His first day on campus he met a precocious 16-year-old bookworm named Susan Sontag, with whom he became friends for life. The place was aswarm with kindred spirits and budding daredevils.

after learning “that incoming freshmen were required to memorize the school song”), Nichols headed to the University of Chicago, where he hoped to make a fresh start and shed his hangdog past. Stymied back home (where he sulked off from enrolling at N.Y.U. Unable to feel snug in his own skin, Nichols would find expression and fulfillment by converting his wary discomfort into the psychodrama of improv and sketch comedy, breaking out of his specimen jar and never looking back. Later he would be fitted with a wig and false eyebrows, but the constant, fidgety adjustment and telltale stink of acetone fed a prickly sense of self-consciousness and outcast condition.

At school he was mocked (“Hey, baldy!”), bullied and belittled, a self-described zero. When Michael and his younger brother, Robert, sailed to America in 1939 to meet up with their father, who had relocated to New York, he knew only two sentences of English, one of which was “Please do not kiss me,” intended to ward off the fussing attention that “the sight of a bald little uncared for refugee holding a 3-year-old’s hand was likely to engender among adults.” Nichols would soon learn that those his own age were less solicitous, the little monsters. At the age of 4 in his native Germany, which his Jewish family would flee during the Nazi terror, he received an injection of whooping cough vaccine that left him completely bald and unable to regrow hair, a pale salamander. From earliest childhood Nichols felt the sting of stigma, the shame of exclusion.

Life after life book review guardian