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the fall, and I suppose I thought a psychologist could provide me with a crash course and whip me into shape before college started. So after dinner one night, sitting around the table, my parents were drinking coffee and I was folding a napkin into the shape of a fan. I told them I had something important to discuss with them. They both perked up. Was I okay? Well, I was fine, but would it be possible for me to make an appointment to see a psychologist? They didn’t seem shocked—my mother had seen a psychologist, as did many of my parents’ friends—but they were very curious as to why. Is it something that you want to talk about first? I told them I just needed to talk to somebody about some private problems. My mother agreed to get a referral through her psychologist. But they wanted to know more. What was going on? I just said that “I felt weird”—which was a perfect description for how I felt at that moment. And that was enough for me to explain to them for now. My mother drove me to see Dr. Paul Goldman after school one warm spring afternoon. We were both quiet in the car. She adjusted the radio to a Top 40 station, dropped me off, and told me she’d be waiting outside when I was finished. I think she thought I was independent enough to go inside on my own and let me handle the meeting myself. Dr. Goldman was in his thirties, with a big forehead and oily skin. He sat in a big brown leather highback chair. I sat across from him on a smaller version of the chair and tried to compress eighteen years of obsessions, compulsions, anxiety, and depressioninto fifty minutes and get $75 worth of answers on the first visit. He listened intently and said little. Sharing tremendous secrets with this man with the big forehead gave me a great sense of relief. He told me that my behavior was highly neurotic, but he never diagnosed me or referred me to a psychiatrist, and I never knew to ask about seeing one. I didn’t know about medications. Drugs like Prozac weren’t even available yet. I saw him for six months, until I went away to college, and we just talked ad nauseam about every detail and event of my childhood. I made no concrete progress in my therapy with him, except that I did start to trust somebody with my most intimate feelings. My parents never attended the sessions with me or asked me directly about what transpired, and they told me that they hoped my visits to Dr. Goldman were helping me with my problems. I think they saw him more as a coach, in a positive way, who was going to work out the kinks and get me in shape for college. And when our sessions ended in late July, college was only a month away.
Suburban Refugee
    The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked as a lifeguard at a nearby pool club. It wasn’t the most demanding position; the club was on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River, so at least I had an incredible view of Manhattan. I sat high up in the lifeguard chair in the hot sun, staring at the Empire State Building, counting down the hours until the big day when my parents would drive me to college and I would finally be emancipated from suburbia. One day, about halfway through the summer, after a long shift up in the lifeguard chair, I announced to my twenty-year-old boss that I was quitting. I had made a snap decision a few days earlier to have some plastic surgery. I had always been insecure about the size of my misaligned nose (I had broken it when I slipped on a marble coffee table when I was five) and kids had often teased me about it. It seemed like a good idea to get it fixed before I went away to college—to make a clean start with a new nose and a whole new me. Early diagnosis: narcissistic personalitydisorder. But I had the classic deviated-septum alibi. I did some quick research on several doctors at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and made an appointment for a consultation to see one who had been highly recommended by a family friend. With my parents’ hesitant