Admissions essay: Amanda Gutterman

I have always been on the cutting edge: the risks, the payoffs. Cutting-edge writers and artists, radical perspectives and ideas. Like sentences without verbs.

On that note, I love departures from the norm and how they shape us. Growing up as an only child with a handicapped mother, wheelchair-bound with Multiple Sclerosis, I learned subtraction balancing checkbooks and addition computing late fees on bills. In freshman year my dad was diagnosed with ALS, and as his health failed, I pulled through. In November of my junior year when he died, my world changed completely, and I became the new man of the family. The new woman.

My background fuels and directs my passion for literature. I am attracted to young, independent protagonists and newfangled writing styles like in Dave Eggers’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Following his parents’ successive deaths, twenty-five year-old Eggers is charged with raising his seven year-old brother, interrupting and redirecting his life as a young adult. Eggers emerges as the postmodern hero: part “noble savage” and part jaded urbanite, stripped naked by the media (a good chunk of the book is a transcript of his interview to be on MTV’s “The Real World”), an introvert and an extrovert, just as guilty, destructive, and self-conscious as he is proud, responsible, and loving. Heartbreaking is infused with newness; the preface even includes a SparkNotes-style guide to the metaphors and allusions in the text. And suggestions for which “boring parts” to skip.

But please don’t skip this part: I connect to postmodern heroes in literature because I have always seen myself as one of them. My struggles amount to a giant résumé for life. I became self-sufficient at a young age, with the strength to pick up Mom when she falls, clean up any mess you can imagine, do the grocery shopping, handle death and disappointment, get myself there on time.

Mom falls a lot, usually when no one is home. She keeps books everywhere: by the toilet, the side of the bed—all the usual places, so that when she falls, she’ll have something to read until someone finds her. Ever the pragmatist, Mom is as far from the tragic invalid as I from a selfless nursemaid. We are not stock characters.

A good example is right now, literally right now as I’m writing this:

MOM: Damn it! I just banged my head really badly.

ME: Do you feel nauseous at all?

MOM: Yes, totally. Can you get me into bed?

ME: Sure, should I call a doctor or something?

MOM: Maybe later, let’s just do this now.

Now I’m back.

I love to write, especially poems, short stories, and screenplays. I like to do odd things like break into the National Cathedral at night just to see how it looks. I am in love with Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye and all the Beat Poets, even the gay ones who are less likely to reciprocate. I love my job at the National Gallery because I love modern art almost as much as fiction. I play the oboe because no one else does. I just began six sentences with “I.”

Gotta go now. I’m not Hercules, but I’m a postmodern hero with people to save.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.