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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Pamela Druckerman 2018

Cover Design © Christopher Brian King

Cover Illustration by Nathalie Jomard

Pamela Druckerman has asserted her right under the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Portions of this book first appeared in the New York Times under the titles ‘What You Learn in Your 40s’, ‘How to Find Your Place in the World After Graduation’, ‘How to Talk to Children About Terrorism’ and ‘In Paris, a Night Disrupted by Terror’, and in Marie Claire under the title ‘How I Planned a Ménage à Trois’.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473510630

ISBN 9780857522955

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contents

Also by Pamela Druckerman

French Children Don’t Throw Food

French Parents Don’t Give In

About the Author

Pamela Druckerman is the author of the No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller French Children Don’t Throw Food (published in the US as Bringing Up Bébé), which has been translated into twenty-seven languages. She’s a Contributing Opinion Writer at the New York Times and an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer. She lives in Paris with her English husband and their children.

About the Book

THERE ARE NO GROWN-UPS

Everyone else is winging it too.

Does it ever feel like everyone – except you – is a bona-fide adult?

Do you wonder how real grown-ups get to be so mysteriously capable and wise?

When she turns forty, Pamela Druckerman – author of the No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller French Children Don’t Throw Food – wonders whether her mind will ever catch up with her face.

With frank personal stories and witty maxims, Druckerman hilariously navigates the unexplored zone between young and not-so-young. There Are No Grown-Ups is a midlife coming-of-age story, a quest for wisdom, self-knowledge and the right pair of trousers. It’s a book for readers of all ages about – finally – becoming yourself.

INTRODUCTION

bonjour, madame

IF YOU WANT to know how old you look, just walk into a French café. It’s like a public referendum on your face.

When I moved to Paris in my early thirties, waiters called me “mademoiselle.” It was “Bonjour, mademoiselle” when I walked into a café and “Voilà, mademoiselle” as they set down a coffee in front of me. I sat in many different cafés in those early years—I didn’t have an office, so I spent my days writing in them—and everywhere I was “mademoiselle.” (The word technically means “unmarried woman,” but it’s come to signify “young lady.”)

Around the time I turn forty, however, there’s a collective code switch. Waiters start calling me “madame,” though with exaggerated formality or a jokey wink. It’s as if “madame” is a game we’re playing. They still sprinkle in the occasional “mademoiselle.”

Soon even these jocular “mademoiselles” cease, and my “madames” are no longer tentative or ironic. It’s as if the waiters of Paris (they’re mostly men) have decided en masse that I’ve exited the liminal zone between young and middle-aged.

On one hand, I’m intrigued by this transition. Do the waiters gather after work for Sancerre and a slideshow to decide which female customers to downgrade? (Irritatingly, men are “monsieur” forever.)

I’m aware of the conventions of aging, of course. I’ve watched as small crinkles and creases appeared on the faces of my peers. Already, in my forties, I can see the outline of what some people I know will look like at seventy.

I just didn’t expect “madame” to happen to me, or at least not without my consent. Though I’d never been beautiful, in my twenties I’d discovered my superpower: I looked young. I still had the skin of a teenager. People honestly couldn’t tell whether I was sixteen or twenty-six. I was once standing alone on a New York subway platform when an older man stopped and said, sweetly, “You’ve still got your baby face.”

I knew what he meant, and I was determined to preserve this small advantage. Long before any of my peers fretted about wrinkles, I used sunblock and eye cream each morning, and rubbed on more potions before bed. I didn’t waste a smile on something that wasn’t truly funny.

All this effort paid off. Into my thirties, strangers still routinely assumed I was a college student, and bartenders asked to see my identification. My compliment age—the age people say you look, to which you must add six or seven years—hovered safely around twenty-six.

In my forties, I expect to finally reap the average-looking girl’s revenge. I’ve entered the stage of life where you don’t need to be beautiful; simply by being well preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty.

