Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes 20140531 : vimarsana.com

On autobiography. The book examines the differences in writing styles between men and women in autobiographical works. This encore presentation is just under an hour. Cspan jill ker conway, author of when memory speaks reflections on autobiography, where did you get the idea for this . Guest well, i have been traveling around with my publicist from alfred knopf and giving readings from some of my earlier volumes and memoirs, and i started to explain to the audience before i read something about the genre, something about its history and where i thought my own work fitted in with it. And the audience would always get very interested and ask a lot of questions, and finally, my editor said one day, well, why dont you do a book about this . so i thought it was a wonderful idea and ii had to do a great deal of reading of 19th century memoirs that i hadnt read before in order to do the book, but i had great fun doing it. Cspan i have a copy of something youll. Guest mm. Cspan . Youll recognize, the road from coorain, yourwhat . Memoir or autobiography . Guest its a memoir. Its my childhood and growing up in the outback of australia and my education in sydney. And its definitely a memoir. It evokes the life and times a lot more than being a fulldressed autobiography. Cspan andand what impact did this haveyouryour memoir have on your whole idea of what memoirs are about . Guest i wrote it for three reasons. First of all, because i was tired of all the australian movies that celebrated male heroes in the australian outback, the worst being crocodile dundee, and i wanted to write a story that had a female heroine, my mother, and a female narrative voice, mine. The second reason was that ive been teaching since i was 23, so thats a very long time now. And if im teaching a young man and talking with him about his plans for his future, what hell do after graduation, i can always find just dozens of memoirs by menhow i founded general motors, how i rescued the Chrysler Corporation, how i discovered dnawhich will maybe inflate the power of the narrator to control his own destiny considerably. But on the other hand, itll be a working, sort of, road map for a young man to think about how he might plan a future. But if i am talking to a young woman, whos just finishing college and thinking about her life ahead, there are really very few memoirs about a womans education that will help her think about it, and also, very few that deal with how a young adult woman sets about planning her life. And so i wanted to write a story that would be a useful kind of road map for somebody going through that process of graduating from college and thinking about the future. And so that was a second important motive. And then the third one was feminism today is expressed in rhetoric thats being so politicized over issues like abortion and the whole question of pornography, that most people just switch off. So i wanted to talk in a narrative voice that drew the reader into the story, male or female, and made them experience, through the story, some of the central issues ofof feminismwhat happens, really, when a society is unjust in its dealings with women. And inin that narrative, you see my mother, who has been such a powerful, very creative, likable, attractive woman sink into despair and neurotic mental illness, mainly because the world she lives in doesnt have a dignified idea of how a widow lives or what she does. And you also see me run into a lot of discrimination. And i wanted that to be told in terms that were very faithful to the important men in my life, father, brothers, teachers, lovers, but made it very clear that the story wasnt a romance its not about relationships with men; its about how a woman gets her life under control and makes important choices. Cspan by the way, whats coorain . Guest coorain is the name of my familys sheep station in southwestern new south wales, a very remote, arid area. The word means windy place. its an aboriginal word. And its the land that my mother and father took up as pioneers before i was born, when they were in their early 30s. And its aa story about what a lbeautiful world they built for a child to grow up in and then how that world is destroyed, mainly as a result ofof climate and australias recurrent droughts. But its also destroyed because my parents, unwittingly, are agents of the destruction. They bring in sharphooved animals into a very delicate, arid countryside where theythey just destroy the root system of the plants. And so the country turns into desert. Cspan the book was written in 1989. Guest yeah. Cspan out in paperback. And you can get the hardback, even. I found that in a store. Guest yeah. Cspan how many years does this bookyouryour memoir cover . Guest it covers the first 25 years of my life. Im 25 on the last page, when im walking out across the tarmac to get on a plane and come to the United States. Cspan what year did you leave australia . Guest i left in 1960. Cspan and since that time, youve been president of Smith College for 10 years . Guest yes. Cspan why did you leave that . Guest oh, well, ii had aan agreement with my husband, was jointly arrived at, that every 10 years, the other person would get to say where you lived. And that way, nobodys career would be primary and the other ones secondary, nor would we have to have a commuting marriage. So the first 10 years of our married life was spent in canada, and then he said, ill go wherever you want to go. we spent 10 years at smith. And then it was his turn again. We went toto live in boston, and i started teaching parttime at mit. But i really