The Early Years

Susan’s personal journey was never conventional.

As an infant, she never crawled, insisting instead on pushing herself around on her rump. She did not speak at all until she was past two. And when she finally began to speak, she spoke in full sentences and whole paragraphs.

Susan learned to read before starting school. By the time she was seven, she was reading at a twelfth-grade level and was selected to give a book report on a “grown-up” book on public television. Nonetheless, her teachers reported that she was a sloppy reader. When she read aloud, she would mistake one word for another, tended to drop the endings of words, and ignored all the little words not full of meaning — words like “of,” “a,” and “the.” She also read with little attention to what she called “the specks on the page”: grammatical markings. She still knows very little about grammar, despite being the author of several books and many articles. She asks people where the “specks” go.

Her teachers described her as “messy.” Her penmanship was terrible, and she did poorly in arithmetic. Hours and hours with flashcards did not help.

School and Its Discontents

She withstood constant criticism for being sloppy and “lazy,” but the criticism produced no change. She was labeled an “underachiever.” She had entered first grade certain she would be a star because she read so well, and was devastated to find her reading so criticized. Her distaste for school began then and only deepened with each year she spent in public school.

Susan was a shy child, insecure about her looks, her clumsiness, and her messiness. But she had a powerful sense of self and believed school concentrated on a great deal of foolish things — like how neatly one wrote — and ignored what actually mattered. Why did her reading “mistakes” count for so much more than her 12.1 reading-comprehension score? So she couldn’t do arithmetic; there were things school never measured in which she excelled, like reading people — knowing how they felt, when they were scared or lonely or about to lash out.

Her ability to “read” people made many adults uncomfortable. She was not a child people warmed to easily. Somehow she could not manage to make people like her.

Finding Her Own Way

By seventh grade, Susan began skipping school regularly. But she kept reading, and discovered how easy it was to learn on her own compared to learning in school. Troubled by how “different” she knew herself to be, she began abusing drugs. After completing an outpatient rehabilitation program at Phoenix House, she stopped around the age of 14.

She graduated from high school at 16 with high scores on New York’s Regents exams. Nonetheless, her teachers gave her low grades, troubled by her poor attendance record and disruptive behavior in class.

College and Law School

Susan was admitted to NYU despite undistinguished SAT scores — the likely result of trying too hard to “figure out” the answers, rather than trusting her intuition, the strategy that had served her so well on the Regents exams. At NYU, where no one checked attendance and she could avoid courses requiring written papers that would expose her shaky grammar, Susan excelled, graduating magna cum laude.

Then Susan applied to law school. Unlike her earlier SAT performance, her LSAT scores were extremely high. She had not taken a prep course, and the night before the exam she discovered her boyfriend was cheating on her — which left her in no state to carefully “figure out” each answer. Instead she moved through the test as fast as she could, checking off answers by instinct, spent every break in tears on the phone, and was the first in the room to finish. After receiving her score, she finally understood that this same instinctive approach had been behind all those strong Regents scores in high school, and she followed that strategy from then on. For example, while nearly everyone takes a bar review prep course, Susan did not. She trusted her ability to absorb information best on her own. She passed the bar on the first try.

Her LSAT scores earned her a place at Yale Law School.

At Yale

At Yale, Susan continued her pattern of skipping classes and learning independently. She was a poor notetaker and hopeless at constructing outlines. Her difficulties with grammar and spelling were, however, near impossible to conceal. The teaching assistant assigned to review her first writing assignment denounced the submission, asking if it was a joke. But the professor — Robert C. Clark, who would later become dean of Harvard Law School — wrote on her paper: “Excellent reasoning. You really have to work on your writing.” A patient and gifted classmate worked with her throughout all three years of law school, and slowly her writing improved. By graduation she at least knew where a period belonged, if not where commas and other specks should go. Her direct speaking style and ability to “read” people served her well in Yale’s trial competition, where she became a finalist — the first woman in Yale’s history to reach the finals.

A Life with GPS

After law school, Susan took a series of positions seemingly “beneath” her credentials — work one would not expect a Yale Law graduate to pursue, including running a continuing legal education program. During that nearly ten-year period, her confidence grew. In 1987, she entered law teaching.

All her life, Susan had struggled with certain tasks that came effortlessly to others: arithmetic, finding her way from point A to point B (she avoided learning to drive until well into her thirties), avoiding falls and collisions, grammar, spelling, notetaking, and outlining. She had difficulty with certain linguistic categories — the difference between an adverb and an adjective, or what exactly a preposition was. She hated traveling, stayed home alone a good deal, and felt disoriented and uncomfortable in public settings such as movie theaters, outdoor events, and large social gatherings.

People considered her quirky and inflexible. Although she had never been diagnosed with any learning disability, she had always known that her brain simply would not do many things that most people found simple. At the same time, it found many things far easier than they were for others. She seemed to perceive what others did not — and to miss much that others saw clearly. As Susan thought of it, she excelled at knowing what was real and what was not, while “figurers” often could not tell the difference.

The Turning Point

Beginning in 2001, Susan began staying home more and more. She found it increasingly difficult to travel and, more alarming, increasingly difficult to teach her classes as she always had — without notes, relying on her spatial sense of where she was in the room and in the material. It all felt like a kind of nervous breakdown.

In October 2004, Susan took a rare trip away from home. She traveled to Chicago to visit a friend. While there, she went to a store three blocks in a straight line from her friend’s house. Leaving the store, she got turned around and, without realizing it, set off in the wrong direction. Finding herself lost, she returned to the store and tried again, with no better luck. Disoriented, she fell, got up, and somehow found herself back at the store a third time. On her third attempt to reach her friend’s home, she spotted him across the street, looking for her. Before crossing to meet him, she looked down to tidy herself up — and noticed that her right leg was covered in blood. She had been bleeding profusely for some time without any awareness of it. This incident set in motion the events that led to the founding of Sarah’s Place.