“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

was one Sunday call in April when my mother described in detail the LSAT prep course she had enrolled me in for the coming summer. She had already paid the deposit. It was a full eight-week program, small-group format, taught by a woman who had scored in the 99th percentile and whose students regularly placed in the low 160s.

My mother said it with continue reading …