Hello from Boulder, CO, where I can see the mountains from my friends’ apartment and am about halfway through my book tour (you can still find me at upcoming events in the Denver area—tomorrow!—Seattle, Cambridge, MA and Baltimore). I’ve been telling people that my book tour is really a Friends and Mentors Reunion Tour with book events attached. The events have given me an excuse to catch up with a high school classmate I hadn’t seen in 15 years and get lunch with a friend who I’d fallen out of touch with and dearly missed. Then there was the most recent stop, which left me emotional.
I had returned to my alma mater, Northwestern, for a few days to give a talk among other things. I also reconnected with several professors who’ve known me since I was barely old enough to vote.
During the talk, my closest mentor sat in the front row, beaming as I answered questions. The best way I can describe the feeling radiating from him is nachas, the Yiddish term for feeling proud of another’s achievements, which I’ve typically heard parents use when talking about their children.
I got a similar vibe from another professor, who led a freshman seminar that I took and adored. He offhandedly referred to an essay I’d written 14 years ago for a student publication. I think I’d blocked out the memory of that essay because what felt revelatory to me then feels like “duh” now, though he was more generous about it.
I had the sense that both of these professors were holding my past and current selves in their mind simultaneously. It’s hard for me to do the same because I’m so used to inhabiting the latest version of myself. Seeing myself through their eyes, though, the distance between who I am now and who I was then became clearer. I tried to imagine myself from their vantage point, what they observed in overeager 19-year-old me and what it must have meant to watch me—or any student—grow in the span of years or decades.
As I thought about my beloved teachers and mentors from college, tearing up in the back of a Lyft driver’s SUV, I listened to music that matched my buoyant yet sentimental mood (Ben Rector, if you’re wondering) and realized that the lyrics were all about romantic love. I wondered whether there were songs about mentors and mentees or even teachers and students. Teachers have so powerfully shaped me over the years—and I know I’m not alone in that—but it’s not a kind of relationship that singers croon about.
Even an ode to mentors might fall short of capturing the kind of relationship I have with my closest mentor. Yes, he’s a mentor. He’s also like extended family. Not just because he sometimes exudes parental pride, but also because of all that he has come to know about me.
The dynamic between us has slowly shifted since we met. Now that I have professional experience under my belt, some of our conversations feel more like those between peers. On this visit, I tried to be a sounding board for a writing project he’s mulling over. He told me what he learned from a mini-lecture I gave to his class. The idea that I had anything to teach him felt wild. But maybe that’s where we’re headed. With time, the stark distinction in our roles—where I receive, and he gives—will likely blur.
This question of blurred categories reminded me of a pair of friends who I write about in my book, who refer to each other as “sister-neighbor-comrade.” A one-word label doesn’t cut it for these women’s relationship. I thought about how to describe my longtime mentor. Maybe a “mentor-uncle”—a muncle? It’d be hard to come up with a word with a worse ring to it. And then I remembered a passage in Maria Popova’s book Figuring—the same quote that serves as an epigraph for my book:
“The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.”
Maybe the best I can do is recognize that one label is often not enough to describe what two people mean to each other.
Some book updates!
The Other Significant Others hit the national bestseller list in its first week!!! (And the Indie bestseller list!) THANK YOU to everyone who bought the book, evangelized about the book, ordered the book from the library. I’m so so so grateful. And thank you to my friends who got me this ridiculous cake to celebrate the news.
If you want to watch me potentially get teary with a mentor, catch me at my event at Harvard Book Store on March 15. My interviewer is Rebecca Traister, who’s known me since I was 18—a time before I realized that the honorific “Mrs.” is out of date, especially when you’re emailing a feminist writer! Yikes.
It’s been a dream to have some of my favorite writers feature the book in their newsletters, including Anne Helen Petersen, Maria Popova and Courtney E. Martin. I also got my first byline in the New York Times via an op-ed that’s based on the book. I’m excited for you to hear an episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast that will be out in the next few weeks. My brilliant friend (and Vox reporter) Sigal Samuel interviewed me today for it, asking such smart questions.
It’s been more gratifying than I can say to talk to people IRL about my book, including strangers who are miraculously excited about the book and interviewers who I admire the hell out of, like writer and facilitator Priya Parker, who interviewed me for my event in Brooklyn and described my book as both “reasonable and radical.” Evidence of that event is below.
I hope to see some of you in-person! Here’s a question you can answer virtually:
Have you had a close bond with a mentor that feels hard to describe or classify? What about the relationship feels confusing to others or to you?
Touched to be in such brilliant, friend-focused company. Thanks Rhaina. And I have SO MANY FEELS about mentors. I think because I am sort of a class/culture immigrant -- heading from Colorado Springs, where my parents both went to state schools, to New York City, and trying to become a writer (which seemed sort of preposterous) in an elite context where I had no connections -- I instinctually sought out mentors and really clung to them. I needed the anchoring in a world that I had no familial connection to or familiarity with. I also needed the social networks and people from whom I could learn the rules underneath the rules.
And then there's my deep love of old men (maybe because I never got to have a relationship with either of my grandfathers?!). My college political theory professor is now one of my most regular commenters on my substack and it melts my heart. Quaker author Parker Palmer has shaped my life and my thinking in so many beautiful ways, and my Stella's middle name is Parker, in honor of that.
Thanks for the chance to think about all this. And congrats on all the beautiful places this book is taking you--literally and otherwise.