Why I Chose an English Major

(and maybe you should, too)

Dear Liz,

There’s been so much bad news about the loss of the English major at universities, college kids not being able to read a whole book, the uselessness of an English degree, and on and on. It’s depressing. And probably not based on facts about how much money people earn with an English degree or how happy they are in life (I’m far too lazy to get the facts for you). There is far too little talk of happiness.

I’ve led a pretty satisfying life as a result of my English degrees, but clearly, many people don’t think they’re worth much – or anything – at all. Please stand back as I mount a full-throated defense of my English degrees and why you, too, should consider an English major. Spit may fly.¹

Some quick background about moi: my mom was a big reader. We’d go to the public library in our suburban town outside San Francisco every three weeks where she’d load up on paperbacks. My mom grew up poor in a rural area and she would tell me that going to the library was a special thing. She had fond memories of reading Black Beauty and Heidi, and the librarian would give the kids summer reading lists. Hurray for rural librarians! My mom was also sick in a hospital with TB for a year, so that perhaps also led to her love of books. When she got out, she ended up skipping a grade in school.

In elementary school, I wrote short stories for school assignments. Once we even had to write and “publish” a book – the story and the physical book, including a cover we drew ourselves. My contribution: Judy and the Ice Cream Sundae, a gripping tale about a mouse named Judy who falls into an ice cream sundae. Thank you, Mrs. McIntyre, I am forever grateful. 

Outside of school, I was reading S.E. Hinton, Judy Blume, and all the V.C. Andrews novels my friends and I could get our thieving, fifth-grade hands on. Flowers in the Attic, are you kidding me? What could be more enthralling than sick-AF adults terrorizing little kids and lacing their doughnuts with arsenic? I was hooked.

In high school I enjoyed most of the books we read in English class: The Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of Anne Frank, and A Separate Peace come to mind, though I’m sure there were more. After I placed into Honors English I read and hated, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Over my head and just plain confusing. I was starting to think Honors English wasn’t for me, but meanwhile, I devoured (har-har) Anne Rice’s vampire trilogy and whatever else came my way, including some of the bestsellers my mom read (James Michener, Judith Krantz, John Jakes, Alex Haley, and Judith Rossner). 

Flash forward past some difficult years of me going to beauty school while still in high school, being super into music, and wanting to move to New York. When I got accepted at NYU, I stood shaking in the kitchen with my father, looking at the letter in shock.

When I got to NYU, I had the exceptional good fortune of being placed in a remedial, two-year Western Civilization program. Remedial because I’d gone to a crappy high school and wasn’t exactly top of my class (and maybe beauty school didn’t look so great on my application). 

In this program there were two core courses: Humanities (literature, art, music) and something called The Individual in Society (history and philosophy). We started in ancient Greece, and over the course of two years, ended in Postmodernism. It was hard. I was overwhelmed. Thucydides and Herodotus, who? What? I got Cs my first semester. But something magical happened along the way. We read. A lot. Gilgamesh, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Fathers and Sons, are just a few I recall. I remember squirreling into my bunk bed in the SoHo apartment I shared with my roommate, crying over Jane Eyre. 

My mom had a high school education, my dad a community-college A.A. degree, and both of my older sisters did their first two years of college. Still, I somehow never got the memo that reading books, specifically novels, was a big part of college. On top of it, you then had to write stuff about what you read and spend a lot of time in the ten-story university library to cite research sources. Heady times! 

But actually, I was a pre-music major because I come from a musical family. I “played” the piano and I “sang,” by which I mean I sucked at both. Do recall that NYU is full of extremely talented classical musicians and musical theatre nerds who could rattle off melodies and break into song by composers I’d never heard of (perhaps they’d never heard of Merle Haggard or George Jones, so we’re even). Outside of school, I’d always been into music – pop music.