wanted to spend that time getting back my old writing style. I used to write a lot when i was an undergraduate at the university of sydney. I stopped when i got to harvard and did a phd. I started writing for other historians and i began to write short articles and very scholarly academic prose. Then i became a university administrator, started writing bureaucratic prose, you know, memoranda to this person and that. So when i came to have the time again to go back to the writing i wanted to do, my style was gone. Ii couldnt write in anything but that terrible bureaucratic voice. So i knew id have to write something that was very close to the bone and got deep into my psyche in order to get my style back. So thats why i started, among other reasons, and it did come back. Cspan small point, but i notice the difference in the road to coorain, you dedicate the book to john. Guest yes. Cspan . And in this new book, its in memory of john. Guest yes. He died just about three years ago now. Cspan and where did you meet him . Guest i met him when i came to harvard as a graduate student, and i didnt understand the system very well. I was in a big hurry to get through the prpreparatory part of doing a phd, in which you take courses and then you present yourself for a general examination on your understanding of the field youve chosen. And mine was 19th and 20th century american history. And i was in a hurry. And im also extremely compulsive, asas a person, about studying, so i knew that if i gave in to the standard pattern in which graduate students took two, three, four years to prepare for their general examination, id just be so compulsive about it that id never get it done. So i decided id have my general examination within days of passing all my preparatory courses. And i didnt understand that if i did that, i lost my scholarship and i had to get a teaching job. And so i hurriedly went to the Harvard History department to ask for a teaching job, and they said, oh, yes, theres one. You can go and be a teaching assistant in john conways course. so i did, and thats how we met. Cspan how long were you married . Guest thirtythree years. Cspan any children . Guest no, alas. Not for lack of trying, but we just didnt manage that. Cspan now in this book, did you ever total up how many different authors you talk about . Guest you know, i didnt count them. Iveive often counted the ones in the anthologies ive done, but i didnt count them. Cspan well, let me pick one. Guest ok. Cspan . And have you talk about it. One of those that we know here on this network is katharine graham. Guest yes. Cspan why did you pick her autobiography or memoir to write about . Guest well, the main theme of when memory speaks is about the differences between the way, in different time periods, its thought appropriate for a man or a woman to tell their life story. And in the opening chapters, i trace the waythe romantic myth about a female life shapes how women tell their life history. And the romantic myth, just to talk about it in almost parody form, makes the heroine wonderfully, emotionally finely tuned. Shes usually beautiful or attractive or got some special quality. And shes carried by fate or destiny into meeting the romantic hero. There are some complications to the romance, but eventually, they marry, and then, you know, 19th century womens novels used to finishor memoirs, and so, reader, i married him. and her history ends at the point of the marriage and is subsumed within his. And for aa strong or a powerful woman to try and present herself in this romantic vein, she has to conceal all her motivation for power, to exercise choice and influence over her destiny and to make herself seem like this lovely person to whom things just happened. And i was fascinated by Katharine Grahams memoir because she rescued a faltering family media enterprise, served very well as its president and as publisher of the Washington Post and clearly exercised a great deal of judgment about how that enterprise was run. But in her presentation of herself in her autobiography, she really lets you think that shes just this nice suburban woman who doesnt enjoy being thrust into this role and is always being badgered by her advisers and scarcely making a decision of her own. And sheshe uses a phrase, i heard my voice saying, as though its another person. And so i thought she was a wonderful example. Shes a woman i admired greatly, and im so interested that even somebody who has exercised the power she has, after all, deciding to publish the pentagon papers, deciding to back the reporters who broke the watergate storydespite that, she still feels obliged to present herself that way. Cspan do you know her, by the way . Guest yes. Yes. Cspan just before we opened the cameras up here and the microphones, you were talking about coming from a board meeting. Guest yes. Cspan . And i believeand i dont know thatbut you are on quite a few boards, arent you . Guest yes, i am. Cspan how many . Guest six. Six forprofit boards and then hospitals, colleges, schools, foundations. Cspan would you mind naming the six . Guest im a director of Merrill Lynch, colgatepalmolive, arthur d. Little consulting company, a small hightech Company Called allen telecom, nike and an australian Company Called lend lease international, which is a Global Property and real estate company. Cspan how many days a year are you in meetings on boards like that, the commercial boards . Guest oh, goodness me. Its probably half my life. Cspan what do you think of it . Guest i enjoy it very much because, remember, im a historian. Ive spent a lot of my life studying economic history, and its fascinating for me to see how