Never take a single room in college. You’ll miss the whole point of being away from your parents and getting prepped for the real world. I think the true education in college takes place from 10 at night until 2 in the morning. What you learn from your peers can be far more important than what you learn in the classroom.
I have several friends who are psychiatrists. Over the past several years, they have all told me about what they’re seeing from their patients. “I’m hearing loneliness,” they all said in various ways. “Anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies in young people. They need human contact like never before. They need friends.” We are social beings, wanting the human touch more than ever, and yet 57 percent of college students report feeling lonely, according to a 2024 survey; more than 60 percent aren’t “thriving” at all, according to 2025 numbers.
Several young people in my life are in college. They have chosen to live in single rooms. No roommates. They say they can study better. But they’re missing the point. How are we really going to learn about life if we isolate ourselves? We need the company of others, the camaraderie, the friendships. We should never be alone on the island. We learn and mature and get to know the world from the stories of others.
I went to Brookline High School. There were 600 students in my class, and perhaps 10 of them got into my college. Two of them were good friends, and we initially decided to request to room together. They wanted to include someone who had gone to boarding school, a “brain” as they called him. I knew the “brain” and, for various reasons (a know-it-all), I said, “If he’s part of the package, no way I’m going to live with him.” So I went for potluck, taking my chances with strangers. This is what I call the “accidental nature of life.” Because I didn’t take the easy road, with familiar faces, it changed my life.
I had three roommates that freshman year. One was local, from Westwood, who wanted to be a plastic surgeon. Another, from New Jersey, was the best debater in his state. The third was from Abilene, Texas. I had always wanted a roommate from the Lone Star State. I figured he’d have a beautiful sister and a father with a fortune from oil drilling. But he had a dad who was a schoolteacher and no sister. He never played football. But he wanted to be a writer. We shared a floor in the dorm with another quartet next door with whom we became great friends…guys from Watsonville, California; Omaha; Pittsburgh; and Oxford, Mississippi. “Mah daddy ran the music department at Ole Miss,” the Oxford native told me. “Ah was in the All-State Band…mah girlfriend became Miss America.” I didn’t need to go to classes. This menagerie gave me the most important, interesting year of my life.
Almost every night we’d gather in our living room, my roomies and neighbors wandering in and out and “shootin’ the breeze” about subjects great and small. All eight suite mates were virgins. No one had ever tasted alcohol. Not even a beer.
We talked about subjects such as: Is Judaism a race or a religion? What was it like growing up in the South? The West? The Midwest? New England?
We were all storytellers. We’d get sucked into yarns that taught lessons, so much more than “lesson plans” and the forced memorization of dates and famous battles.
We were all storytellers. We’d get sucked into yarns that taught lessons, so much more than “lesson plans” and the forced memorization of dates and famous battles.
Another student in the building was “Albert the Scholar,” as we called him. He roomed with Jacques from Haiti. Albert came from Beirut, then called the Paris of the Middle East. “Beirut is the most beautiful, most cosmopolitan city in the world,” he would tell us. I had to look up cosmopolitan in the dictionary. He regaled us with stories of the beauty of his hometown, the wealth, the closeness of families, the energy, the history. A shining jewel. Years after college, I saw him at a reunion, when Beirut was a symbol for the destruction of a certain civilization. “Tribes can bring the greatest cities and societies to nothing. Don’t think it can’t happen in America,” he said to me. “The decline and fall.”
Greg from New Jersey gave me a copy of the Holmes-Laski Letters, a book detailing the correspondence between two brilliant minds. I had never heard of Laski and only knew Oliver Wendell Holmes because of his Boston roots. Greg pushed me to read and understand above my pay grade. No one in this group of eight was a party boy. We all went to various libraries after dinner. Then to get hamburgers at a local joint that stayed open late…and back to our rooms for our real education. None of us drank. I had never had even a sip of beer, and my parents only had a cocktail, Old Fashioneds, when they went out to dinner on Saturday nights.
But the stories we told—and heard—didn’t require alcohol to be interesting. Mark from Oxford, Mississippi, told us, “Every New Year’s Eve, my family and I would go to William Faulkner’s house. He was usually drunk when we arrived there. After dinner, Faulkner would tell us ghost stories, with his voice like an actor’s, and send us home after midnight. We would huddle together walking to the car, holding our parents’ hands, knowing there were spooky things all around us. Looking back, I’d say that the more Faulkner drank, the wilder and scarier the stories.”
Dean, the boy from northern California, told tales of working in the artichoke fields, the biggest home in America for this vegetable. It was “East of Eden country,” as Dean described it. His family knew John Steinbeck, and this was the year that James Dean, starring in Steinbeck’s movie, became the heartthrob of Hollywood. My Dean was a big fella, about 6-foot-3. He went out for crew. He also suffered from hemorrhoids and spent a long time each day sitting in a warm basin of water in the shower while he studied German flash cards. When he wasn’t rowing or going to classes, he would always spend time in the dorm room, dressed only in an extra-large yellow terrycloth bathrobe.
I’ve mentioned that my roommates were all academically oriented. Two were premed. We all talked about finding women to date. But all of the roomies, except two, were babes in the woods in that department. I was the only one with a girlfriend who was still in high school. Dean, everyone agreed, took a shine to her. One day, Dean heard a woman’s voice across the hall. He put on his yellow bathrobe and burst into our living room. He then threw open his robe and yelled, “Stick ’em up!”
The woman in our room was Greg’s mother.
One night after we came back from the libraries, we were in our living space, yapping about courses, life, and writing assignments. All of us suddenly started talking about writing “the great American novel.” We came to an agreement that the title of the novel would be a sign on the T stop outside of our windows. It read, “Eight Minutes to Park Street.” Then we agreed that the first of us to actually be published would have the rights to the title.
As I said before, one of the other boys—Jacques—living in our building was from Haiti. When I first met him, walking up the stairs to our rooms, he introduced himself and said, “I’m going to be dictator of Haiti by the time I’m 24. Or I’ll be dead.” He was completely serious. Jacques was handsome and a ladies’ man. You didn’t want to introduce him to a date, because they would immediately have an interest in him. After freshman year, Jacques and I roomed together; he was studying premed; I was majoring in English with no clue about the future. Except that I wanted that title, Eight Minutes to Park Street.
After college, Jacques went to Paris for medical school and married. We lost touch for several years, and another classmate called me one day and said, “You won’t believe this. Jacques landed on a beach in Haiti with a raiding party to liberate Haiti from Papa Doc Duvalier, the ferocious dictator. He was hunted down and executed.”
Jacques was 24 years old.
Robin also lived in the building. He was American but had gone to high school in Switzerland. Robin was handsome, and I thought very cool. He told us stories about school in Europe. In the winter, the students were in Gstaad, skiing almost every day. In the spring they would all move down to the idyllic little village at the mountain’s bottom. There were students from all over the world. And a certain number of them came from royalty, or very rich merchant or oil families. Robin’s stories were magical—to me, like fairy tales or the stories of Aladdin. The people we lived with took us to many worlds every day and night.
After college, Robin married Ali MacGraw, who would go on to become one of America’s biggest movie stars. Her third husband was Steve McQueen.
The stories I absorbed that freshman year helped turn me into an adult. The experiences of students completely foreign to an innocent, immature kid from Brookline changed my life. Not the courses I took, but the people I met. You can get the same lessons from every college dorm in America, from 10 at night till 2 in the morning. Keep your ears open. Ask your new friends for their stories. Be curious.
Don’t room alone.
This story first appeared in the print edition of the September 2026 issue, with the headline, “Don’t Room Alone.”
