Is It Better to Be Pointy or Well-Rounded?

it depends

The last chapter of my memoir, The Golden Ticket, is an open letter to high school seniors that lists real and fictional people who would likely be admitted to highly selective colleges and universities. Anne Frank, Huck Finn, Arnold Spirit Junior from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Scout Finch, the creature from Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein when she was 18. Jane Eyre. Pi from Life of Pi. Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Emily Dickinson, though she probably wouldn’t attend wherever she was admitted. But they’ll get in even though some of them are fictional and you’re real, I wrote, because they’re not googling “how to get into a highly selective college.” They’re busy living richly and audaciously, even if they’re hiding in attics or stuck on rafts.

The letter is tongue-in-cheek, of course. The hypothetical rising senior to whom it is addressed doesn’t exist. But also, don’t we all know someone like my hypothetical rising se…