For a while, this strategy seems to work. Fields of micro-wrinkles appear on the faces of women who’d always been far better-looking than me. If I haven’t seen someone in a few years, I brace myself before meeting her, lest I accidentally gawk at how much she’s changed. (The French call this tendency to look the same for a long stretch, then to suddenly look much older, a coup de vieux, an “age blow.”)

I regard the graying roots and creased foreheads of many of my peers with sad detachment. I am proof of the adage that everyone eventually gets the face she deserves. And what I deserve is, obviously, a permanently youthful glow.

But in the course of what seems like a few months, something changes in me, too.

Strangers no longer gush about how young I look, or seem shocked when I reveal that I have three children. People I haven’t seen in a while clock my face for a few extra beats. When I arrive to meet a younger friend at a café, he stares right past me at first; he doesn’t realize that the middle-aged lady standing in front of him is me.

Not everyone my age is distressed by these changes, but many seem to be suffering from a kind of midlife shock. One friend says that when she walks into a party, there’s no longer a Cinderella moment when everyone turns to look at her. I’ve noticed that men only appraise me on the streets of Paris now if I’m in full hair and makeup. And even then, I detect a disturbing new message in their gazes: I would sleep with her, but only if doing so required no effort whatsoever.

Soon the “madames” are coming at me like a hailstorm. It’s “Bonjour, madame” when I walk into a café, “Merci, madame” when I pay my bill, and “Au revoir, madame” as I leave. Sometimes several waiters shout this at once.

The worst part is that they’re not trying to insult me. Here in France, where I’ve lived for a dozen years as an expatriate, “madame” is a routine form of politeness. I call other women “madame” all the time, and teach my kids to say it to the elderly Portuguese lady who looks after our building.

In other words, I’m now considered to be so safely into madame territory, people assume the title can’t possibly wound me. I realize that something has permanently shifted when I walk past a woman who’s begging for money on a sidewalk near my house.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she calls out to the young woman in a miniskirt a few steps ahead of me.

“Bonjour, madame,” she says when I pass in front of her a second later.

This has all happened too quickly for me to digest. I still have most of the clothes that I wore as a mademoiselle. There are mademoiselle-era cans of food in my pantry. Even the math seems fuzzy: How is it that, in the course of a few years, everyone else has become a decade younger than me?

WHAT ARE THE forties? It’s been my custom not to grasp a decade’s main point until it’s over, and I’ve squandered it. I spent my twenties scrambling in vain to find a husband, when I should have been building my career as a journalist and visiting dangerous places before I had kids. As a result, in my early thirties I was promptly fired from my job at a newspaper. That freed me up to spend the rest of my thirties ruminating on grievances and lost time.

This time, I’m determined to figure out the decade while I’m still in it. But while each new birthday brings some vertigo—you’re always the oldest you’ve ever been—the modern forties are especially disorienting. They’re a decade without a narrative. They’re not just a new number; they feel like a new atmospheric zone. When I tell a forty-two-year-old entrepreneur that I’m researching the forties, his eyes widen. He’s successful and articulate, but his age leaves him speechless.

“Please,” he says, “tell me what they are.”

Obviously, the forties depend on the beholder, and on your family, your health, your finances and your country. I’m experiencing them as a privileged, white American woman—not exactly a beleaguered group. I’m told that when a woman turns forty in Rwanda, she’s henceforth addressed as “grandma.”

With their signature blend of precision and pessimism, the French have carved up midlife into the “crisis of the forties,” the “crisis of the fifties” and the “noonday demon,” described by one writer as “when a man in his fifties falls in love with the babysitter.” And yet, they have an optimistic story about how to age, in which a person strives to become free. (The French are flawed, but I’ve learned from some of their better ideas.)

Wherever you are, forty looks old from below. I hear Americans in their twenties describe the forties as a mythic, far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. When I tell one of my sons that I’m writing a book about the forties, he says that he’d like to write a short one about being nine. “It’ll say, ‘I’m nine years old. I’m so lucky. I’m still young.’”

