Religion, like myth, is not absolutely sequestered from scholarship. “Nothing humanly beautiful is really terrifying,” she writes, setting a stage for readers like me to think that when Zeus transformed himself into a bull and “lay down before her feet and seemed to show her his broad back,” we should see the overwhelming power of beauty-not the overpowering power of power. Hamilton, too, comments that being so initiated gains its subject “geographical fame,” suggesting that Europa cut a deal for a spot in the atlas. Social scientists work to get dads more involved because research indicates that fathers’ involvement in their child’s early education is correlated not only with academic success but also with improved overall well-being. As with most US children, my mother was more involved in my educational development than my father.

As with most US children who attend public schools, the majority of my instructors were female. The scene sticks with me, I think, because so many of my earliest memories involve women teaching me to read and men assigning me things to read.

When I was ten, he handed me a paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942) and said, “All educated people know mythology.” I took the book and ran upstairs, where I immediately wrote my name and the date in ballpoint pen on the inside cover, as if the ink was an incantatory potion that would launch me to the ranks of the educated. He was a deeply kind person who saw in our Erskine Caldwell clan something worth salvaging from the fate otherwise predicted by demographics. Growing up, my family had a patron: an artist who gave us his used Dodge Dart when my mom’s job took her off a bus line and who sometimes handed me five-dollar bills at the end of his visits to our house.

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