contemporary organizations that have to make a profit work and to contrast those, which are not entrepreneurial in the exact meaning of the word, but lilive and operate in the nonprofit sector, and they must always generate a surplus in order to be able to manage and improve themselves, but are really working not to return to shareholders but to return to society. And so, it fascinates me. Cspan as you know, you write about a merrill. Guest yes. Cspan . By the name of James Merrill. Guest yes. Cspan . Who has something to do with the Merrill Lynch. Guest yes, hes son of the founder of Merrill Lynch, son of Charles Merrill. And, of course, one of americas greatest poets. Cspan is he still alive . Guest no, he diedoh, seven or eight years ago. Cspan and what was his memoir . Guest his memoir is called a different person. Its one of my favorites, first of all, because hes a great writer; secondly, because it describes the life of a young man, whos gay, coming to terms with his sexuality. And its a story of his struggle to become a mature person and to somehow escape from being the child of so enormously asuccessful a man and yet respect and admire what his father does. So its beautifully written. He has a wonderful talent for prose. Theres a wonderful passage in it in which he describes being in rome with his father, whos going for an audience with the pope. And his father sets out in the morning dressed in an absolutely white silk suit, so Charles Merrill greets the pope clad in the same color. And James Merrill describes it as a confluence of jupiter and saturn. Its wonderful language. Cspan what was his relationship to his father . Guest he finishes his story describing his affection and respect for his father. Of course, he has the standard youthful rebellions, but he comes to think of him as aa very benivolbenevolent influence in his life. Cspan is there anything left in Merrill Lynch of the Merrill Family . Guest theres no immediate kin of the Merrill Family, but thethere were, until quite recently. And the heritage of Charlie Merrill stays very strong in the firm. There are stories told about him, people recall how he talked about himself and about the business, and its quite common for people to begin a presentation about the firm today, starting out with aa quotation from him. So hishis spirit is very much there. Cspan right next to the merrill story in your book is aan author that i was first introduced to when we did a special on oxford. And that was when mr. Clinton came into office. Guest uhhuh. Cspan . The president , and we went over there and did a special, and one of the books i read to get ready for it was jan morris book on oxford. Guest on oxford, yes. Cspan now you paint an interesting picture of this human being. Guest yes. Cspan tell us about jan morris. Guest well, jan morris began life as james morris. Heheshe tells in the story the experience of being, even as a very small child, convinced that thethe person who inhabited this body, which happened to have male genitalia, was female. And the story is a narrative of how james morris eventually became jan morris by having anan actual surgical effort to create female genitalia. And what interested me about the story was that the narrative is told very much in a male mode until maybe the last chaptermaybe chapter and a half, in which the newly emerged jan morris begins to feel that she cant handle ordinary mechanical tasks orshe describes not really liking to drawto open the wine or park the car and allall those other things. And she also describes the shock of discovering that in this new form, people condescend to her and explain things that she understands very well, in a very condescending way. But shes happy because she feels shes got the right physical body to match her inner psyche. And to me, shes very interesting because there is a school ofof feminist thought today that is what we call essentialist and which believes that there is, somehow or other, an essential female or male psyche inin all of us. I dont happen to agree with that. I think our identities are very much socially conditioned and that, really, biologically, apart from the arrangements for reproduction, our minds and our mental powers andand physical capabilities are very similar. But jan morris is a wonderful example of someone who believes the opposite, and because she does, she has no personal history to recount after becoming female. Shes found the right essence for her substance, and theres nothing more to develop. So the story gets pretty flat after that. Cspan well, there is a line that i wanted to ask you about, though i dont know if you have any more information on it. she now lives as a woman. guest yes. Cspan . With a female partner, and clearly doesnt want to think of the relationship as lesbian. guest yes. Iiithats just my own observation, but cthats clear in the book, very clear. Cspan thetheresthe next chapter is grimm tales. Guest yes. Cspan now whats that mean . Guest well, i was thinking about grimms fairy tales, because a lot of the victim memoirs that we are reading today read like fairy tales. There are wicked parents and much misunderstood and mistreated children, and there is a narrative drive in all of those stories to rediscover that parent and, somehow or other, even up the scales or theres a preternaturally wonderful parent, mostly a mother, who is being celebrated by an adoring child. And those arethose are story categories out of fairy tales. Life is much more complex than that. Cspan you pickeda couple i want to ask you aboutrick bragg of the new york times. Guest yes. Wonderful story. Its about braggs childhood in poverty in the south. Cspan