An Education

I have been waiting for several weeks to see the art film An Education based on Lynn Barber's memoir and Nick Hornby's screenplay. My husband and I finally saw it last Friday. The film is set in 1961 in England around a young woman who is being pushed by her father to achieve the grades and standardized test scores she needs in order to be admitted to Oxford. Of course, the protagonist, as a complication, immediately meets an older man, falls in love, loses her virginity, and confronts the choice of a lifetime: to marry or to get a higher education. I knew I would love this film because I was confronted with the same choice also as a senior in high school.

During the summer of my junior year, I met a second lieutenant stationed in Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. My mother and I had gone down to the coast in order to renew our relationship since I had been living with my grandmother for the past four years. I was sixteen, and he was twenty-two. He drove a baby blue Corvette convertible. I had to admit I was smitten in many ways because it was with him that I discovered many of the activities previously reserved for adults only. I was able to go to the Officers Club on base, for example, and hear a blues singer in a darkened, smoky room singing, "When I Fall in Love" in her sultry voice. I was able to see him "protect" me when he thought one of his friends in the club was coming on to me. When I went back to the Mississippi Delta for my senior year, he came up one weekend to my grandmother's house and proposed. Of course, my mother said "no" with the usual arguments: she's too young, she doesn't know what she wants, she needs to consider college, etc.

Ultimately, the decision came down to what I wanted, and it was an easy decision. Since the ninth grade, I had wanted to go to college and become an English teacher. I did not know how I would accomplish this goal, however, so I told my friends I planned to work and perhaps attend college later. I did precisely that: I worked full-time, took two night classes per semester and in the summer, and eventually finished two years before I married. I admit though that I did briefly consider what it would be like to travel the world with my Air Force husband in uniform. Ultimately though, a small voice within me urging independence won out.

I have never regretted this decision, and I assume that Lynn Barber in her memoir feels the same way. Both of us are published authors and have achieved our career goals without making a decision to marry too early that we might have both been sorry for.