When Julia Keller dropped out of graduate school at the tender age of 19, she was fully expecting a parental lecture on why she should tough it out. Instead, to her relief, her father offered to come and fetch her. What had felt like a terrible failure at the time actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise as she found her niche in journalism instead, working her way up over the next couple of decades into a senior position as book critic and feature writer at the Chicago Tribune newspaper. But when Keller decided just over a decade ago to quit journalism, too, in order to write fiction, this time her mother was horrified.
“Her generation, even more than mine, was very much, ‘You do not quit a good job that is paying you a fair salary! Your working conditions are not terrible, you’re not in a Dickensian workhouse, how dare you quit?’” she explains over Zoom from Ohio. “She just could not fathom why anyone would do that.”