In my second year at NYU, I had a radio show on WNYU-AM and was thinking about majoring in Radio when my Humanities teacher, Professor Miriam Frank, took me out for tea. First, she wanted to show me the photograph of James Baldwin on the top floor of the university library. We’d read If Beale Street Could Talk for class, which I’d loved. The picture was a black and white portrait of Baldwin’s face up close. His large dark eyes made me feel like I was swimming in an ocean of kindness, courage, and smarts.

Afterwards in the tea shop, bright spring light reflected off the library’s windows and onto our table. Professor Frank – “Miriam,” she told me to call her – ordered darjeeling tea. I didn’t know what that was, so I ordered Bigelow’s Lemon Lift, which I’d become addicted to at the restaurant where I worked. My professor asked me what I was going to major in the following year. 

“Music or Radio,” I said. 

“Have you considered English? You’re a good writer. Professor O’Neill says you’re a good writer, too.”

“Oh,” I said. That was news. I did spend as much time as I could in the library reading books about books to use as “citations,” a new concept for me. 

Looking back, I realize that pointing out to someone, especially at a tender age, what they seem to be good at is a true gift. If Professor Frank hadn’t said so and hadn’t taken me out for tea as a kind of intervention (I remember being shocked at the invitation), I honestly don’t know where I’d be today. Miriam changed my life. Recently I looked her up on Facebook. She was from a working-class Jewish family and she was a lesbian. Maybe she saw echoes of all that in me (my budding gayness a tale for another time), but who really knows?

My New York life was hard. I was working nights in a restaurant and trying to keep up with my classes during the day. On my way to work one afternoon, I was stopped in my tracks outside a bar as a bank of televisions showed the Cypress section of my local freeway back home collapsing during the Loma Prieta earthquake. My only nephew was uttering his first words and taking his first steps, without me. I felt the pull of California and all that I was missing there. 

I had wasted all my parents’ money in sending me to New York. But I wanted to go home. 

I heard for the first time about Mills College over the summer, a women’s college in Oakland, literally less than fifteen miles from where I grew up. I read an article in the newspaper about the strike on the Mills campus. The board had voted to let men in, drama ensued, and the board changed its mind. 

My dad “worked on computers” in Silicon Valley (I pictured hammer and nails, which is what he did around the house on weekends). He always said it didn’t matter what you majored in, as long as you had a degree. Both of my parents told me to major in something I enjoyed. (Another gift. Go, Mom and Dad!) I transferred to Mills and majored in English. I chose love. 

Maybe you didn’t grow up in a suburb with a good library. Maybe your parents didn’t encourage you to study whatever makes you happy. Maybe you barely made it through high school, barely made it to college, grew up in a doomsday church, were the family with ten broken-down cars out front, and your grandmother finished the eighth grade (oh wait, that’s me again.) Maybe you’re just now thinking of going to college in your forties, fifties, or beyond. Maybe a professor hasn’t yet intervened to tell you you’re good at reading and writing, even though you like them a lot. 

The deal is, you get one life. Please don’t live it out of fear and scarcity. That’s what all the naysayers are telling you: be afraid. You won’t make money, you won’t be happy, you won’t find a job, you shall live in fear and be small, like us. You really have to wonder why people who claim to care about you don’t want you to be happy.

We need people who can read and write well, who understand history and its impacts on life today, who can think through issues and express themselves clearly, who can relate to other people and attempt to see beyond carefully crafted surfaces, and who can call out horseshit. An English major should perhaps be called Reading, Thinking, Perceiving, and Writing. They might get a lot more takers. 

Whatever your circumstances, I hope you’ll reconsider an English major. And if you do, let me be the first to welcome you to the English department.

With love,

-mel

Thought you might enjoy this pic of my granny and mom in front of the pomegranate bushes. Plus my inspirational-aspirational quotes to self above my laptop. And, especially for you, FIRESTARTER.

1. I have a hard time believing you can’t learn to read on your own and that you need college to do that. For the record, it is my strong opinion that reading, from Shakespeare to Stephen King, is available to everyone who can read. Reading doesn’t exist only in college classrooms. Here, I’m talking about people who want to go to college but are afraid of majoring in English.