Agorafabulous! by Sara Benincasa

Author:Sara Benincasa
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Seven

Best Little Psych Ward in Carolina

I ended up in Asheville, North Carolina, the way a lot of people have historically ended up in Asheville, North Carolina: I went crazy. Because of its various rehabilitation institutions, Asheville has long been a destination for the addicted, the depressed, and the clinically insane. In 1936, author F. Scott Fitzgerald placed his reportedly delusional wife, Zelda, in Highland Mental Hospital in the Montford section of town. In the early days of her residence there, he famously stayed at the luxurious Grove Park Inn and chased young tail all over the hills. She spent time in and out of Highland over the next several years. One night in the spring of 1948, she was locked into a room where she was scheduled to receive electroshock treatment. A fire broke out in the kitchen and spread throughout the building, and she burned to death, as did eight other women.

Before it became a mental-health oasis, Asheville’s real claim to fame was tuberculosis treatment. By 1912, when famed osteopath Dr. William Banks Meacham built the popular Ottari Sanitarium, Asheville was already known as a “health resort” for the TB-afflicted. The Ottari was more like a hotel than anything else. It had mahogany furniture and fancy Persian rugs, and the whole place was built in the Spanish–mission style. Meacham lost everything during the Great Crash of 1929, and the building was sold and converted into apartments. I once visited my favorite professor from Warren Wilson College there. She was a hot lesbian with an equally hot pro soccer player for a girlfriend.

I’d always wanted to go to college in North Carolina. For one thing, it was right next to South Carolina, where we spent a week’s vacation each summer. For another, it was packed full of history and pretty scenery and friendly people. Those academically competitive New Jersey teens who do not get into good schools in New England often end up at Chapel Hill or Duke. We’d visited Duke and Chapel Hill when I was in the ninth grade. Duke just seemed like a younger version of Princeton, in a shittier town. (Durham has come a long way since the mid-nineties, when I first visited. It’s now home to some of the hottest restaurants in the South.) By contrast, Chapel Hill seemed fun and exciting, and there were handsome boys everywhere. But back in high school, my grades hadn’t been good enough for Chapel Hill’s rigorous admissions standards for out-of-state students. After Emerson, they still weren’t good enough. I set about looking for another North Carolina school that appealed to me, and found one five hours west of Chapel Hill, up in the Blue Ridge section of the Appalachian Mountains.

The college was called Warren Wilson, and its advertising materials read, “We’re not for everyone . . . but then, maybe you’re not everyone.” That was enough to get me interested. It appealed directly to my twenty-one-year-old narcissism. I’m not everyone, I thought. I’m me. I’m special. They already get that and I haven’t even applied yet!

Surprisingly, that tagline was actually correct.

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