An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the author of American Woman and A Person of Interest
Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife.
My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2013: You could say Susan Choi’s My Education is a novel of the academy, in which an impressionable graduate student has an affair with an older, charismatic professor; that’s a fair–if misleading and incomplete–description. My Education is more surprising than that because a) the professor with whom the heroine sleeps is not the one you might expect and b) the book is full of pithy observations you can’t stop nodding at, and writing you can’t help underlining. “You’re twenty-one! Do you know what I’d give to be that age again?” Regina’s older lover cries in exasperation. “Do you know what I’d give if you’d stop saying that?” Regina replies. Or: “We sprang into flight like the arrow released from the bow,” Choi writes, when the lovers are discovered nearly in flagrante. Full of brilliantly drawn supporting characters–Regina’s hippie stoner roommate who goes by his surname is a favorite–this sophisticated book is about sophisticated people who may be brainy about arts and letters but are closer to clueless when it comes to the complex affairs of the heart. –Sara Nelson
Girl on the Side Regina Gottlieb is a young graduate student that becomes a TA for a notorious professor on campus, Nicholas Brodeur. Rumors fly about his sexual liaisons with students and tumultuous marriage with his expecting wife, Martha. Regina looks past this and falls into the comfortable routine of attending her own classes, assisting a Chaucer class, and developing a friendship with her roommate Dutra (with the occasional benefit ifyaknowwhatImean). Months later, she is at a party at Brodeur’s home when…
A slog Normally I love the (albeit over-explored) premise of student/teacher affair… it’s probably why I picked up this book in the first place. But only a few chapters into the book I was praying it would get better (It didn’t, really), and I had to force myself to finish it. Choi’s writing is overwrought, in love with the sound of itself, exaggerated and pretentious (I got so sick of references to various obscure writers and philosophers, and Brodeurs’ stupid baby carseat, which was always…
An exploration of attraction and obsession It is 1992, and Regina Gottlieb, our narrator, is entering grad school. She keeps hearing about the notorious Professor Brodeur who is very handsome, but accused by gossip of various sexual crimes. Curious, she takes one of the professor’s classes, even though she has never read any of the classics. Eventually she becomes one of the professor’s teaching assistants.Laurence, the other teaching assistant, married with a lovely wife and child, always attired in Brooks Brothers…