Finishing School: To Shred or Not to Shred

Can a person be cool and old-fashioned at the same time? Is it O.K. to have a “Moby-Dick” T-shirt for every day of the week?—and does her best to behave under increasingly alarming circumstances.

My obsession with shredding began in May of 2021, in East Palestine, Ohio. I was visiting my friend JK, who had inherited her childhood home, in nearby Columbiana; she’d recently discovered that her mother went to high school back in the nineteen-thirties with Eleanor Gould, whom I knew at The New Yorker. JK had shown a page from her mother’s 1934 yearbook to a librarian in East Palestine and told her about Eleanor, who spent more than fifty years as a copy editor at the magazine and was considered indispensable.

The librarian had not been aware that so illustrious a person hailed from East Palestine (the last syllable is pronounced “steen,” as in “Franken-steen”). I don’t know whose idea it was originally—my friend’s, the librarian’s, or mine—but we agreed that patrons of the East Palestine Public Library might like to hear about Eleanor. Maybe they would hang a plaque in her honor at the high school. I wrote to the librarian to set a date, timing my trip with the annual blooming of the trilliums.