And yet for many senior citizens I meet, the forties are the decade that they would most like to time travel back to. “How could I possibly have thought of myself as old at forty?” asks Stanley Brandes, an anthropologist who wrote a book about turning forty in 1985. “I sort of look back and think: God, how lucky I was. I see it as the beginning of life, not the beginning of the end.”

Forty isn’t even technically middle-aged anymore. Someone who’s now forty has a 50 percent chance of living to age ninety-five, says economist Andrew Scott, coauthor of The 100-Year Life.

But the number forty still has gravitas and symbolic resonance. Jesus fasted for forty days. Mohammed was forty when the archangel Gabriel appeared to him. The Biblical flood lasted for forty days and nights, and Moses was forty when he led the Israelites out of Egypt, after which they famously wandered the desert for forty years. Brandes writes that in some languages, “forty” means “a lot.”

And there is still something undeniably transitional about age forty. You’ve only ever known yourself as a certified young person, and now you’ve left one stage of life, but you haven’t quite entered the next. The Frenchman Victor Hugo supposedly called forty the “old age of youth.” While studying my face in a well-lit elevator, my daughter described this crossroads more bluntly: “Mommy, you’re not old, but you’re definitely not young.”

I’m starting to see that as a madame—even a newly minted one—I am subject to new rules. When I act adorably naive now, people aren’t charmed anymore, they’re baffled. Cluelessness no longer goes with my face. I’m expected to wait in the correct line at airports, and to show up on time for my appointments.

To be honest, I feel myself becoming a bit more madame on the inside, too. Names and facts don’t just pop into my mind anymore; I sometimes have to draw them up, like raising water from a well. And I can no longer wing it through a day on coffee and seven hours’ sleep.

Similar complaints trickle in from my peers. At dinner with friends my age, I notice that each of us has a sport that our doctor forbids us to play. There’s nervous laughter when someone points out that, under American law, we’re now old enough to claim age discrimination.

New brain research documents the downsides of the forties: on average we’re more easily distracted than younger people, we digest information more slowly and we’re worse at remembering specific facts. (The ability to remember names peaks, on average, in your early twenties.)

And yet, science also shows the many upsides of the forties. What we lack in processing power we make up for in maturity, insight and experience. We’re better than younger people at grasping the essence of situations, and at controlling our emotions, resolving conflicts and understanding other people. We’re more skilled at managing money and at explaining why things happen. We’re more considerate than younger people. And, crucially for our happiness, we’re less neurotic.

Indeed, modern neuroscience and psychology confirm what Aristotle said some two thousand years ago, when he described men in their “primes” as having “neither that excess of confidence which amounts to rashness, nor too much timidity, but the right amount of each. They neither trust everybody nor distrust everybody, but judge people correctly.”

I agree. We’ve actually managed to learn and grow a bit. After a lifetime of feeling like misfits, we realize that more about us is universal than not. (My unscientific assessment is that we’re 95 percent cohort, 5 percent unique.) And like us, most people focus on themselves. The seminal journey of the forties is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”

In another ten years, our fortysomething revelations will no doubt seem naive. (“Ants can see molecules!” a man told me in college.) And even now, the decade can seem like contradictory ideas that we’re supposed to hold in our minds at once: We can finally decode inter-personal dynamics, but we can’t remember a two-digit number. We’re at—or approaching—our lifetime peak in earnings, but Botox now seems like a reasonable idea. We’re reaching the height of our careers, but we can now see how they will probably end.

IF THE MODERN forties are confusing, it’s also because we’ve reached an age that’s strangely lacking in milestones. Childhood and adolescence are nothing but milestones: You grow taller, advance to new grades, get your period, your driver’s license and your diploma. Then in your twenties and thirties you romance potential partners, find jobs and learn to support yourself. There may be promotions, babies and weddings. The pings of adrenaline from all these carry you forward and reassure you that you’re building an adult life.

In the forties, you might still acquire degrees, jobs, homes and spouses, but these elicit less wonder now. The mentors, elders and parents who used to rejoice in your achievements are preoccupied with their own declines. If you have kids, you’re supposed to marvel at their milestones. A journalist I know lamented that he’ll never again be a prodigy at anything. (Someone younger than both of us had just been nominated to the US Supreme Court.)