this was just in 1997, w. Guest yes. Yes. Cspan yeah. Guest very recent. And he is the child of a wonderful struggling mother who is married to a nogood, unreliable, alcoholic, brutal male who beats her and abuses her and the children. But she remains faithful to him and goes back whenever shes invited back to him, when he abandonsafter hes abandoned them. And she labors mightily to support the two sons. And one son, rick bragg, escapes through his gifts and talents and one son remains in that impworld of poverty, doing hard physical labor all his life. And rick bragg, the narrator, wants to celebrate this remarkable mother, as he becomes more and more successful as a journalist. And he ishe writes in a narrative style that is not unlike the way women are obliged to present themselves inas romantic heroines do, because he attributes his success to luck. Its just luck that he happened to get a job working as a Sports Reporter for a local paper. Its just luck that hes in the right place to move up in the journalistic world. Its even luck when he makes it to the nieman Fellows Program at harvard. And so he, in a way, treats his life as though hes not personally responsible for having abandoned the family and moved away, although he stays true to the south in wanting to report southern stories. And i think that thats characteristic ofof men born in extreme poverty. Its almost too dangerous, psychologically, to think about striking out for extraordinary success. And so you attribute causation to luck. But i dont think theres all that much luck in life. We are caught in a very complex web of causation, and we do exert our will and deploy our talents to make the most of that. And so i was very much struck by the way he presents his story, downplaying his talents andand ooveremphasizing the role of luck in his life. And im also very struck by the portrait of the mother because its a very conventional and traditional one of a suffering, nurturing maternal female. And i always wonder what would the narrative voice of his mother be, and would she see herself as this suffering and muchabused person or would she see herself as triumphant . And so its doing bragg an injustice, but there is a theme in some of these memoirs celebrating a wonderfully nurturing mother, written by sons, which isis deeply conservative and really prshows you women, you know, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Cspan you point in that book that his High School Education was so poor, he neverhehed never have made it into a good college or a strong journalism school, so it was athletics and his passion for it that opened the way up. Guest yes. Cspan the reason i bring this up is that heres a man who got to the new york times, got a pulitzer prize. Guest yeah. Cspan . And has written a wellknown. Guest a wonderful memoir. Cspan youyouve been up there in the northeast. Guest yes. Cspan . Running a college called Smith College in northampton, massachusetts, for 10 years. Guest yes. Cspan how did you get there . Guest well, i came to harvard graduate school, determined to study american history. I grew up in australia, wanted to understand my native country, which has a similar history to the United States; a white settler population occupying a continent, developing a unique and very idiosyncratic culture, the white population convinced it was theirs, although they were displacing native population. And in the australia of my growing upits different today, but in my growing up, we studied only british history, british and european history. We didnt study our own country it was thought of as just totally derivative from the United Kingdom. And i knew it was different because i had grown up in this very remote outback, with the whole itinerant agricultural laborer population, very, very different experience; closer to texas, in many ways, than something british. And i was fascinated by the way americans wrote the history of their country. So i wanted to study american history, originally thinking id go back to australia and become a new kind of historian there. While i was at harvard, i met and married john conway, whos a canadian, and we went, instead, to canada, to ontario, where he was taking part in founding a new canadian university. And i taught at the university of toronto. I continued working, both teaching and writing american history, and particularly, the history of american women and the history of higher eduction. And in the course of doing that, i became convinced that the great difference between australia and the United States or the United Kingdom and the United States was the very strong womens institutions that this culture developed in the 19th centuryphilanthropic ones, social service ones, schools, colleges and so forth; universitiesbryn mawr has a graduate school. And so i was very interested in how those institutioninstitutions were founded and what impact theyd had on womens position in american society. At the same time, at the university of toronto, since ive never been able to keep my hands out of politics, i guess i got involved in a variety of political fights at the university of toronto, including one about equitable treatment of women. I had the usual experience of women academics of being passed over for promotion, while all my male colleagues were promoted. And i discovered, at the same time, that id been paid much less than they, although i worked every bit as hard and had published, in a scholarly sense, and taught just as much and served the university in a variety of administrative capacities. So i got really mad. And i had the decision reversed and had my compensation corrected. And then i got to thinking, well, it