I finished off The Interestings: A Novel by Meg Wolitzer yesterday morning. It was a sprawling novel, beginning in a summer camp for creative kids and ending in the indignities of middle age. It was a frustrating book in some ways. The book doesn’t have a traditional plot; it’s more just the unfolding of life for a group of camp buddies. Many of the characters are either irritating, shallow, or simply poorly sketched out, so I really loved only one character in this book. But the subject matter — a group of friends with big ambitions living in New York City — is so familiar that I found it difficult to put the book down. I had to finish off the last five pages in the car ride to church yesterday.
Where do people end up? Which one of your friends from high school became extremely successful and which ones sunk into an ordinary life? Did the people who you thought would be famous and noteworthy actually get there? Did the successful ones get there by sheer personal talent or did luck, connections, and money help grease their way? Fun questions.
I am a friend hoarder. I hate to lose people. So, I have the phone number, street address, or the Facebook IM of nearly everybody that I have known since I”ve been 11. Now, I’m not making daily phone calls to all those people. Many of them just get the yearly holiday card. But I know where there are, and that’s somehow comforting. My daily-phone-call-friends have been with me, since I was 21.
Looking back at the set of friends from high school, all are financially okay. Many are more than okay, but none won the Pulizer Prize or were on a Time magazine cover. I suppose everybody is medium successful and is medium content with their life choices.
One friend was effortlessly brilliant, but never wanted success. She applied to Harvard for early admission, because her mother forced her to. In her typical passive-aggressive style, she didn’t submit an essay with her admission package. Instead, she drew a cartoon of adorable astronauts jumping in and out of craters in the moon. When they emerged from the craters, the astronauts carried little banners with question marks. She said with some satisfaction that the cartoon meant nothing, and it was sure to get her rejected from Harvard. Well, the admission committee thought it was brilliant, and she was accepted. Later at Harvard, she drew many puzzling cartoons for the cover of Harvard Lampoon Magazine. But she never really wanted success, and later settled quite happily into life as a stay-at-home mom in Washington, DC with her very successful husband.
After college, I moved to New York City, where I met people of extraordinary ambition. They uprooted themselves from suburbs all over the country leaving behind family and friends with smaller quantities of ambition. And everybody is fine. Now, nobody wrote an award winning novel or is playing cello in the New York Philharmonic, but everybody has a job and pays the rent. The ones who have a little less career success are compensated with nice spouses and warm children. Others chose a life of independence from families and 9 to 5 jobs and are content, too.
So, flipping through my mental Rolodex (how old am I?) of friends, it is pretty obvious that success isn’t making it to the “Top 30 Under 40” list or following one consistent career path over time. Success is surviving with a smile, style, and a weekend bottle of wine.
I like to think there isn’t a deadline for success. A final grade on one’s life shouldn’t happen at age 40 or 50. Hopefully, we still have time to keep doing stuff that makes us happy. Maybe, there is still time for a reinvention or two.
Apt. 11d 
A couple of years ago, my husband looked up some of his good buddies from his gifted program. One of them is now a hand surgeon, which (when you think about it) means that that guy does more to improve the lives of others than just about anybody we know.
Laura said:
“I like to think there isn’t a deadline for success. A final grade on one’s life shouldn’t happen at age 40 or 50. Hopefully, we still have time to keep doing stuff that makes us happy. Maybe, there is still time for a reinvention or two.”
Certainly. My dad and his sister were just getting started in their 50s.
Colonel Sanders didn’t start selling any fried chicken until he was into his 40s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders
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One guy from my high school, not a close friend or in the same class, killed a guy and got out of prison already. He argued self-defense on the murder and was only convicted for hiding the body after somebody found it a few months later. Obviously, hiding a body is one of those things that should either be done well or not at all.
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I went a women’s college and am surprised by how many of my closest women friends did achieve success but never married — including a high-powered doctor who is known internationally and one high-powered lawyer. I think they are as surprised by how things turned out as anyone.
On the other hand, all of my women friends who joined the foreign service dropped out at some point to spend time with their kids (me included). The guys who started with us all stayed in and several of them are now ambassadors.
Of the people I know who became fabulously successful and famous (ambassadors to large nations who are frequently quoted in the news, etc.), all of them had serious family money and I”m not really sure how much of their success is due to their own success and how much of it is due to the large amounts of family money and parental influence/networks that were brought to bear. A couple of these guys had large amounts of drive and probably would have sold out their grandmother to succeed, and one guy I knew was simply brilliant and was kind of effortlessly successful without really trying.
We’re in the process of getting college mail this week (mostly rejections at this point — fingers crossed) and
so I’m finding myself asking exactly these kinds of questions — If my kid gets into a first-tier college, is it really a ‘golden ticket’ for the rest of his life? If my gets into a second or third-tier college, does this mean that he’s condemned to be a member of the proletariat for the rest of his life? My husband and I are somewhat convinced that we would have ended up in the same place (upper middle class, nice house, interesting jobs, the occasional bit of foreign travel) even if we had gone to a large state university, and — as noted — have figured out that our famous classmates didn’t get famous BECAUSE they went to Oxford, or Yale, or whatever but rather used the same connections that they used to get into Yale to later become an ambassador. Therefore, we’re not too worried about where our kids ultimately go to school, etc. though we do wonder if it in this hypercompetitive world, our kids will drop down a level, then their kids will drop down a level below that, etc. etc. etc.
