Based on 15 years of experience as a private college counselor, Early Decision is Lacy Crawford's debut novel that follows Anne as she helps five seniors craft the perfect essay, get into elite colleges, and appease their parents obsessive need to succeed.
The paperback goes on sale today, so snag yourself a copy. For now, welcome Lacy to LLF!
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The library in my elementary school was sunken, a blocky, 1960s room reached via a set of steps that went down right after the door to the nurse’s office. This was in Illinois, where everything was flat. To be interesting, a thing had to rise: churches, barns, thunderheads. The library felt deadly. Shelves covered every wall and stopped near the ceiling, where a series of windows showed a strip of sky.
Use of the library was structured. Teachers led us down those stairs and back up again. We’d peek into the nurse’s office to see if there was anyone lying on the bed or throwing up or—as happened sometimes—getting an allergy shot.
But one day childcare required that I be picked up late, and the school sent me to the library to read by myself. I huddled in one corner, where Roald Dahl’s books were tucked on the bottom shelf, and where I found an unloved volume, almost new: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and six more).
The story of Henry Sugar concerns a man who trains himself, through intense concentration and what are, essentially, the basics of meditation, to see without his eyes. Lots of children’s heroes have magical powers, but this magic was not a gift. It was earned. Henry reads about an Indian guru with these skills and dedicates himself to learning them. For three years he trains his mind, and at the end of that time he can see through a playing card. Dahl writes about the painstaking work of concentration, how Henry renews his focus, moment by moment, day after day, until finally the queen of hearts or jack of spades begins to come clear. The natural world yields to his intense concentration because he works at it enough.
I remember looking up from the page with a terrible ache in my neck. Was I getting sick? I felt hot. I was unsettled. Hours had gone by; the lights in the hallway were on, and the sky above the shelves was dark. My mother had been delayed and they hadn’t wanted to disturb me.
I had experienced, in other words, a little bit of what Henry Sugar practiced: an absorption so complete that the world bent to my needs. I hadn’t been frightened or felt left. Hadn’t even noticed no one came for me. This was power. And now I knew what the world would require: this kind of focus, this kind of work. But that if I did it, I could make things happen. I felt terribly alive.
Thirty years later, a few months before the hardback debut of my novel Early Decision, my very first interviewer, with the Tampa Bay Times, asked me to name a childhood reading experience that changed me, and for reasons I didn’t understand, I talked about Henry Sugar. I hadn’t read Dahl in years. But as I talked I realized I wasn’t telling a story about learning to love to read; I always had. Rather, it was that on that afternoon, on the carpeted floor of my school library, I first tasted what it would be like to write. To give myself completely to a project, renew my focus again and again, work harder than I thought was possible for a very long time—and find that the world might gradually, magically, reveal itself to me.
I’m almost forty. I have kids. We live at the edge of a canyon in Southern California. But when I write, I am back on the carpet in that blocky library, below the Midwestern fields, sunk in deep, the windows invisibly high overhead.
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