How a Book Can Change a Graduate's Life

The Atlantic

20-06-2025

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For many people in their early 20s, graduating from college is both a significant milestone—perhaps the most important of their young life—and a rupture that leaves them utterly unmoored. (It has been this way for a long time; just ask Dustin Hoffman on that pool float.) A week ago, as the class of 2025 began heading into the world, my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez wrote about times we find ourselves without direction, and the books that can help guide us out of the wilderness. She names seven that helped her through upheavals in her own life, and specifically calls out transitional moments such as weddings (or breakups), job changes, and, of course, graduations.
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section:
A provocative argument about what creates serial killers
Yes I will read Ulysses yes
' A Father's Prayer,' a poem by Gioncarlo Valentine
Fathers don't just protect—they prepare
' Weepers,' a short story by Peter Mendelsund
My own college commencement ceremony took place some years ago this week. On paper, it was the perfect celebration: I donned my cap and gown, posed for my mother's Facebook pictures, and took an exciting phone call about a full-time job. But in reality, I wasn't even graduating that day: I'd been mailed my diploma the previous December and had spent the intervening six months underemployed and sick, subsisting on meals I was still learning how to cook and bottles of Two-Buck Chuck.
Perhaps because my final college years coincided with the height of the #MeToo movement, I'd been reading a lot of work by female essayists and memoirists. I was looking for someone to distill and clarify what I was experiencing as a young woman, to help me move firmly into the category of 'adult' while taking stock of all the baggage I was still carrying from my teens. I bought Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts from a feminist bookstore in Atlanta. I got Mary Karr's Lit from a books-by-the-pound store in my college town, and devoured it. I read Eula Biss, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Margo Jefferson, and Joan Didion. But the book that most defined those months and years was Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams.
Jamison's essay collection alternates between measured analysis and naked emotion. Across chapters, the author takes on different roles: a medical actor, a journalist investigating a dubious diagnosis, a tourist in Nicaragua, a theorist of female suffering. In self-aware prose, she deftly avoids the labels that too often entrap women who write about their life and their feelings—self-obsessed, hysterical, histrionic. But Jamison also understands how good it feels to be melodramatic, and how warranted it can be. There's a big, bloody heart inside her sentences, and its insistent beat won my allegiance immediately and forever. At the time, I felt fragile, like my shell might crack at any moment, and between Jamison's covers I found a writer who understood that sensation.
The margins of my copy, I see now, are crammed with annotations marking moments of reflection and identification. They're also full of craft notes, breaking down how Jamison deploys a phrase or a pronoun, charting allusions and noting connections between her ideas and the ones I'd encountered while earning my degree. Her book was a guiding star, not just emotionally but also professionally: It reminded me why I wanted to write and edit, and why I cared about great prose in the first place. It encouraged me to make room for my many overwhelming feelings—and then to keep moving toward the life I have today.
By Xochitl Gonzalez
These titles are great tools for anyone trying to navigate new opportunities, new places, or new phases of life.
What to Read
Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp
Knapp's memoir of sobriety is just one entry in a robust genre, standing among books such as Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey; The Night of the Gun, by David Carr; The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison; Lit, by Mary Karr; and The Basketball Diaries, by Jim Carroll. But Drinking: A Love Story was pivotal for me; I borrowed it from a sober person when I first started trying to stop. Knapp's depiction of addiction as a doomed love affair struck home. 'For a long time,' she writes, 'when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.' Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, 'In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.' Her book details the glory and devastation that precede the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp's lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives. — Melissa Febos
Out Next Week
📚 Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, by André Aciman
📚 The Girls Who Grew Big, by Leila Mottley
📚 , by Rebecca Grant
Your Weekend Read
The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta
By Matteo Wong
Reorienting the internet and society around imperfect and relatively untested products is not the inevitable result of scientific and technological progress—it is an active choice Silicon Valley is making, every day. That future web is one in which most people and organizations depend on AI for most tasks. This would mean an internet in which every search, set of directions, dinner recommendation, event synopsis, voicemail summary, and email is a tiny bit suspect; in which digital services that essentially worked in the 2010s are just a little bit unreliable. And while minor inconveniences for individual users may be fine, even amusing, an AI bot taking incorrect notes during a doctor visit, or generating an incorrect treatment plan, is not.