was easy for me to have that fight. Im happily married. Ive got a husband whod support me. Wouldnt hurt me too much if i had to leave and go find another job. Id easily find one. but then i thought about the women who were single mothers or who were caring for elderly parents and couldnt really stand up and fight on their own so i thought id call a meeting of all the women faculty at the university and talk about my experience and see if theirs were similar and find out what we wanted to do about it. I called the meeting, just about everybody came, and they told me stories way, way worse thanthan my own. And so we tried to get the faculty association, which was maleled, to help us work with the administration to correct this problem. But they said, oh, theres no discrimination against women here. All the differences are differences in performance. so the university of toronto, where i was, was a publicly funded institution. And the legislature happened to be Holding Hearings on its upcoming budgets. So we went and put our names down at the legisto speak at the legislative hearing and told our story. And the universitys estimates were not adopted, and they were told that they wouldnt be until the situation was corrected. So all of a sudden, i had gotten myself in a fight with larger implications than i usually mixedgot mixed up in. And the long and the short of it was that when iwhen there was a new administration at the university, i was asked to become one of the universitys Vice President s and i started out, having never been so much as a department chairman, being involved in the administration of a very large canadian university. So i was somebody who had studied the history of Higher Education and womens education in the United States and had major academic administrative responsibility. And so that led to my being invited to be a candidate for the smith presidency and i didnt originally intend to take it, if offered, but then i went to visit the campus and met this wonderful population of women students, and i was hooked. So thats how i got there. Cspan is it still all womens . Guest yes, indeed. It is. Cspan now theyi cant make the best connection, because i didnt bring the book with me but arthur sla sla schlesinger. Guest yes. Cspan . Has written about smith in his little book that discusses multiculturalism and political correctness. And he says at smith, there is some kind of a code, and i wanted to ask you whether this came before or after you were there, where there wereput labels andand be critical of people forthey call it ableism and lookism and heterosexism. Are you familiar with those. Guest i know what those. Cspan . Terms . Guest . Words mean, but iiim not familiar with this at smith, no. Cspan and the idea was that people were asked to be very careful about the way they talked about other people and using the language that you do, you know, if somebody is not particularly goodlooking or all that. Isis it ais smith a politically correct place in thein. Guest you know, ive managed to live all my life in the academic world and never run into political correctness. I see it today in many applications to the foundations on whose boards i serve, which will be couched in language that refers to the differently abled and things like that. But i have never encountered it in the academic world. I think that there is, at smith, a very strong feminist concern with making sure that women are not called girls, that they are spoken about very respectfully. And certainly anyone who arrives on campus and talks condescendingly about women will be hissed and called to account for it. But this other obsession with using totally neutral language, iive never encountered. Could be that there is aaaa group of the student body at smith who has these concerns, but if so, ive never met them. Cspan Elizabeth Cady stanton is one of your subjects in your book under the heading ofchapter 5 is feminist plots. Guest yes. Cspan whats that chapter about, and what was she about . Guest the chapter is about the way in which women who were among the founders of the feminist movement in the United States and in the United Kingdom tell their life histories, because after all, these are all political activists of the most extreme kind, quite far out on the spectrum of behavior in their generation. So one wouldnt think that they would be able to tell their life histories as romances. And what interests me about Elizabeth Cady stanton is that she moves between talking about her life in romantic terms and talking about it in straightout political terms. And so it produces a very strange and uneven kind of narrative. Cspan when did she live . Guest Elizabeth Cady stanton is aaan early 19th century american educated in very demanding secondary school but tremendously troubled by the fact that her brother could go away to union college, but theres no college for women that she can attend. And shes infuriated by that and even more troubled by that when the brother dies very young and stanton tries to take his place in her fathers esteem. Her father is a very prominent, wellknown and successful lawyer ainup in new york state. And she comes to realize that no matter what she achieves it wont be satisfying to her father because its being achieved by a female child. And she marries a member of the Abolitionist Movement whom she meets at the house of aan uncle and cousin against the familys will, which is pretty feisty for a woman in the 1830s and 40s. And thethe couple go on their honeymoon to england, and she goes to the Antislavery Convention of 1844 in london with her husband and finds, to her astonishment, that the women members of the