According to Amy, Brigitte’s life wasn’t exciting, but she liked everything about it, and it worked well for her. She didn’t need or want excitement in her life, and looking far ahead to the future, she could see where it was going. Her life had direction and forward motion, even if not with great speed. Just like her studies for her Ph.D., and her book. That was enough for her. It was a journey. She was in no hurry to reach her destination or make any snap decisions. Despite her mother’s and Amy’s cynicism, concerns, and dire warnings, Brigitte wasn’t worried about it all.

“So whose life are you ruining today?” Amy asked her with an impish grin as she bounced into the doorway of Brigitte’s office.

“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Brigitte said, pretending to look stern. “On the contrary, I’m checking to make sure the applicants sent us all the right stuff.”

“Yeah, so you can turn them down. Poor kids, I still remember getting those awful letters. ‘Although we were very impressed by the work you’ve done during your senior year, we can’t figure out what the hell you were doing all through junior year. Were you drunk or on drugs or just lazy beyond belief? We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors, but not at our school…’ Shit, I cried every time I got one of those letters, and so did my mother. She figured I’d wind up working at McDonald’s, not a bad job, but she wanted me to be a doctor. It took her years to forgive me for being ‘just’ a social worker.” Amy’s grades for junior year couldn’t have been that bad, Brigitte knew, since she had gone to Brown, and eventually got a master’s of science degree at Stanford before getting her social worker’s degree at the Columbia School of Social Work in New York.

They were all academic snobs at BU. In the academic world, where you got your degrees really mattered, just as how often you published did later. If Brigitte had been teaching at BU, she couldn’t have lingered over her book for the past seven years without publishing it sooner.