This was the moral of Patchett's central story — and what a story it was. As a desperately lonely freshman from Tennessee, she decided to bake cookies for her faculty adviser, the one person who'd shown her kindness. But the dorm oven was broken. So she picked up her two pans of raw cookie dough, walked across the street to a mansion, and knocked on the door. The woman who answered was Alice Ilchman, the brand-new president of Sarah Lawrence College, still unpacking boxes during her first week. Ilchman later told the story herself: she opened her door to find a freshman holding two trays of unbaked cookies. She led Patchett to her kitchen and said, 'Make yourself at home.' In the time the cookies took to bake, Patchett met her children and played with her dog. That single act of desperation-as-bravery led to babysitting, cooking at dinner parties, and what Patchett described as the family she'd been too shy to ask for.