american delegation werewere not to be seated at the convention and not allowed to speak, although the Abolition Movement in the United States is femaleled in a very striking degree. So that put stanton in contact with a lot of women who were very politically active and concerned in the Abolition Movement, and it gives her an opportunity to discuss the political disabilities under which women live in the United States and in the United Kingdom. And that makes her vow, along with some of her abolitionist friends, that one day theyll call a National Convention of women to discuss womens rights and that time is, of course, postponed a little in stantons life by the fact that she starts a family, lives in boston with her husband. But eventually, she and lucretia mott, the great quaker leader of the Abolitionist Movement, do get together, and they do call aa Womens Rights Convention at seneca falls, which is a wellknown historical moment in feminist history, in which they write a womens declaration of independence, which stanton mainly drafted. And its a claim not just for Political Rights for women but for economic rights for women also. And that launches her on a career as aa womens rights speaker and polemicist, and that shapes her life. But she tells the first part of her life as though she were a romantic heroine, changes tone to talk about the unhappiness of her marriage and the joys she has in fighting for womens rights. But then the closing chapters of her memoir revert to the romantic mode. Shes just back from a tour as a public speaker delivering a series of lectures on the inequities of marriage, and then she shifts gears within a page and starts describing in very romantic terms the wedding of her daughter, which she describes as though she were the most saccharine victorian writer. So shes a woman who switches style and tone and mood depicting a person whos having trouble telling her life story because it doesnt fit the categories of the world around her. Cspan do youdo you worry more about writing or about the story . Guest i worry about both. I worry about both. Youyou can always tell when the narrator is having trouble by what happens to the style and the structure of the plot. And the story is really only welltold if its wellwritten. It can be very striking, but if itsif its told ineptly, it doesntdoesnt grab your attention. Cspan do you write at any special time of the day . Guest yes, i write between 5 in the morning and 8 00. Given all the other things i do in my life, the phone starts going around 8 30, and im probably on the run the rest of the day. So i get up, start writing at 5, finish at 8. Whenever i get home at night, i print out what ive done in the morning, start to edit it, and that means that i can put those changes in in the morning and get straight back into the story, no matter whats intervened in the daytime. Cspan does it matter how you feel at that hour of the morning how you write . Guest no, you just gotta make yourself get up and sit down and away you go. Cspan are you fast . Guest no, i dont think so. Im a very painstaking writer, probably rewrite every sentence five or six times. Cspan how long did it take you to write this book . Guest about nine months. Cspan and how long did it take you to read all the books you had to read, or had you read them . Guest id read most of them the onlythe ones i hadnt read were the 19th century mens memoirs. Ii did that sort of while i was going along. I did that durover a summer. And i dont have a very heavy meeting schedule in the summer. So. Cspan and how many books have you written . Guest ive written five and published also a number of anthologies. Cspan and the road to coorain was what book . Guest its number three. The others were history books and are notnot aimed at a general reader. The road from coorain is thethe first one really aimed at aat a general readership. Cspan how many of these did you sell . Do you remember . Guest oh, gosh, its still going strong. I think its around 500,000 or 600,000 in this country at the moment. Cspan and what is it that people say to you that means the most . Guest the thing that moves me the most is to get a letter from a young woman who says, wherever she may be in the world, youve told my story, and now i know how to tackle my life, or from women of any age who say, once i read that book, i got so much insight on my own relationships and my own life that im going to be able to live it differently. cspan you close this book on memoir by talking about your father and something you have in common with him. Guest yes. Yes. Imy father died when i was 10 the death and its effect on our family is described inin the road from coorain. The rcircumstances of his death were so troublesome that for most of my life i believed that he may have committed suicide. He was found drowned in aa large dam on our property. And at the time, he was deeply depressed, and so we all thought that he must have done that deliberately because we had no inkling that he had any illness of any kind. But a few years back, i began to discover theto suffer from aa condition called atrial fibrillation, which is ana kind of electronic set of signals in the heart that go wrong and tell it to beat fast andand toto beatits pumping in rather than pumping out. And its a condition thats welltreatable medically today but wasnt so easy 50 years ago when my father died. And lo and behold, my brother has become an amateur family historian, and he found my fathers medical records. My father was aa veteran of the 191418 war and was badly injured, and so he received aa military pension. And so all his medical records were with thethe australian war