“Even five years ago, people I met would be like, ‘Wow you’re the boss?’” says the forty-four-year-old head of a TV production company. Now they’re matter-of-fact about his title. “I’ve aged out of wunderkind,” he says.

What have we aged into? We’re still capable of action, change and 10K races. But there’s a new immediacy to the forties—and an awareness of death—that didn’t exist before. Our possibilities feel more finite. All choices now seem to exclude others. And there’s a now-or-never-mood. If we were planning to do something “one day”—to finally change careers, read Dostoyevsky or learn how to cook leeks—we should probably get moving on it.

This new time line prompts a reckoning—sometimes a painful one—between our aspirational and actual lives. False things we’ve been saying for years start to sound hollow. It’s pointless to keep pretending to be what we’re not. At forty, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life, or collecting notches on our résumés. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called the Ding an sich—the thing itself.

Indeed, the strangest part of the forties is that we’re now the ones writing books and attending parent-teacher conferences. People our age have titles like “chief technology officer” and “managing editor.” We’re the ones who cook the turkey on Thanksgiving. These days, when I think, “Someone should really do something about that,” I realize with alarm that the “someone” is me.

It’s not an easy transition. I’d always been reassured by the idea that there are grown-ups in the world. I imagined them out there curing cancer and issuing subpoenas. Grown-ups fly airplanes, get aerosol into bottles and make sure that television signals are magically transmitted. They know whether a novel is worth reading, and which news belongs on the front page. In an emergency, I’ve always trusted that grown-ups—mysterious, capable and wise—would appear to rescue me.

Though I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, I can see why people are drawn to them. It’s tempting to think that a cabal of grown-ups secretly controls everything. I understand the appeal of religion, too: God is the ultimate grown-up.

I’m not thrilled about looking older. But I realize what unsettles me most about becoming “madame” is the implication that I’m now a grown-up myself. I feel like I’ve been promoted beyond my competence.

What is a grown-up anyway? Do they really exist? If so, what exactly do they know? And how can I make the leap to become one of them? Will my mind ever catch up with my face?

1

how to find your calling

WHEN I WAS growing up, my family didn’t do bad news. My maternal grandmother responded to everything from family squabbles to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by declaring cheerfully, “I’m sure they’ll work it out!”

There are worse things for a child to endure than relentless optimism. My plight wasn’t even unique: lots of middle-class Americans grow up in sunny, nonintrospective homes. But I suspect that mine was more relentlessly positive than most. In order to avoid unpleasant subjects, we didn’t go into much detail about anything, including our own ancestry. I was nearly a teenager when I discovered that two of my grandparents and all of my great-grandparents came to America as immigrants, mostly from Russia. Since no one had said otherwise, I’d assumed that we’d been Americans forever.

Even our immigration story was vague. My grandmother said her parents came from a place called “Minski Giberniya.” But she didn’t know exactly where this was, and when she once searched the Ellis Island records, there was no trace of either of them. And after her family settled in South Carolina, they instantly went native. My grandmother became a Southern belle and a sorority sister who lived by the local maxim: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything.

No one in my family ever mentioned that we had close relatives who stayed behind in “Minski Giberniya.” When I eventually questioned my grandmother about this, she acknowledged that her mother used to send care packages of dried beans and clothing to siblings and cousins who’d remained in Russia. But after World War II, she didn’t send them packages anymore.

“We lost touch,” my grandmother said.

This is how my family explained the fate of relatives who were probably rounded up and murdered in the Holocaust: we lost touch.

This extreme positivity seemed to run in my maternal line, with each generation shielding the next from bad news. I first noticed it at my father’s fortieth birthday party, when I was six. We were celebrating at home in Miami, the city where I grew up. Guests were having drinks on the patio, around our swimming pool. I was in the house when I heard a splash and saw a commotion.

