Yet, living in New York in the first years after college, where I worked as a temp secretary and wrote half-realized novels, I again migrated toward the fiction that I was going it alone in the big city. It was both true and untrue. Unlike most of my friends, I got almost no financial help from my parents. But they never would have left me to starve. Perhaps most significant, my family and education had provided me with a wealth of pre-existing connections to the media establishment and, no less important, the social acumen to make use of them. Even so, in my mid-20s, when a handful of my city friends began buying two-bedroom apartments in the West Village — despite making just $24,000 a year as editorial and production assistants — it confirmed my sense of myself as everyone’s “poor relation.”

It was the man who became my husband, who writes about economics and politics and who grew up in an indisputably working-class family in the north of England, who hammered home for me that all along I had been a bona fide member of the bourgeoisie. It was a classification that was even harder to dispute when, 13 years ago, true to the Brooklyn cliché, we took our accumulated savings and bought a dilapidated brownstone, marking us as certified gentrifiers as well.

My relative privilege came into even starker relief seven years ago — and I began to appreciate the extent to which privilege and deprivation are passed down from generation to generation — when our older daughter began attending a rare mixed-race-and-income public elementary school in the neighborhood. At classroom celebrations, in addition to lawyers and literature professors, I found myself in the company of transit workers and security guards. Some lived in housing projects, a few in homeless shelters.

I’ve been disheartened to discover the extent to which, in a mixed environment, the children themselves seem to self-segregate by socioeconomic status. Even at a young age, the fields of reference between the haves and have-nots are apparently too different. Conversely, children from similar backgrounds, even similarly employed parents, somehow sniff one another out. My younger daughter had been in kindergarten only three weeks when she announced she had made a new best friend and asked me to schedule a play date. To my never-ending amazement, she’d managed to home in on the only other child in her class of 25 whose parents worked in book publishing.

Of course, the most privileged segment of society does not use the public schools at all, a fact I learned as a teenager and then all over again when a good 50 percent of my parent-friends in the city began enrolling their children in private schools where, thanks to exorbitant tuition costs and selection processes built in part on pre-existing connections, the children of the well-off are guaranteed to interact almost exclusively with other members of the lucky in birth. (Even those who receive financial aid, as my family once did, tend to pay in the thousands, an impossibility for most families.)

Not that reproducing one’s social access and class advantage is an oft-stated goal by those who send their children to such places. Instead, one tends to hear about the “small class sizes” or “amazing theater program.” But these perks constitute only half the equation. The other half goes unmentioned. For if there’s one taboo subject left in the United States, it may be the existence of a class system as closed and inflexible as the one my husband left across the Atlantic.