Stovall has a collection of quotes, and among them is this one from Madeline Blais, who won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing as a reporter for The Miami Herald. She now teaches journalism at UMass-Amherst. I had a momentary shock of recognition when I read:
At Ursuline Academy, Sister Immaculata, my geometry teacher, saw me as a hopeless idler. I can't blame her. I was a terrible math student. She was particularly dismayed to catch me reading a copy of Mary McCarthy's Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, which I thought I had cleverly inserted inside my geometry text so I could tune into the escapades of all her evil relations while my teacher nattered on about how to measure angles. ... She leaned close, and put her head close to mine. Her lightweight rimless glasses slid down her nose. She smelled like talc and sanctity. She hissed: 'I hope you don't grow up to be like her, to be someone spiteful, someone who' -- dramatic pause -- 'likes to spill the beans.' Of course, when you get an order that explicit and that stifling at a formative age, it's only a matter of time before you decide to do just the opposite.It wasn't our Ursuline Academy. Stovall is from western Massachusetts, and she wrote a well-regarded memoir about growing up Irish-Catholic there in the 1950s.
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