“What happened?” I asked my mother.

“Nothing happened,” she assured me.

For the record, my mother was loving, warm and well intentioned. She was trying to protect me. But I suspect I’d be a different person today—perhaps working in a different profession—had she simply said, “Larry Goodman got drunk and fell in the pool.” Then we could have agreed that bad things sometimes happen, and that I was a reliable witness of them.

Instead, I came to feel that bad things occur in a fuzzy far-off dimension, always patio-distance away. If you don’t examine them too closely, it’s as if they never happened.

This view of life was easy to sustain in Miami. The city is perpetually sunny, and was literally invented out of air, since it only started to boom once air-conditioning became widely available in the 1950s and ’60s. Years later, when my future in-laws visited one of Miami’s oldest homes—now part of a historic state park—they pointed out that it was roughly the same age as their house in London.

People are often surprised to hear that I spent my childhood in Miami. They think it’s a city of grandparents. But that’s mostly Miami Beach, a slender island off the city’s eastern coast. There’s a whole other hot, unglamorous inland area where most inhabitants live.

My parents bought their first home on land that had previously been a mango grove. The mango trees were still there, and the fruits would splatter on our cars, ruining the paint. Like the other homes in the neighborhood, ours was concrete, air-conditioned and built to keep out the salamanders, the burglars and the weather. Occasionally, a black ringneck snake would slither inside through the vents. We almost never saw the beach.

Practically everyone in Miami was displaced. Our Cuban neighbors were certain that they would soon be returning to Havana. Most of my parents’ friends had Brooklyn or tristate accents. We pretended that South Florida had the same seasons as New York, though in department-store photographs of me with Santa Claus, I’m tanned and wearing shorts.

Miami’s lack of context and aura of wishful thinking suited us perfectly. When my mother had to disclose any unpleasant news—say, that someone we knew had cancer—she’d sandwich it between reports of dinner plans and cheerleading practice. The bad news would flash by so quickly, I’d doubt whether I’d really heard it.

It was the 1980s and the peak of the American divorce boom, so I’d often learn that grown-ups I knew were splitting up, but never the reasons why. My parents didn’t say much about people they knew, or describe relationships between our family members. I once noticed them whispering about an alcoholic aunt, but when I asked for details, they went silent. (I learned years later that the aunt would launch into anti-Semitic rants after her first Bloody Mary.)

Such facts weren’t considered child friendly. In fact, almost nothing was. We described world events, new outfits and summer vacations with vague catchphrases like “It’s terrible,” “That looks adorable” and “We had the best time.” People we approved of were “fabulous” (one of my mother’s friends liked to call pretty women “delicious”); those we didn’t like were “annoying.” Someone who spoke about any one subject for too long was “boring” or “not regular.” (I would later realize that these “boring” people were the semi-intellectuals in our midst.)

My parents weren’t my only source of information, of course. I knew about AIDS, political prisoners and the fact that Colombian drug cartels murdered people in Miami. I read books in which characters had backstories, contradictory qualities and inner lives. But as an obedient oldest child, I also believed that what happened at home was real life. And in our house, we didn’t gather facts into patterns, analyze our own experiences or speculate about other people. Nor did we discuss our own history, ethnicity or social class. Pointing out complicated truths just made everyone uncomfortable. It was like saying that Larry Goodman fell in the pool.

As I grew older, I came to assume that a separate grown-up conversation about life went on when I wasn’t there, or that all this small talk was a prelude to the day when we would finally sit down and discuss everything. I was relieved when, on successive trips to the supermarket, my mother brought home volumes of a down-market encyclopedia. Finally, there were some facts in the house. (We had to wait for certain popular volumes, like “S,” to be restocked.)

The irony is that my childhood was a cover-up without a crime. I’m pretty sure that Larry Goodman climbed, unharmed, out of our swimming pool. He probably didn’t even have a drinking problem. For the most part, behind the smoke screen of pleasantries and good news, nothing terrible was happening.

