Free Lies My Mother Never Told Me by Kaylie Jones

is able to survive his experience of war, and his reentry into society.
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    I went off to Wesleyan on Labor Day weekend and realized, after talking to other students, that I knew very little about anything. I believed I’d gotten into Wesleyan because of who my father was, not because I deserved it. My dad had even written my college application essay. I’d sat next to his big leather office chair, engulfed in the smoke from his fat Cuban cigar, watching him type it out on his IBM Selectric II. He used the word avocation when describing my interest in stage acting. “Do you know what that means?” No, I didn’t know what that word meant. “Well you should. It means an interest outside of your main line of work. Like acting, for you.”
    I timidly asked if it was okay for him to be doing this.
    â€œThose goddamn New York millionaires probably hire people to do this shit for their kids. Why shouldn’t I help you?”
    But now he was gone. During my first few months of college, I felt like a person wandering around in the dark, fumbling for a light switch. I got plastered every night, but was up at eight in the morning to make my Russian language class at nine. Some weird fuel made up of rage and fear kept me going, and constantly on my guard.
    As the orphaned child of a renowned doctor might search for answers in the pursuit of medicine, I was naturally drawn to literature and immediately registered for a course in twentieth-century literature. On the first day, a gentleman with a graying goatee and little glasses got up before the class of a hundred students and recited a poem:
    Others because you did not keep
    That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
    Yet always when I look death in the face,
    When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
    Or when I grow excited with wine,
    Suddenly I meet your face.
    By the fourth line, the professor’s voice cracked. By the last line, a tear trickled down his face. “Yeats,” he managed to say. Wow, I thought. How many years had this man been teaching kids who couldn’t care less? Teaching the same poems over and over again. And yet, they still brought tears to his eyes. I knew he was the teacher for me. The next day I went to visit him duringhis office hours—Professor George Creeger, on the top floor of one of the old houses that made up the English Department.
    I didn’t see any reason to hold back, so I told him everything. I told him who my father was, and how I’d decided to stay home with him and go to public school in East Hampton rather than go away to prep school, because he was sick and I wanted to be near him. I explained that my first written language was French, that I’d gotten into Wesleyan because of my acting background but that I no longer had it in me to act, and that I didn’t know how to write a literature paper, but if he’d show me, I’d do my best. He spent several hours with me, explaining the structure of a three-page paper. My first effort was on Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” He gave me a B+. On my next one, I got an A.
    I found several such brilliant, kindhearted guides that year, and under their mentorship, I began to read in earnest. For an entire semester my sophomore year, I studied Tolstoy with my Russian language professor, Duffy White.
    One evening in the library, lying in a big, square fauteuil with my feet up, I was reading the scene in War and Peace when Prince Andrej dies, and it was as if Tolstoy had reached out to me personally, across a continent, an ocean, and more than a century, and touched me on the shoulder. It was another light twinkling through the darkness.
    During the 1812 battle of Borodino, Prince Andrej is wounded in the thigh, and an infection develops. He is taken in by the Ros-tovs and spends his last days surrounded by his beloved Natasha Rostova, her parents, his own sister Princess Marya, and his little son from his first