I also became a scholar, another calling where it seems that being emotionally well-adjusted is not really necessary. If I had sought counseling, I might have become a more mature, emotionally well-adjusted human being. She mentioned that I seemed rather alienated and that perhaps I should make use of the university’s excellent counseling services.įortunately, I never took her up on her advice. Although she never said anything to me in class about my narcolepsy, she wrote me a long note at semester’s end.
This is why, when I see students falling asleep in my own classes, I don’t disturb them. Every day I would come to this master class, sit three or four feet from the professor, and … fall asleep. It was an intimate seminar of 14 students. She was already famous for writing “The Woman Warrior” and winning the National Book Award. But receiving the grant did make me think about what genius means and why we are attached to an individualistic notion of it, even if we are sometimes being ironic when we use the word.Īccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, a genius is “an exceptionally intelligent or talented person, or one with exceptional skill in a particular area of art, science, etc.” I exhibited quite a bit of genius at a younger age, beginning with how I was rejected by every college I applied to, except one.Įventually I left that school and made it to the University of California, Berkeley, where, at 19, I was brilliant enough to get into a nonfiction writing class taught by Maxine Hong Kingston. Not long ago I received a MacArthur Fellowship, which is sometimes called the “genius grant,” much to the MacArthur Foundation’s disagreement and my own.
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