A forty-seven-year-old art teacher mailing a love letter in the guise of an educational solicitation to his teenage student is creepy—more than creepy, sinister. Yet the memoir treats the episode comically, a missive between star-crossed lovers.

(Sinister or amusing? There are three Jills weighing in: the agonized teenager crying in frustration because she can’t decipher nuance in an adult’s letter; the forty-four-year-old memoirist, entertained by her younger self’s confusion and Arnold’s predicament; and me, the one who knows how the story ends.)