My parents did have one dark secret: we weren’t rich. Unlike many of their friends, they worried constantly about money. By any reasonable standard, we weren’t poor, either. But it felt like we were, because we were clinging to the bottom of the upper middle class.

Money mattered tremendously in Miami. Regardless of your social skills, or even your criminal record, being wealthy gave you status and mystique. (Florida has always attracted people with “an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with a minimum of physical effort,” the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said.)

And in the 1980s, Miami was on its way to becoming one of America’s most unequal cities. Friends of my parents sold their starter homes near us and built larger ones closer to the bay, with wet bars and tennis courts. Soon they were dressing up for charitable galas, driving Mercedes and summering in Colorado to escape Miami’s heat.

My family was left behind in the mango grove, and we were perplexed. Where did all this money originate? How exactly did someone come to own a bank, as several of my friends’ parents did?

My father was old-world. He was born in Brooklyn just before World War II, to working-class immigrant parents who lived next door to relatives with names like Gussie, Bessie and Yetta. His own father, Harry, had dropped out of school at age twelve to deliver newspapers—first from a horse-drawn wagon and later from a truck, and usually with a cigarette in his mouth. One day, when my father was a teenager, he turned up at the truck after school to help out. He found his father in the back, hunched over stacks of newspapers, dead of a heart attack.

My father did a couple years of college, then got a series of jobs in TV production. When my mother met him in New York City, on a blind date, she saw a handsome, appropriately aged man who wore a suit to work, and who—unlike a recent succession of boyfriends she’d had—was actually nice.

That was all true. But what she didn’t see, in her optimism, were the vast differences between them. My mother’s branch of the family had bounced cheerfully out of the shtetl and into the sunshine. Her American-born parents were established, canny and successful.

My father was patriotic, nostalgic, dreamy and loyal. Though dazzled by my mother’s social skills and fancier family, he would always long for the old neighborhood.

They moved to Miami, where my mother had grown up. There weren’t many TV jobs in town, so my father opened a small advertising agency, and made commercials for flea markets and local horse-racing tracks.

“Nice” melted in the sun and became depression. He was good at the creative part. But to get more business, he had to sell himself to potential clients. And to be good at sales, either you have to see into people’s minds to know what they want or you must be so magnetic that they want whatever you’re selling.

My father had neither quality. He enjoyed going to bed early, and making puns and canned remarks. (A favorite of his, to this day, is “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”) Countless fights erupted between my parents either because my father drove too slowly, or because he’d fallen asleep at a dinner party again. “I was just resting my eyes,” he would say.

He was also, perpetually, down to his last advertising account. And he blamed himself for this. We’d have a kind of absurdist daily dialogue, in which I’d ask him how his day had gone, and he’d reply, shamefully, that he’d been “busy.” Even then I realized he wasn’t, and that my parents’ arguments weren’t really about his slow driving; it was that he wasn’t in the fast lane of life.

My mother was his opposite: outgoing, charismatic, confident and able to sell anything. Popular and pretty, she’d been voted best dressed in high school, then earned a degree in retail at Ohio State. She was interested in whatever was new: the newest clothing styles, the latest restaurants. She turned our living room into a gallery and hosted shows for up-and-coming artists. She and a partner opened a successful women’s clothing boutique that served as a kind of clubhouse, where women came to talk as much as to buy. Miami’s climate is technically “tropical monsoon.” But since it was always freezing inside from the air-conditioning, her customers stocked up on cashmere sweaters.

I grew up in my mother’s world. When I wasn’t at her boutique, I was tagging along with her in department stores to see what the competition was carrying. Age eight, while other kids were breaking bones on the sports field, I got a shopping injury: my brother and I were horsing around in the ladies’ sportswear section of Burdine’s, when a cart holding the cash register fell over and fractured my wrist.

Shopping was one topic we discussed in depth. It was even a source of wisdom. “If you don’t love it, don’t get it,” my grandmother would say. Our retail equivalent of a Buddhist koan was “Why, once you bring an outfit home, doesn’t it ever again look as good as it did in the shop?”

