I've read novels like this....
I was given madly to ponder and think by this post of
agonyyaunt concerning a lady who is some years older than myself who is still not over her teenage friendship troubles.
And there is story of false betraying friend in high-school and parents being rather over-punitive, and she still, decades later, feels she is 'being held back by teenage drama.... the feeling of betrayal I feel will never leave'.
So, here we have someone who was 'a senior in an all-girls Catholic high school.... a particularly gifted student' and the trouble came when she flunked a test and lied about it, and this led to further consequences and drama and hurt. I graduated high school and became a secretary at the front desk of a local office and moved on with life, but every time I experienced hardship, this instance would replay in my mind.
Possibly, as a gifted student, she had had other ambitions? Was her life so devoid of incident that this remained formative to her? She was coming of age at a period when opportunities for women were opening up, after all, and there are a fair number of It Changed My Life stories from then.
(It was a rather different story, but one of my grandmothers would frequently revert to that time of her life when she was a promising pupil-teacher and the pet of the headmaster. I am not saying that was quite the same as 'Once a chap has been Head of School at Eton, nothing else has quite the same glow' but there was the sense that it had been a defining epoch for her self-image.)
And I think of various novels I've read in which Some Blighting Event happens at around that stage of life just as person starts to affront it -
- and what is great about Angus Wilson's Late Call is that as an old woman Sylvia actually finds renewed life and overcomes the blightedness and moves on.
So I wonder what other forces there were crouching like toads on her life (hat-tip to P Larkin): while somehow this incident remains clear and dramatic and vivid.
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