me, “What books?” “The Iliad and The Odyssey, of course,”
she replied. Almost every single hand went up. Not mine. The professor then asked, “And who has
read these books in the original?” “What original?” I asked my friend. “Homeric Greek,” she replied.
A good third of the class kept their hands up. It seemed pretty clear that I was one of the zeroes.

A few weeks later, my professor of political philosophy assigned a five-page paper. I was panicked.
Five whole pages! I had only written one paper of that length in high school, and it was a year-long
project. How could anyone write five pages in just one week? I stayed in every night, plugging away,
and based on the time I put in, I should have gotten an A for effort. I got a C. It is virtually impossible
to get a C at Harvard if the assignment is turned in. I am not exaggerating—this was the equivalent of
a failing grade. I went to see my dorm proctor, who worked at the admissions office. She told me that
I had been admitted to Harvard for my personality, not my academic potential. Very comforting.

I buckled down, worked harder, and by the end of the semester, I learned how to write five-page
papers. But no matter how well I did academically, I always felt like I was about to get caught for not
really knowing anything. It wasn’t until I heard the Phi Beta Kappa speech about self-doubt that it
struck me: the real issue was not that I felt like a fraud, but that I could feel something deeply and
profoundly and be completely wrong.

I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common for females from growing
up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in the world whom I
respect and love the most. At home, he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty; at work, he’s a
pediatric neurosurgeon whose days are filled with heart-wrenching life-and-death decisions. Although
we had the same upbringing, David has always been more confident. Once, back in high school, we
both had Saturday night dates who canceled on us in the late afternoon. I spent the rest of the weekend
moping around the house, wondering what was wrong with me. David laughed off the rejection,
announcing, “That girl missed out on a great thing,” and went off to play basketball with his friends.
Luckily, I had my younger sister, wise and empathetic way beyond her years, to console me.

A few years later, David joined me at college. When I was a senior and he was a sophomore, we
took a class in European intellectual history together. My roommate, Carrie, also took the class, which

----------------------- Page 22-----------------------

was a huge help since she was a comparative literature major. Carrie went to all of the lectures and ΨΨ網Ψ文Ψ檔Ψ下Ψ載Ψ與Ψ在Ψ線Ψ閱Ψ讀Ψ
read all ten of the assigned books—in the original languages (and by then, I knew what those were). I
went to almost all of the lectures and read all of the books—in English. David went to two lectures,
read one book, and then marched himself up to our room to get tutored for the final exam. We all sat
together for the test, scribbling furiously for three hours in our little blue books. When we walked out,
we asked one another how it went. I was upset. I had forgotten to connect the Freudian id to
Schopenhauer’s conception of the will. Carrie, too, was concerned and confessed that she hadn’t
adequately explained Kant’s distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. We turned to my
brother. How did he feel about the test? “I got the flat one,” he announced. “The flat one?” we asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “the flat A.”

He was right. He did get the flat one. Actually, we all got flat A’s on the exam. My brother was not
overconfident. Carrie and I were overly insecure.

These experi