commission. And lo and behold, my brother found the record ofof the same problem. And, of course, if its not treated, it can cause you to have a stroke or have a heart sspasm, which turns into chaos and is a real heart attack. So it looks as though my father may have had aa death from natural circumstances, which really changes the way i look at the relationship to him in my early childhood. Cspan does it make you worry about your own heart . Guest no, cause its very welltreated these days. They didnt have the same kind of medication and ability to deal with quirky nerves in the heart at hatatin his time. Cspan howhow many years ago did your mother die . Guest my mother died in 1977, so 21 years ago. Cspan so she knew about you being president of Smith College. Guest yes, she did. Cspan what do you think if she saw you today, a wellyou know, youre an author and people buy your books, and youre on six boards and teaching at mit. Guest shshed beshed be just as disapproving as she always was. I think its a very ambiguous experience for a woman whowho knows shes right and has not been able to get a good education herself to watch her daughter receive an absolutely firstrate one. On the one hand, you want to give it to the child, and on the other, its just really so hard to bear that they have it and you dont. And she did not approve of how i lived my life, was not impressed with me becoming president of smith. I think she just couldnt bear it. And ive now, as a much older person, watched so many other families bring the first child to college when they didnt go. Andand i can see how ambiguous that experience is. Cspan and how old were you when you lost your brother . Guest i was 13. Cspan and is your other brother still alive . Guest yes, he is. Hes the person who found my fathers medical records. Cspan oh, thats right. You write about a person in here who was a chief executive officer whowho wrote a book, very successful book. And i want to combine you talking about him, lee iacocca. Guest yes. Cspan . And what you see as you serve on these boards about someone like him whos in the chief executive spot. Andand do youand dodo any of the companies that you serve on have a woman as their chief executive officer . Guest ahha, wonderful questions, all of them. Lee iacocca first. He is a person i think, you know, aabsolutely encapsulated in everybodys mind as the person who rescued a failing Chrysler Corporation. And i was interested in his memoir because his is the sthe story of somebody whos a salesman, although he starts out life as an engineer and is given the opportunity to work in the engineering side of the Ford Motor Company. He says, engineering is really dull, and its not really where the action is in the automobile industry; its in marketing. and he wants to become an absolutely firstrate marketer. And so the early story of his life is the successful boy from an immigrant family who makes his way through college and gets a firstrate education, making his way in a corporate world. And iacoccas way carries him right up to being president of the National Division of the Ford Motor Company, and eventually, it gets him in second place to henry ford ii. And all through this narrative, he has always had in his own mind that he can make anything happen. And the story is narrated in terms of one success after another, one bright idea after another, the group of talented people he drew around him who he was able to guide as aas a leader and be successful in any enterprise they undertake. And hes just never allowed for the fact that hes not really in control of his own destiny and the person who is in control of that top spot at the fat the Ford Motor Company is henry ford ii. And so hes utterly devastated when henry ford fires him, and you would think that that would make a man reflect on causation in his life and look around a little atat all the circumstances in his life that he cant control. And, of course, he doesnt; he simply goes to the Chrysler Corporation expecting to be able to do the same thing. And once again, he attracts a great pool of talented people around him, expects to succeed. And, of course, he cant because the Energy Crisis of the early 70s comes along, and the market for automobiles collapses, and his company is really not able to manage financially and cant even meet itsits loan payments. And so he has to beg the support of thethe us treasury, and he goes off to washington to plead for it and again doesnt see himself as somebody whos caught in this very complex set of events and circumstances he doesnt control. Hes just impatient that he cant persuade them to do what he wants as fast as hed like. So at the end of his story, when he has finally, through the help of the us treasury and the bailout of that loan, being able to revive the fortunes of the Chrysler Corporation, hes still thinking about the next phase in his destiny, and hewhich he intends to make, and his closing chapter sounds very much like the early stages of a president ial campaign. And, in fact, his candidacy was muted for a little while inin the period after his Great Success at chrysler. So hishis story to me is a fascinating one, a very intelligent man who simply is never able to look around and see what complex network ofof causation hes enmeshed in in which he can have some influence. But he really has to recognize some of the determining forces as well. What. Cspan let me just ask you this. It turned out to be one of the largestselling hardback. Guest yes. Cspan . Nonfiction books in history, two million plus. Guest yes. Cspan why do you think it sold so. Guest oh, because itits told in the conventional mode of the american success