When I was in my mid-20s I was quite a dish. I was blonde and bubbly and eager-to-please. I tended to believe the things people told me, especially things they told me about me. I didn’t know whether I was smart, mostly because some people thought I was kind of brilliant while others thought—or assumed—that I wasn’t very bright. It was very confusing to me—especially since the fact that I was an outstanding student at top-tier schools seemed somehow irrelevant to this calculus.
Around this time I went to a New Year’s Eve party hosted by a hot-shot Wall Street money guy who later did white-collar prison time for insider trading. He lived with his 25-years-younger girlfriend in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with a wraparound view of Manhattan. I was studying architecture at Parsons, and in typical grad student style I’d go pretty much anywhere on the promise of a free meal. So although this promised to be a tiresome evening of my-toys-are-bigger-than-your-toys one-upmanship, I cheerfully accepted the invitation.
Most of the guests were couples in their 40s and 50s. The men struck me as one-note bores (my date the exception), but I found the women fascinating. They all seemed so chic and accomplished and self-assured, and I couldn’t wait to meet them. Always in the throes of trying to figure out who I wanted to become in my life, I was sure that they knew things, things that I needed to know, things about being chic and accomplished and self-assured.
