My favorite section so far, these chapters detail Borkowski’s self-consciousness about being an outsider, or more specifically an insider stuck between categories and therefore rendered invisible. A “ghost” in high school, he played sports but “wasn’t a jock; I smoked week, but I wasn’t a stoner…I didn’t belong to any clubs or organizations because I wasn’t a joiner…I guess I didn’t know where the fuck I belonged because I didn’t know who the fuck I was” (115). Coupled with the back-and-forth instability of his childhood between his mother and father, he presents his alienation and feelings of being stuck in between various roles and worlds in his same nonnegotiable tone.
I’m drawn to these chapters because A) while, yes, I strongly relate to the strange tension of being in between categories, groups, and roles B) I also feel that the tension of being “in between” is often overlooked or under-examined. And Borkowski’s frank, conversational tone is an effective match for content that may be considered outside of “canon” working-class or literacy narratives — I think his voice is prepossessed with a humility that allows him to go off typical talking points as an academic and a teacher.
Borkowski’s twist on the working class narrative is actually the first type of any working class narrative that I’ve read. I’m itching to read more of its kind (against the grain of typical working-class narratives) because A) I was also strongly and actively discouraged from pursuing higher education and B) I believe in its depiction of academia and higher education void of its ivory tower connotations; it’s learning, or as he says, “To put it more simply: I believed books could help me figure out stuff about myself and about the world. Maybe they could be a beacon and an anchor” (129).