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If it is golden ticket, tell her not to try to buy a squirrel.
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There is such a thing as regression to the mean.
Compare, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski to Mika Brzezinski.
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There’s an article folks are discussing, on the continued long-term study of children identified in Johns Hopkins SET program (identification based on 12 yo SAT-M scores over 700 or SAT-V scores over 630). http://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2013-kell.pdf: “Who rises to the TOP?: Early Indicators.”
It’s interesting to read, to see how early talents & identification influence long term outcomes.
I am resistant to the notion of prestige-motivated identifications of success and try very hard to teach my children to be resistant as well (with not necessarily great success). I also don’t think there’s no such thing as “success” either, though, and I do think that doing things that other identify as being valuable and being identified as successful can provide opportunities (say, being an ambassador, or a congressperson, or president, or a surgeon all provide opportunities to do good things and to enjoy doing them).
Many of the people I went to school with are conventionally successful on many different dimensions, and, although they certainly had fortunate coincidences (“luck”) along the way, they are not, for the most part, people who relied on connections to be successful — the pediatric surgeon was an immigrant who came to the country not speaking English at 12, the partner at a major law firm was raised middle class by a single father who died before the partner attended law school, the scientist at a major pharmaceutical company was raised by alcoholics.
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Very few people from my suburban, midwestern high school have gone on to do anything super impressive (someone from my high school was on Gossip Girl but she was a number of years younger than me) but many are successfully in conventional ways, lawyers and doctors, things like that. Outside of success, I’m more curious about people who are drastically different from their high school selves (e.g. the cheerleader who moved away, came out, and is an artist). These are the people I’d most like to talk to now.
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Hmh, what counts as superimpressive? I wouldn’t have put being on Gossip Girl on my list :-). Fame, prestige, money, impact, creativity, . . . many different measures of success.
I personally am impressed that Laura collects friends and keeps track of them. Seems like there could be an article in there.
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Laura, do you really have friends who you talk to on the phone every day? That is the most astonishing fact of all. I am also a friend hoarder, but even very close friends – people I would go out of my way to travel and visit – I talk to 2-3 times a year. Email and FB help, but even so.
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It’s the ones that got away that really bug me. My college roommate and I were best friends for four years. The college computer matched us up, and we stayed roommates the whole time. We continued to hang out for a while after college. I dragged her to a party in Queens and she met her Irish boyfriend and then got all wrapped up in that relationship and we lost touch. I tried to find her years later, but you know how many “Susan Changs” live in Queens, NY? A lot. And all of them have mothers who don’t speak English. Apparently, all of the college friends lost her, because she doesn’t show up in anybody’s Facebook list. I find that whole situation annoying.
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I talk to my mother and sister every day, often multiple times. I have 2 friends that I talk to every other day now. Work and kids keep us busy. We talk about forming an old lady commune sometime in the future. Not sure where the husbands are going.
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Not sure where the husbands are going.
Carrousel?
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Some sort of Shaker-like arrangement?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
The guys can make furniture.
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Wow, that’s amazing. I’m very close to my sister and parents but I talk to them about once a week. I wonder how common that is? I have retirement commune friends, too, but we talk much less often.
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I talk to my mom on the phone once a week or so and to my sisters on the phone almost never. We have a FB private group where we chat several times a week, some times more than others. I talk to no one except my husband and kids every day.
I also consider myself close to my mom and sisters.
I was recently told I’m an introvert, which surprised me quite a bit, but then it was pointed out to me that I’m simply the most extraverted introvert in a family of introverts. 🙂
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Wendy said:
“I was recently told I’m an introvert, which surprised me quite a bit, but then it was pointed out to me that I’m simply the most extraverted introvert in a family of introverts. :)”
Funny!
Same exact deal in my family–I always thought of my sister as being a raging extrovert, but then I realized that she was simply the most extroverted member of our introverted family.
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Lots of creatives and blogger types are “extroverted introverts”. We get our social interaction fix in a controlled manner.
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I also talk to parents & sisters once a week, in a scheduled phone call. We’d probably end up missing it if we didn’t schedule it, so it’s a good thing we’ve made it a habit. The kids used to join in on occasion, but do that less these days.
We discuss a lot of politics. I had an European house guest immediately after the 2004 election, who was greatly amused to overhear the phone call post mortem (and anguish — we all talked about what liberal hill we’d stake out to defend with, if not our lives, our sacred honor).
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Outside my immediate circle, a number of hs classmates became very successful actors. My sister was friends with Mira Sorvino. Her dad clearly helped her along. A number of B actors, too. Tate donovan, jay Hugley, Hope Davis.
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You’re going to hear from somebody’s agent for calling them “B actors.”
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