Old School

by

Tobias Wolff

Susan Friedman Character Analysis

Susan is a former student at Miss Cobb’s, an all-girls school near the narrator’s all-boy’s prep school. The narrator finds Susan’s story “Summer Dance” in an old literary review and plagiarizes it for a school writing competition. After the narrator is expelled for this, he meets with Susan to apologize for stealing her story. She is five years older than the narrator and is in her second year at medical school at Georgetown. Susan is flattered by his decision to plagiarize her story and praises him for pulling a prank on the school and on Ernest Hemingway, who chose the story as the winner of the competition. (She’s unaware that the narrator didn’t submit it as a joke.) When Susan criticizes writing as a lonely and pointless exercise, the narrator is shocked, and her viewpoint only bolsters his love of writing.

Susan Friedman Quotes in Old School

The Old School quotes below are all either spoken by Susan Friedman or refer to Susan Friedman . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Honesty and Honor Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6: The Forked Tongue Quotes

By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman , Ruth Levine
Page Number: 125-126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: One for the Books Quotes

Susan considered my caper with her story a fine joke on this ivy-covered stud farm, and on Papa, as she acidly called him, and on the idea of literature as some kind of great phallic enterprise like bullfighting or boxing.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:

A writer was like a monk in his cell praying for the world—something he performed alone, but for other people.

Then to say it did no good! How could she say that? Of course it did good. And I stood there half-drunk and adrift in this bay of snoring men, and gave thanks for all the good it had done me.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Susan Friedman
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Old School LitChart as a printable PDF.
Old School PDF

Susan Friedman Quotes in Old School

The Old School quotes below are all either spoken by Susan Friedman or refer to Susan Friedman . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Honesty and Honor Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6: The Forked Tongue Quotes

By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman , Ruth Levine
Page Number: 125-126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: One for the Books Quotes

Susan considered my caper with her story a fine joke on this ivy-covered stud farm, and on Papa, as she acidly called him, and on the idea of literature as some kind of great phallic enterprise like bullfighting or boxing.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Ernest Hemingway, Susan Friedman
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:

A writer was like a monk in his cell praying for the world—something he performed alone, but for other people.

Then to say it did no good! How could she say that? Of course it did good. And I stood there half-drunk and adrift in this bay of snoring men, and gave thanks for all the good it had done me.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Susan Friedman
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis: