Recently I've been thinking about a concept that really has no precise name, but which I started calling the "Nemesis." I was teaching a class called Autobiography, Fiction, and Self-Invention, and I was struck by the number of people, my students included, whose life story prominently featured an "adversary" figure. This nemesis tends to haunt the person's early childhood. He/She is typically a classmate or a person in the neighborhood. The nemesis incites a lot of fear and anxiety, and a feeling of foreboding. Occasionally he/she is vanquished, but more often than not the nemesis simply eventually disappears or moves or transfers to a different school. Rarely does the nemesis turn into a friend, though of course anything's possible. But the person does struggle against this figure, face the nemesis in battles big and small, sometimes temporarily and briefly winning, sometimes losing dreadfully.