiculousness. He wore a long duster coat, in the heat of September. His filthy blond hair stuck up and out in thatchy spikes from heavy use of some kind of pomade, as if it were 1982, not 92, and he wore Lennon shades with completely black lenses, as if it were outdoors, not in, and overall, in his resemblance to a Joy Division poster, he comported himself as if twenty and not, as I d come to find out, almost forty. Still he was the best-looking man, by a league, in the room and certainly the best-looking man I had seen in the flesh to that point in my life. I hadn t yet lived in one of the world s great cities, where such specimens congregate, but even now that I have, he still ranks. And he must have realized; there was in his posture a kind of inverse vanity, a suggestion that he engaged in his sartorial ridiculousness out of some impatience with the effects of his beauty. He stood alone at the back, his feet away from the wall and his shoulders slumped against it. An ambiguous expression that was not quite a smile slightly lifted the sides of his mouth. His hands remained stuffed in the duster s deep pockets. The inappropriate hoodlum charade seemed to chide anybody who stared, as I did.

Casper was the only fellow student in my program I d managed so far to befriend. When he arrived and

Susan Choi is the author of the novels My Education, American Woman, A Person of Interest, The Foreign Student, and The National Book Award winner, Trust Exercise. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn.

Praise for My Education:

The academic novel married to the novel of obsession is almost too pleasurable to contemplate, but that s what this book is Choi s an extremely confident writer, and in My Education she beautifully explores the way a young person tries, and often fails, to navigate her budding and intersecting sexual, intellectual, and emotional lives.  The writing in this novel is masterful but the book did something to me emotionally, too.  I felt like I was in an obsessive relationship with it.  I wanted to read it all the time. Meg Wolitzer, NPR.org
 
An unsparing account of the carnal conspiracy between two gloriously human, difficult women . . . This novel was instrumental to my approach to [Luster], in the way it presents the desire of women (unvarnished, without apology) but also in its engagement with language and the way this lends itself to texture and sensuality. Raven Leilani, author of Luster

Choi gets top marks for slyly re-inventing the affaire de l Académie in My Education. Vanity Fair
 
A fascinating examination of sexual politics and the many disguises of desire. The Daily Beast
 
A scorching hot read a chaise-lounge literary page-turner par excellence:  sexy, smart, well-plotted, jammed with observations witty and profound, and so well-written it occasionally leaves you gasping. New York Newsday
 
What Choi is after is the elusive territory of experience, the way people and events imprint us when we re young and then linger, exerting a subtle pressure over how we live our lives. The Los Angeles Times
 
"Sizzling...a story filled with fiery love affairs, regrettable mistakes, and between-the-sheets scenes that blow 50 Shades of Grey out of the water." Self

Explores a young heart and its painfully naïve and bold ways . . . It s The Graduate meets The L Word meets the Carey Mulligan flick An Education.