Christopher Zara has heard it before: That he has made it. That he is a successful journalist at a national magazine. A respected professional.
“Considering where I started from, it seems that way from the outside,” he says. “I work in journalism, and people know who I am. But to me, it doesn’t feel like I’ve made it.”
Zara is a senior editor, running the news desk for Fast Company, a business magazine and website known for its trendspotting and crisp writing. But unusually for someone in his position, he does not have a college degree — a twist that he explores in depth in his book, Uneducated: A Memoir of Flunking Out, Falling Apart, and Finding My Worth,” published in May by Little, Brown and Co.
“I still feel like I’m one layoff away from being right where I was, and if I were in the job market now, without that degree, it would still be a huge strike against me,” he says. “It’s that big question that other people don’t have to answer because they did it the ‘right way’” — i.e., they have a degree.
But Zara, who grew up in Hamilton, makes it clear that his goal with Uneducated is not to suggest that there is no value in going to college. As he writes in his prologue:
“Education is a net good for society. It lifts people out of poverty and provides opportunity. It’s valued because it’s necessary. I realize that, and it is probably the thing I find most painful about not having a degree.”
He often regrets the fact that he did not have the college experience.
“There are things that you miss out on: the bonding experience of college, the basic experience of being on the campus and absorbing information from your fellow students and teachers. Not having had that experience, I assume that I missed out on something great,” he says.
He also rues missing out on the networking opportunities that colleges and universities can offer. “We get a lot of interns here from working with colleges directly,” he says. “Those experiences are so crucial when you’re starting out. They set you on a path, and I missed out on that as well. I feel a lot of regret about that. Maybe I shouldn’t feel regret, but I do.”
Zara was born at St. Francis Hospital in Trenton in 1970. His family lived in Trenton, where he attended Holy Family Grammar School and St. Anthony’s. When he was 7 or 8, the family moved to Hamilton, and in fifth grade, he started attending Lalor Elementary School.
It was while he was a student at Hamilton High School West that things started to go south for him academically. “What I remember was it was it felt like a place without a lot of hope. There were a lot of people who didn’t seem like they thought they had options,” he says.
He wonders how things might be different today if he had gotten more support from the school system in his youth. As a freshman, he was a straight D student, and he wonders why no one seemed to notice.
But his parents, he writes, had stopped speaking to each other, their marriage on the rocks. By 11th grade, he was regularly getting called to the vice principals’ offices for acts of rebellion. One too many of those led to his expulsion.
A self-harming incident followed that, and he spent four days in a behavioral health center. He was classified as “emotionally disturbed” and sent to a “special school.” One day, instead of boarding the bus for that school, he just kept on walking.
“Would it have killed me to suck it up on that chilly fall morning in 1987 and ride the stupid short bus?” he writes now.
Zara went on to pass the General Educational Development test, or GED, roughly around the time he would have graduated from high school. But he knew it would never be the same as having a diploma. In his 20s, he spent a number of years working menial jobs and struggling with drug use and addiction.
He moved to Orlando to get clean, then on to Seattle. “I was on a track to being a retail worker for the rest of my life — scooping ice cream, working in picture frame shops,” he says. “I was in my 30s, thinking, this is what my life is going to be. I think I started at that point trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.”
He had been told by a number of people over the years that he was a good writer. He decided to find out if he could make a living at it. He pitched a story idea to MovieMaker magazine, which was accepted. That led to other freelance writing assignments, including some for Seattle Magazine.
He set his sights then on the center of the publishing world. New York.
“I decided, sort of naively, after I had a handful of clips that I would just come to New York and see what I could get into, see if I could find a job here. People come here after going through masters programs and working internships and whatever, and I came here with none of that,” he says.
He nevertheless scored an internship with a struggling trade publication, Show Business Weekly, that unexpectedly turned into a full-time editor’s job. After the magazine folded, he was able to get another job, this time with the International Business Times. And that, eventually, led him to Fast Company.
Zara says that writing the book gave him a new perspective on some of the turning points in his life, like the four days he spent in the mental hospital.
“I had always thought of that experience as somewhat inconsequential and amusing,” he says. “It had never struck me as being a central part of my life, but it ended up being that for a few reasons. The patients that were there that I bonded with, I don’t know their names, but I still remember them fondly. It was somewhat similar to a dorm experience, I suppose. I didn’t realize that was so profound until I started writing about it.”
He also learned in the course of writing the book that he had been given a diagnosis during that time that he was never told about: schizotypal personality disorder.
“I don’t know if I have it, but when I looked it up, some of the things I learned about it made it sound like it would have been helpful to me to learn about that 35 years ago,” he says.
Today, Zara lives on the Upper West side with his wife, Christina D’Angelo, a graphic designer. The seed to write a memoir was planted sometime after the 2012 election, when he noticed lot of media coverage of the white working class and broad presumptions being made about people who didn’t have college degrees.
“I don’t even really have a high school diploma, and that conversation is still uncomfortable to have,” he says. “And I thought I had to talk about it at some point, and I thought, if I’m going to talk about it, I might as well write about it.”
He pitched the story to a number of book publishers, eventually getting a deal with Little, Brown. “There are lots of books about the value of college education, but a lot of them are written by college graduates,” Zara says.
He wanted to write a book from the perspective of a person who has navigated the waters of professional life without a degree. He hopes he can help people see that there is a power of education that society values, and those who have that power must use it wisely. “The big issue is that we’ve created a system where there’s only this one way to succeed,” he says.
Uneducated by Christopher Zara. Published by Little, Brown and Co. Available online at Amazon.
Author Christopher Zara's memoir, Uneducated, was published by Little, Brown and Co. in May. (Photo by Jason Woodruff.),