story, and every american wants to believe that through hard work and talent and industry, you can make it to the absolute pinnacle of success. And nobody really wants to admit, in a country devoted to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that sometimes you cant control circumstances and you run up against Causal Forces in your life that you are absolutely not able to shift. So its the kind of story every loves to read. Cspan the other questions on the boards you serveon the six boards. Guest yes. Cspan . Are there any other women that serve on those boards . Guest yes, on several of them, there are other women. Some of them, therethere are two other women. So thats a pattern which is changing. W. Cspan and how aboutare there any top officers . Guest in some of them, indeed, there are, executive Vice President s. Few at the moment, but many more on the way. Cspan so what have you noticed about the ceos of the companies that you. Guest well, to. Cspan . Boards you serve on . Guest . To me, the most striking thing about observing those organizations and the people who run them is that to be a good chief executive you really have to be what i would describe as an androgynous personality. You have to have tremendous drive and ambition, great strategic sense and very, very high intelligence. Cspan do they read . Guest yes. They read. Cspan do they read your books . Guest yes. But the other thing thats important about them is they have to be very finely attuned to people, have enormous empathy, be able to enter imaginatively into what its like to be another person and to be able to call out the best in the talented people around them these are none of the organizations that are run on a kind of military command and control mode; they are run by somebody who can really call out the energy and talents of those around them and be extremely sensitive to every nuance of every personality. And i think thats not the stereotype of the standard chief executive officer, but all the successful ones i know have those qualities. Cspan what would they say about your performance on the boards, do you think . Whathow would they describe what yourewhat youre doing for these boards . Guest oh, i think theyd say that im a quick study and that i think well about Strategic Issues and that im somebody who is enormously interested in the business, whatever it is, and that im a strong representative ofof the stockholders. Cspan this cover has what on it . Guest it has two figures from classical mythology, male and female, and theyre meant to be shown merging together because the concluding chapters of when memory speaks talk about the way in which male and female narratives are becoming closer and closer as we get toward the present. Cspan i have lvery little time left. Let me ask you about the kathryn harris. Guest yes. Cspan . Memoir, the kiss. Guest yes. Cspan what was it about, andand why did you choose it . Guest kathryn harrisons memoir, the kiss, is about the experience of an incestuous relationship with her father. And its called the kiss because she frames the moment that she fell under the spell of this relationship with an erotic kiss from her father and ends the story with her ability to end the relationship by a kiss of farewell to her grandfather, whos the good male in her life and its a very mechanical story, and its really told like a fairy tale, as though shes under a spell and has no willpower or moral ingmoral reasoning capacity of her own. And i. Cspan did it work . Did it sell . Guest it certainly sold because its very sensational material. But as a memoir, its very unsatisfactory because it doesnt tell you anything about harrisons life and times. There were no strong characters except this father who is, himself, really just his genitalia and his eyes and his hands; heshes hardly a person. Cspan and one last one. Thejeandominiqueis it . Bauby . Guest bauby, yes. Cspan whats that about . Guest the diving bell and the butterfly is aaa memoir written by a man who was totally paralyzed by a stroke. Its a stroke in the brain stem, so thethe rational capacity of the brain is in fine shape, but the motor part of the body isis immobilized. And bauby can blink only one eyeleyelid, and thats his power of movement. And he manages to dictate the memoir to a friend who counts the number of blinks of his eye to signify a letter in the alphabet. And its a story of what its like to be imprisoned in whata body that he describes as like a diving bell, cant move it except by some other people moving him around. And the butterfly is the traditional image for the soul in french poetry, and bauby, of course, is french. And its the image for the power of his mind and intellect. Cspan can you pick one of these in here that you write about that you would hand to somebody and say, this is a good place to start . Guest yes. I would certainly give them James Merrill, and i would give them virginia woolfs moments of being. Those are the perfect places to start. Cspan our guest has been jill ker conwayyou can see there on the screen, the copy of her book called when memory speaks. Thank you very much for joining us. Guest its been wonderful to be here. He. Thanks for responding, coming in and responding. And in april of 2013i pestered cheryl about launch. Sometimes d. C. Can seem so focused on the next position or titles, and i felt like, hey, this is someone who i admire. We can kind of have lunch, build and intellectual community, fill in ideas. But sherrill was busy. A, we cannot have lunch right now. I have a new book that is going to come out in may of facebook. Com booktv about the next generation of diversity. And so by september