In which I explain myself and all my ways

so if you're new to this Substack, start here

Sep 26, 2024

This is who I am — Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

To those of you who already subscribe, and especially those who have been here from the beginning: thank you! I wrote this post because it occurred to me (thanks to my long-suffering husband David, who has been extraordinarily good-natured about being lassoed into my writing) that readers who have just stumbled onto Personal Statements may have no idea what it is or who I am or where to start. So if you’re coming across this Substack and thinking What on god’s green earth is happening here, this is the definitive guide that will either get you to hit the “Subscribe” button or ~~run away screaming~~ drive you into the warm embrace of funny cat videos.

Last week, my husband, who is a truly good person except for when we fight about the refrigerator or he complains about my salad dressing (it is NOT unpleasantly tart, David!), said that I need a post about who I am and what this Substack is so I could pin it to the home page and I had a small existential crisis because I am an associative thinker and the word “pin” made me think of what you do to insects and also of the existential difficulty of articulating who I am, in much the same way Alfred J. Prufrock struggled with articulating who he is in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
               And how should I presume?

See? Pinned! Pinned and wriggling on the wall! How the heck can I presume anything under these conditions?

So, how should I begin/To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a cynical middle-aged woman who emigrated from the former Soviet Union at age nine (more accurately, my parents emigrated and brought me with them). I now live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, practically in the shadow of Stanford University, which I understand is a big draw for the 16-18 year old demographic and their parents. (I know this because I worked as a Stanford admissions officer and then as a private college counselor.)

I recently published a memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, which is structured as a series of responses to college application essay prompts. It is not a how-to; if you recall, the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a complicated object, coveted and dangerous at the same time. My second memoir, Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip, is coming out in April 2026. It’s about a three-day road trip with my mother and daughter which turns into an epic journey (think Odyssey) through the physical and emotional landscape of memory, motherhood, and migration. It’s also about driving in terrible weather and mistaking ostriches for cows standing on their hind legs and binge-watching the second season of White Lotus and negotiating relationships and languages and topography both real and imaginary—the roads between Palo Alto and the California central coast as well as the subterranean byways of regret and nostalgia and loss.

My name is spelled Irena, with an a at the end, and the reason for the a at the end is that when we came to the US my father wanted to change my Russian name (Irina) to what he decreed would be my new American name, Irene, and even though I spoke zero English I knew immediately that Irene was a dowdy old person's name (apologies to any readers if you have Irenes in your life) and I DID NOT WANT IT and my father was like, too bad so sad you're a nine-year-old child and I'm an adult filling in paperwork and then he left the room and I snuck over and grabbed a pen and saw that while it would be very difficult to change the middle e to a i, it would be very easy to change the terminal e to an a, so that is what I did. How do you like that nine-year-old child now, dad?

Arriving in San Francisco International Airport. I’m the one with the overgrown bangs, the umbrella, the soon-to-be-changed name, and possibly an early manuscript under my arm.

Okay, but what is this Substack about?

I know the received wisdom is to have a clear and concise snippet, like “My Substack is about growing organic vegetables in Vermont” or whatever, but when I started this Substack, I was like, BUT I CONTAIN MULTITUDES! Originally it was going to be about the crippling pressure to achieve and ways we can broaden our thinking about success, but then I started a second Substack, called The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions, which is all about that toxic pressure and finding success on our own terms. (I should note that I exist in a state of near-constant overwhelm because I seem to create a lot of work for myself and then complain about it, but writing is how I distract myself from the mundane activities of daily living and the mundane activities of daily living are how I distract myself from writing, so maybe it works out?)

Back to the question. This particular Substack, Personal Statements, is also occasionally about college admissions and what it means to succeed, because it’s almost impossible to live in the Bay Area and not write about those things. It’s also about finding beauty in unexpected places, the indignities of middle age, refrigerator turf wars and neighborhood nemeses, the tangled threads that connect families, ADHD (yes, I have it. Are you surprised?), nostalgia, books, and television, especially 1980s sitcoms—all of which, as my students like to write in their college essays, made me into the person I am today.