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There were many untold stories in my family. Most of my story remained untold until I discovered the comfort of writing, all of it in a journal until I began to get published in my late twenties. There were descriptions of things I had kept secret, a rape, excessive drinking, my suffering as a child of an adored father who had black, drunken rages, my own alcoholism, the heartbreak of falling in love and then out, my own shame until I stopped drinking and believed someone who told me my writing had power.

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“For someone who just had their first novel published, you seem less than happy.” I was lying in a fetal position on my then boyfriend’s bed, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, said novel clutched to my stomach sobbing, because my father had been mean to me. Thirteen years later when novel number three was published, I was having a screaming fight with my ex-husband during a physical exam which inspired my then doctor to put me on Prozac and recommend I get more sleep. When the first check arrived, I carefully signed the back and then, inexplicably, found an envelope and a stamp and mailed it to someone who had nothing to do with the book. I then announced I had lost the check and was certain my publisher would refuse to replace it and burst into tears. I handle success poorly.

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I had no idea what I was doing at first. That class, a group of men who had recently immigrated from Haiti, were painfully polite and kind despite my incompetence. I spoke too fast, I used vocabulary terms they didn’t recognize, I was constantly handing out things and then realizing they were too advanced and taking them back, aware that these men would lose their right to a free education if they failed the final exam for the third time and most of them had already failed twice. I called my father for help but he had never dealt with this sort of student having taught literate, driven, and mostly brilliant graduate students’ Anglo-Irish poetry and Dickens. Finally, I went back to the writers who had inspired me with their stories about learning and teachers who had changed their lives or students whom they had educated. I reread Teacher Man by Frank McCourt and found his approach, storytelling and humor, was helpful, but I was younger than most of my students, and a woman, which meant I had to find a path towards mutual respect. Somehow I remembered the James Baldwin essay, A Letter to My Nephew, in which Baldwin urges his younger relative not to turn bitter and angry in the face of racism but to find a way to survive and live with dignity. It is filled with tenderness and rage.

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