One of my favorite books is Normal People by a writer called Sally Rooney. I always feel the need to preface my recommendation with the fact that it does lack queer representation and the primary abusive characters is cast as one of the only people of color in the TV adaptation (I will add, though, that this is one of the best book-to-tv/film adaptations I have seen in a long time, and I’m a strong believer that the book is always better). On its surface Normal People is just a pair of young, straight white people fucking (can I say that on here?) their way through high school and college. But I think if you can see beyond this (and the fact that Rooney writes with a complete exclusion of quotation marks for dialgoue) it tells a really beautiful story about navigating impermanence, class, sex, politics, friendship etc. etc. Anyway, the point of this post is to just share a quote from this book that I spend a lot of time thinking about, especially when I was writing my autoethnography and thinking about why I am in grad school. The quote says,
“You need to get straight in your mind what you think a good society would look like…And if you think people should be able to go to college and get English degrees, you shouldn’t feel guilty for doing that yourself, because you have every right to.”