When I applied to college in 2001, my mother suggested we look into my father’s Native American heritage — a vague family tale — to see if I could register for a tribe to gain an advantage. I didn’t. The family legend was so distant the very idea felt embarrassing. But, in my early twenties, I did let the people around me know that I went to a public high school, that I came from a middle-class family, that my mother dropped out of school, and that I helped pay for my college education. My “public school,” though, was a Magnet consistently ranked among the top 10 public schools in the country. My father was a college professor who made double the US median income. My mother finished her BA in night school. And by “helped,” I meant I made $200 a week to defray my parents’ expenses for my meals.

Maybe this is part of why Julia Salazar’s much-reported embellishments of her own background didn’t torpedo her campaign for State Senate in Brooklyn. Even articles reporting on her win last night led with the controversy over how she’s described her backstory: The New York Post condemned her personal story — a big part of her appeal — as “wildly exaggerated.” Salazar has said she immigrated from Colombia when she was, in fact, born in Florida; asserted a “working-class background” that her brother strongly denied, offering photos of the family’s four-bedroom riverfront house; said she went to work at 14 to “make ends meet,” which her mother contradicted; implied her mother hadn’t gone to college when her mother got a degree when Salazar was 8 years old; asserted a very confused timeline about her conversion to Judaism; and claimed Jewish ancestry nobody could verify.

There’s no interpretation of Salazar’s claims about her life that can escape the conclusion that she presented a selectively edited and lightly fabricated account of her personal history, and Rolling Stone seemed baffled to have to report last night that “the constituents of District 18 were apparently untroubled” by that. But I wonder if the supporters — certainly the young, mostly white, recent college graduates who flooded her victory party — didn’t recognize, at least subconsciously, that this kind of thing is just way more common than we’d like to admit.

I’m older now, and I don’t flog my “middle-class” cred so much anymore. Yet let’s be real here: We have a culture that lionizes survivors of challenging childhoods, that gobbles up memoirs of poverty and suffering, and that makes having endured harrowing circumstances seem almost necessary to speak with any moral authority. I suspect so many of us have been embellishers, especially when we were young, in the stakes to abjure privilege, to claim uniqueness in the form of obstacles, to show our guts and thorny individualism in rising above ordinary roots.

In my freshman year of high school, my new best friend convinced the whole grade she had a fatal degenerative lung disease and that her parents beat her. Turned out the disease was made up, and she came to school early to sneak into the theater greenroom to apply costume-makeup bruises to her neck and arms. These were horrible things to lie about. But at the time, I didn’t even question why she would: It obviously lent her a nobility and a heroism far above all the rest of us boringly comfortable and well-provided-for suburban youngsters, an air of the overcomer, who is the aristocrat of our time.

Eight years before that, when I was 8 years old, I remember awakening in my childhood bed with a strange and sudden thought: How extraordinary it was to be born a privileged American in such a time, the utopian end of the 20th century after the end of the Cold War, when it seemed the worst we had to worry about — or so it seemed to a child — was whether the President of the United States had or hadn’t received a blow job. And I remember the feeling that accompanied that waking thought: a feeling of extreme anxiety.

It isn’t a coincidence, I think, that I got sick that year, the same year I began to have an apprehension of my privilege. I was born with an esophageal malformation that was successfully corrected with surgery at birth, but I began to tell the other kids at school that I had been born without an esophagus, or that it was made out of plastic. The fantasy became real: I began to have torso pain; I was hospitalized when I struggled to eat.

This might not resonate with everybody, but friends to whom I mentioned my story — from different backgrounds — found it familiar. Pain, physical and emotional, was rampant in my relatively affluent suburban school system. My classmates cut themselves, told strangely horrific tales of the darkness at the heart of their family lives. At Yale, where I went to college, the central focus of gossip for the first month of freshman year was who was and wasn’t a “legacy” — in other words, who had preferential treatment in admissions thanks to parents being alumni and who had made it there on their own. The odor that surrounded the “legacies” was so rank I have no doubt some “legacies” felt pressed to lie.