When it was time to choose a theme for my bat mitzvah party, I eschewed the standard ones of the era—tennis, space travel, Hawaiian luau—and picked “shopping” instead. It was the only topic that I knew intimately. My mother and I made place cards shaped like credit cards, and hired a party planner to make centerpieces out of bags from Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus. The planner looked surprised when we described the shopping theme, but no one in my family thought this was an odd way to mark my passage into adulthood.

They did mention that we couldn’t afford the party. In a rare disclosure of bad news, my mother called me into her bedroom one day and said we might need to cancel it, for lack of funds. (We downsized to a cheaper venue instead.)

Our lifestyle was made possible by my mother’s father, who paid for most of the party and for the new roof on our house. Though my grandfather, like my father, was the son of poor immigrants, he had the ability to connect with people, make deals and make money.

My grandfather paid for the private schools where I mingled with the offspring of Miami’s superrich. Some of my classmates lived in waterfront mansions on Miami Beach that they rented out as movie and TV sets. Some got Porsches when they turned sixteen. When my mother arrived at school once to pick me up in her Toyota, a boy sneered, “Is that your maid’s car?”

I never questioned this cosmology. I figured that an optimal outcome for me would be to marry a plastic surgeon. (Another of my grandmother’s maxims was “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.”)

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, my life changed when I discovered The Official Preppy Handbook—a satirical guide to the habits of old-money East Coast WASPs. It described a world in which people owned Irish setters, went skiing in Gstaad and wore duck-motif belts. (“The less an object has to do with ducks, the more it cries out for duck adornment.”)

Before reading the book, I’d barely clocked the fact that there were Americans who were neither Latino nor Jewish nor black. And I was unfamiliar with the WASP aesthetic: Who knew it was good to have used furniture?

I knew that I wasn’t preppy. I didn’t know anyone nicknamed Skip or Bink (though I had a Cuban friend we called “Juanky”). I could sail a bit, but my house wasn’t scattered with cigarette boxes that my father had won at regattas.

But the book confirmed my suspicion that there really was a lot my family wasn’t saying. Daily life—even mine—could be decoded and mined for meaning. Your clothes, your carpeting, the words you used and the objects scattered around your house all amounted to a kind of tribal map.

We never discussed what our tribe was, and our religious observance was bare-bones. (At my shopping-themed bat mitzvah, we served shrimp cocktail.) But when I walked into a restaurant with my parents, I could spot which women my mother would know, even if I’d never seen them before. They had the same faces, clothes and hairstyles that we did. Most of their parents or grandparents had come to America from the same general European vicinity as ours, at roughly the same time. It was as if entire Belorussian villages had been transported to South Florida, and their descendants were now having dinner in the same Italian restaurants.

I didn’t quite know it then, but I craved a Preppy Handbook equivalent of my own life, which would explain our ritual objects, outfits and customs. I wanted to know the invisible meaning of everything—from what we wore, to why we all had quasi–New York accents, to exactly where we all came from. But how could I do an anthropology of my own life? I wasn’t even a reliable witness of who had fallen in the pool.

As I got older, I came to trust my own judgment more. At an airport about to fly home from a high school trip—financed by my grandfather—I ran into an older cousin’s husband in the departure lounge. Only he wasn’t with my cousin and their two sons; he was with a pretty blond lady and a similarly blond toddler. When he saw me, he looked panicked.

“Cousin Neil has another family,” I told my mother, when I got back to Miami.

“Impossible,” she said. (With no push from me, my cousin and her husband soon divorced.)

Once I’d had this taste of truth spotting, I wanted more. I began to read my mother’s Cold War spy novels, and to dream of having a piercing intellect that I would use to crack codes and solve crimes.

Never mind that I couldn’t even follow the plots of spy movies, and that I was unable to memorize a phone number or keep a secret. I imagined a future in which I remembered license plates as they flashed past me and I unraveled the motives of foreign agents. Surely the CIA would spot my talents and recruit me.

Pamela will probably be good at something, but it’s not philosophy