Crossword-Solution: MAJORED 7 letters, 14 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 17

I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.

I was once driven north along Central Park, all the way from Chinatown. We hailed the cab in front of a building where Orthodox Jews still lived, so they shut down an elevator on Saturdays. In the taxi, I was with my mother. We were visiting her aunt, my great aunt, who was 93. She had no memory of the old country, Lithuania, but she'd been born there. Her parents escaped the pogroms so she could survived a century here. Her American prosperity was half a century of subsisten…

I wished I hadn’t majored in women filling their pockets with stones and sticking their heads into ovens. Maybe tomorrow the pinhole would widen and I would want to be a marine biologist.