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Today I'll return to Radnor High, where I learned the periodic table, Algebra 2, Shakespeare, poetry and a little something about people.

I'll be talking about Going Over and the Berlin Wall.

I'll also be remembering the Beth of long ago and the Beth of 2010, who stood with the great filmmaker Lee Daniels and others celebrating the school that partly shaped us.

I am deeply grateful that so many Radnor alums have returned to my world in recent years. I continue to learn from them.

With thanks to Molly Carroll Newton, Michelle Wtezel, Fran Misener, and Ellen Tractenberg.

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Today in class, following our review of four student memoirs, we'll look ahead toward the literary profiles that the students will be writing as their final project. My instructions for the assignment are, as usual, simple enough (I include them below). Not quite as simple is shaping, with the students, standards of excellence, or measures against which such profiles might be judged.  I loved, for example, Patti Smith's profile of Johnny Depp in a late 2010 issue of Vanity Fair precisely because of the rugged, empathetic nature of her questions; Smith knows fame, she knows yearning, she knows loss, and she knows Depp, and by going beyond what she already knew (by asking the piercing personal and philosophical questions) she gave us an indelible, original portrait.

In Misgivings:  My Mother, My Father, Myself, the poet C.K. Williams brings psychological acuity and a poet's ability to parse to his intimate renderings of those who shaped his world.  We know Williams's mother, for example, by what he tells us she withholds, and why.  "When my father was undergoing his illnesses, his absentmindedness, his depressions, (my mother) somehow managed never quite to submit to them:  although she sympathized with him, wished he were better, was, you could tell, a little offended without ever saying so by his not being better, she still never manifested what was happening as something that really possessed her; she always kept back that corner of her feelings that might have made her suffer too much."

In her introduction to The Possessed, Elif Batuman yields a portrait of the "first Russian person I ever met" that (by choosing just the right scenes, the right snips of dialogue, the dead-on, tell-tale italics) gives us an immediate sense not just of a man's infuriating but perhaps endearing idiosyncratic tics, but of the effect those tics had on Batuman herself.  "Toward the end of one (violin) lesson, for example, he told me that he had to leave ten minutes early—and then proceeded to spend the entire ten minutes unraveling the tortuous logic of how his early departure wasn't actually depriving me of any violin instruction. 'Tell me, Elif,' he shouted, having worked himself up to an amazing degree. 'When you buy a dress, do you buy the dress that is most beautiful...or the dress that is made with the most cloth?'"

Oliver Sacks, especially in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, makes effective use of clinical language and telling dialogue to bring his real-life characters to the page.  Frederick Busch uses a novelist's touch—vivid, unexpected details, the lean of impression against the stacking of facts—to invigorate portraits of people like his father and Terrence des Pres.  In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff juxtaposes known facts against purported ones to give us a man, his own father, who sought to deceive all on every topic save for the power and importance of love.

I'm going to be reading segments from those books to the students today.  Additionally, I've asked them to read, on their own, Lynn Hirschberg's New York Times Magazine profile of Lee Daniels, the so-smart, so-sensational, and (to use her word) audacious director/part producer of the Oscar-winning film "Precious" (among other things).  The students have downloaded the Hirschberg story (in these waning days of being able to download NYT files, though, hey, I am a paper subscriber and will still have privileges) and, I hope, they've played the video o

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I have two new books to read this week—Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air and my friend Susan Straight's Take One Candle Light a Room—and I am eager for those quiet hours, eager to escape into the worlds that others have created.  I'll be writing about those books here, as soon as I know just what to say.  

In the meantime, and finally (I promise), these last images from the Radnor High Hall of Fame weekend: 

In the first, my friend Ellen, who knew me in my years at Penn, stood beside me at my wedding, invited me to stand with her at hers, and has remained so dear.  In the second, "Precious" (and precious) filmmaker Lee Daniels, the extraordinary athlete Chris Sydnor (we ran track together, but let's just say he was a tad more talented in the speed department than I'd ever be), and yours truly, on four-inch, non-sprint-able heels.  In the third, my former English teacher, the inspiration for my fictional Dr. Charmin (Undercover);  she said she had hoped to write a perfect introduction, and oh, she did. Finally, it all begins with our parents, and here is my father, who I am so glad could spend the day with me.

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The magnificent, big-hearted, beautiful-eyed Lee Daniels, the mind and soul behind "Monster's Ball," "Precious," and so much else, brought us to tears with his remarks at the Radnor High Hall of Fame induction ceremony. 

I won't forget these past few days. 

Not. 

Ever.

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Today I'll be inducted into the Radnor High Hall of Fame.

I type those words.  Sit back.  Wonder how that ever came to be.

I spent last evening in the home of Radnor graduates, parents, and administrators who are all working toward giving students the best education that can be gained.  I spent it talking to Nancy Carpenter Barnes, a fellow inductee, a well-known artist, the former president of the Barnes Foundation, and an Emmy-winning producer for public TV.  I'll spend today not just with Nancy, but with Lee Daniels, the film producer and director; John Galloway, the theologian; Christopher Goutman, the award-wining producer, director, and writer; Paul Michel, the federal judge who, among other things, served as an assistant prosecutor in the Watergate trial; Charles Ryan, the investment banker who created Russia's leading investment bank; and Chris Sydnor, the extraordinary athlete and coach.  The Egyptologist Henry George Fischer and the music writer and producer Andy Mark, both sadly deceased, will be remembered as well. 

The inductees will share this moment with the teachers and students of Radnor High, and I will be introduced by the very woman who inspired the smart, encouraging English teacher in my first young adult novel, Undercover.  She could not have been more than 25 back then.  She paired my reading of Juliet with a Romeo reading by my secret crush.  She read between weak, overwritten lines and saw the seeds of a writer.  I'll stand with her today.


There's more about this day here.  There is so much in my heart.  I don't even know who to thank.  But few honors have affected me in the way that today does.  I wish my mother were here to see this.

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