What I Learned While Not Taking Math

In 1999, at 18 years old, I chose to attend Smith because it had the three things I was looking for in a college: It was a small liberal arts school, within a couple hours’ drive of my parents’ house, where I would not be required to take math.

Downtown Northampton, with its charming coffee shops, music venues, and historic movie theater, seemed like a nice bonus. As did the reportedly excellent dining hall food. I knew in theory that I’d be paying my own way through college, and that my student loans would be with me for a very long time. Even so, I could think only about the immediate future, about where I wanted to spend the next few years.

It was my dream to write novels for a living, which to me seemed fanciful, improbable, and largely unrelated to higher education. I didn’t know yet that being a Smithie would infuse almost every aspect of my life from then on and that I would, in many ways, ultimately have Smith to thank for my career.

I remember early on, attending a talk at John M. Greene Hall between one of my favorite writers, Ruth Ozeki ’80, and her editor, Carole De Santi ’81. I had always wanted to be a writer, but before then, I had never met a writer, save for a children’s book author who came and spoke at my elementary school. That night at JMG, I was (and still am) the sort of person who was too self-conscious to ask a question during the audience Q&A. But I was rapt. These women were funny and wise and accomplished in my dream profession, and they were Smithies. They made a writing life seem possible. That meant a great deal to me.

The summer after my first year, I interned at The Atlantic magazine. The internship was unpaid. I was only able to do it full time because of Praxis funding from Smith. When the fiction editor’s assistant went on leave, I got to fill in for a few weeks. During that time, the fiction editor offered to read some of my short stories, which he gave to another editor at the magazine, who passed them along to a former Atlantic intern who was just starting out as a literary agent. She has been my agent ever since.

After my sophomore year, I took a year off from college and lived in London. Before I left, I emailed Natascha Biebow ’93, an editor at Random House UK whose name I had found in a binder at the campus career development office, to ask if she might be willing to meet for lunch. Not only did she say yes, she also got me a job at a literary agency in Covent Garden, where I learned about the business of publishing.

When I say I have Smith to thank for my career, I mean it in these concrete ways. But I also mean that in choosing the subject matter of my books, I never thought twice about telling women’s stories, since they were what interested me most. Perhaps this sounds odd, but throughout my 20s and 30s, many celebrated women writers of my generation wrote and spoke about how they had had to unlearn the idea that the only important writers were the white men of the literary canon. This had never occurred to me.

Twelve or 13 years ago, I did a bookstore event with a young, well-known, enormously talented debut novelist. An audience member asked why she had chosen to write her book from a man’s point of view. She responded that she felt it was necessary in order to be taken seriously as a writer. That stunned me. Who better to explore the inner and outer lives of women than someone like her?

My first novel, Commencement, was about a group of friends who meet at Smith. A male editor I knew when I was writing it warned me that if the word “feminist” appeared in the first hundred pages, no publisher would touch the book. In fact, a young woman editor bought it for good money, with a request that feminism be even more central to the story. Six books later, she is still my editor today.

My Smith education was built on friendship, literature, feminism, and activism. After I graduated, I came to understand that these would be the tenets of my life as well. During my college days, my Smith friends and I viewed the attendees of other Seven Sisters schools as our rivals. But as soon as we entered the world, women’s college grads were all part of the same club. I’ll meet a woman I like enormously, and she’ll inevitably say, “I went to Barnard” or “I’m a Mount Holyoke alum.” There is instant recognition. Ahh, of course.

It’s no surprise to me now how many of the writers whose work I have admired most at every stage of my life went to women’s colleges. Nora Ephron (Wellesley), Anna Quindlen (Barnard), Greta Gerwig (Barnard), Sylvia Plath ’55, Ann M. Martin ’77. Each in their way has questioned prescribed roles for women and explored fearlessly the complexities of marriage, parenthood, relationships, love, and work.

Lately, as the mother of two children, ages 6 and 7, I think often of an afternoon lesson on the Romantic poets taught at Seelye Hall some 25 years ago. The professors, Pat Skarda and Bill Oram, did a surprise performance when we students entered the classroom. She, portraying Dorothy Wordsworth, sat at a table, trying to write. He, portraying Dorothy’s more famous brother, William, kept interrupting to ask her for things: the whereabouts of his pen, a glass of water, writing advice, lunch.

At the time, I saw this as a funny history lesson and an explanation of why only one of the two was considered a great writer, even though both siblings wrote beautifully, and many of his best images in poems were taken straight from her journals. Only now do I see the modern lesson in it—that the world with its intrusions must sometimes be held at bay if a woman wishes to create. Pat Skarda as Dorothy Wordsworth is responsible for so many unmade beds in my house, so many takeout dinners. And so many pages written as a result.

In my novels, I have often written about women who made major life decisions at a young age, and how those decisions played out over the ensuing decades, for better or worse. I am so thankful that my 18-year-old self unwittingly chose an education that has lived on inside me and continues to teach me things a quarter century after the fact.

J. Courtney Sullivan ’03 is a New York Times bestselling author of six novels: Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, Saints for All Occasions, Friends and Strangers, and The Cliffs. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Smith Quarterly.