Social Climbers class on Balzac and Kanakia

4 spots left

Wednesdays, 7:00–8:30pm. Oct 14 – Nov 18 (6 weeks). $240. NoHo. Reading Balzac’s Père Goriot and Naomi Kanakia’s The Default World. Class details. 4 spots left.

Maybe a week ago I saw a tweet I can’t find now, by a girl, that was like “girls are posting pictures of themselves on the website that newly rich guys they want to date use? you’re kidding me.” The website referred to was of course twitter.com.

It stayed with me because there was something jolting about it—I was shocked out of my usage of this app that suddenly felt very empty headed.

Oh—people are playing a different game than me, I thought. Here I had been, scrolling the feed, allowing interesting and/or funny sentences to fill up my head as a means to relax and/or keep up with the news—meanwhile, the whole time, I didn’t know it but I’ve been swimming with sharks.

But after the initial jolt, I processed the second part of the tweet, the tweeter’s point: “you’re kidding me.” Her point is that this isn’t at all shocking; that of course people do things to try to get what they want. And—here I’m extrapolating—even though when it’s written out so plainly, it looks kind of sneaky or shady, internally, this probably feels as prosaic as me lacing my shoes in the morning getting ready for work: I’m doing the thing I have to do to get what I want.

And this all made me think about social climbing—because that’s the subject of a class I’m teaching Wednesdays from 7-8:30pm this fall in lower Manhattan, which I’m writing about here, in this post, with the intention to invite you to sign up for it—and how what counts as ‘social climbing’ is probably to some extent in the eye of the beholder. One person’s social climbing might be another’s admirably agency.

I mean, there’s a definition of social climbing that is unambiguously negative, where you befriend people only because they can help you get ahead, and you drop them the minute they’ve served their purpose. And make no mistake, the protagonists in Père Goriot and The Default World do do that, or at least intend to.

But I think things start to get more interesting when a behavior isn’t necessarily negative-sum, or immoral. The Cambridge Dictionary says social climbing is “the act of trying to improve your social or class position by befriending people from a higher group. Merriam Webster says it’s “trying to gain acceptance into a higher social class or fashionable society.” The girls posting pictures of themselves on twitter.com in search of a newly rich tech boyfriend aren’t hurting anyone, are they? There’s nothing immoral about this. They’re just trying to improve their social or class position.

I personally have thought a lot about this kind of thing in the four years since I’ve moved to New York, because I have, without meaning to, very distinctly and meaningfully improved my social or class position. As I’ve written about before, due to going to a party mentioned on twitter.com in the summer before I moved here, I ended up meeting an entirely new class of people (upper middle class, Ivy League, children of rich parents), and, separately, 12x’ing my (previously almost nonexistent) income, which I talk about a little bit here, with relevant background about the kind of poorly paid work I used to do here.

This has been a positive change in many ways, especially the money, but the social aspects have not always been easy—I am always learning new ways that I’m peasant-coded. I’ve learned I’m not supposed to evaluate a restaurant by portion size. I’ve learned about types of Japanese food that aren’t sushi. I’ve learned other people have answers to “Where do you like to travel?”—an astoundingly benign-seeming question that, at least to me, appears to imply not only regular vacations abroad, but so many that you have spots you return to.

It’s easy for me to keep a sense of humor about this, because, for one thing, these are good problems to have, but also: none of this was intentional. Meeting rich people is not at all what I came to New York to do. I came to New York to meet writers! And then I just needed a job! It would never have occurred to me to try to “get in with the software engineers.” These people can’t help my career at all! I just ended up liking them on a personal level. So, paradoxically, it was by accidentally abandoning the literary social climbing I was actually attempting by moving to New York that I ended up rising in class position, something I never cared about and was never aiming for.

Or have I risen in class position at all?? Do I just make more money now?? What does it mean that my grandmother hobnobbed with famous writers, my dad went to an elite prep school, but I grew up in rural Canada? What exactly is the relationship between class and money!? 🤪

Anyway, I’m teaching a class on two novels about people trying to rise in the world. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac is about a young law student from the provinces who uses his noble cousin to rise in the high society of Paris in 1834. The Default World by one of my favorite Substackers Naomi Kanakia is about an Indian trans girl moving from Sacramento to San Francisco to try to marry a rich techie in order to get health insurance to pay for gender-affirming surgery. Both protagonists are very, very brazen in their social climbing. And one thing you get from a calculating, social climbing narrator is a detailed understanding of a class structure, because they have to know where the levers are to pull them. I think it’ll make for good conversation.

If you’re in New York this fall, I invite you to join this class. There are only 4 (or maybe 5—there might be a bug—check back if it’s full, or message me) spots left. You can sign up at the bottom of this web page.