City of Girls: The Sunday Times Bestseller

might’ve had something to do with why I performed so poorly at college my freshman year. Perhaps I had not been such a terrible student, after all. Perhaps I had merely been sad.

born anew in the fresh eyes of every young person who arrives here for the first time.

Or maybe they still loved each other. Except theirs was the sort of love that best thrives when a husband and wife are separated by the distance of an entire continent. (“Don’t laugh,” my grandmother said. “A lot of marriages would work better that way.”)

She had paid attention to me as a person, not a child, and that means everything to an eleven-year-old child who does not want to be seen as a child.

I felt that I’d embarrassed myself by falling to bits in her arms, comforting though she had been.

But her delight in seeing me was a balm. I felt so welcome. Not only welcome, but wanted.

I didn’t understand what I was doing at college, aside from fulfilling a destiny whose purpose nobody had bothered explaining to me.