As part of my summer 2020 internship for an independent children’s book publisher, I had the opportunity to help the company’s founder and CEO with the early stages of her memoir by conducting interviews with her and ghostwriting chapter drafts. The following pieces exemplify my ghostwriting work.
Where Women Belong
When I contemplate what it meant to be a woman when I was growing up, I think about the things I learned and internalized as two ends of a “bridge.” On one end were the women of the 50s and 60s—the homemakers in the private realm of the family, existing mainly within kitchens and playrooms and trying to raise healthy children. They married young and went to college for a “M.R.S. degree,” understanding that their social statuses depended on marriage. On the other end were the women of the 70s—the women who were pushing boundaries, breaking barriers, and trying to figure out how to “do it all.” Was there room for children and a career? Could we carve out a niche for ourselves in careers that were once designated as “male only?” These were the women of my generation, yet I always looked back across the bridge and saw the homebound women of my mother’s generation staring back at me. Debates about where women belong proliferated throughout my youth.
There are several “women heroes” from my generation who perfectly encapsulated the struggle for women to assert themselves as talented scientists, performers, and activists. Jane Goodall is one of the first who comes to mind. She was incredible—an absolute hero. Jane was groundbreaking on two accounts: first and foremost, she informed the world that we must accept our biological familiarity with chimpanzees. At the time, zoos were where you went for all things “animal,” and our relationships with primates were smothered by the prevailing doctrine of human exceptionalism. When I went to see her in high school, I was struck by the way she “talked chimp” with her chimpanzee calls. It was because of people like Jane that the world realized we have connections to the rest of the animal kingdom that simply cannot be ignored.
The other thing that was striking about Jane was that she was a woman conducting bold fieldwork at a time when there was absolutely no precedent for this kind of experimentation with animals. She went to the chimps and followed them around in their environment, completely casting aside any expectation of passively observing them in a zoo. Everyone knew that there was no safe way for women to be walking around the jungle by themselves, but she forged ahead and did it anyway.
Despite the empowerment and inspiration that Jane evoked in the women of my generation, there was another female primatologist who was killed by poachers while sleeping in her tent in Rwanda. Dr. Dian Fossey’s death was in 1986, and she was a standout from the generation of female scientists that was supposed to emerge after Jane. Her work was centered on the idea that gorillas had individual personalities and rich social lives, contrary to the reputation they harbored at the time as violent brutes that could kill people on site. How sad it was that it wasn’t the “brute” gorillas that killed her—it was human beings.
What we can learn from Jane and Dian is that women’s fieldwork in my generation was only breaking barriers if you lived to tell the tale. As a woman, you are always at mercy, thinking about yourself in terms of how you can prove your worth, and that is why Dian’s death was so painful and Jane’s life was so moving. Jane said, “I’m going to do what I’m going to do,” and that set a valuable precedent for the rest of us.
Getting Educated, Sustaining Curiosity, and Building Community
I learned the value of asking questions about the world and absorbing new information when I was young. My family raised various different animals to keep as pets, show, and breed, and my involvement in these animals’ upbringing initiated a lifelong appreciation for education. The primary responsibility for raising the animals fell on me and on my brothers, Doug and Jordan. There was never a shortage of teaching opportunities to be found in my interactions with our dogs, horses, hamsters, cats and birds, for they were teaching me.
The aspect of animal behavior that particularly captured my attention was how much they know from the moment they are born. Human children and moms have to be taught virtually everything, but that is not the case for moms in other species. With every birth I witnessed, I was blown away by the moms’ biologically ingrained knowledge of how to give birth and feed their babies, and I was equally blown away by the babies’ ability to rapidly adapt to their new environment. Kittens, for example, are killing machines. The way they pound and play is an instinct that is instilled in their very genetic makeup. As much as my brothers and I were responsible for them as their “masters,” we realistically did not have to do much.
My animals also taught me about the ways in which we humans are similar to other animals. A pair of doves lived in my family’s attic for years, and when one of them died a natural death, the other was dead within a week. Although the doves’ passing was difficult, I came to recognize that grief and longing are not unique to humans. Pair bonding for life can have a real cost.
Out of all of the animals I had the blessing of keeping as pets, the one who was most special to me was a golden retriever named Golden Gallatia. We named each of our three goldens after The Canterbury Tales! Gallatia was in my life from before I started menstruating all the way to my marriage, and she was the rock that was with me through every transition: adolescence, young adulthood, and becoming a wife. From Gallatia, I learned that so many animals have amazing potential to bond with their masters. How she responded to my boyfriends truly said it all!
Perhaps the wealth of hands-on learning experiences I was fortunate enough to access through my family’s animals contributed to the boredom I began experiencing around my junior year of high school. People thought that I was bored because I was too smart to be in the normal high school; in retrospect, they were wrong. I did not do high school well because I was not taking AP classes or becoming involved in engaging extracurricular activities—I was just getting by. At the moment, the traditional classroom experience that my local high school offered was simply not enough to draw my attention and further develop the zest for learning that I had acquired through years of up-close, in-person biology lessons.
My parents were concerned that if I was bored in school, that would not be good for my future intellectual development. They knew that I was too young to go to college, and they did not quite know what to do with me. Fortunately, they found a local private school for me to go to called The Chadwick School, and the school accepted incoming seniors!
When I got to The Chadwick School, I realized that I had transferred to a place where students truly paid attention and were motivated to learn. I recognized that people cared about me, and I became engaged in my academics. I had the most incredible history teacher, and when I told him that I wanted to be the wife of a Supreme Court Judge, he asked, “Why not be a Supreme Court Judge?” For a young woman in my time, that was incredibly encouraging to hear. I had become immersed in an educational environment in which learning was valued and every student, regardless of their background or identity, was expected to achieve. While I started out with a community of animals that taught me the fundamentals of learning, I now had a community of academics to propel me toward further success.
With a year at The Chadwick School under my belt, I was prepared to make a great leap in pursuit of further education: moving east to Massachusetts and enrolling in a private college called Brandeis University. I was the only person in my family to attend a private college in the east of the country, and I recall people looking at me in shock when I told them where I was going—how could I possibly leave the “promised land” of California? When I made the move and began school, much of the learning that I underwent was not actually taking place in the classroom; the East Coast was extremely different from the West Coast, and I had a bit of culture shock to wrestle with. At home in California, everyone was engaging in activism, on brain-altering chemicals, going to chiropractors, and drinking carrot juice. The divorce rate in California had skyrocketed. On the East Coast, people were still married, and people were still sober. It was as though I had stepped through a portal and entered a world of relative normalcy.
I realized that I absolutely loved this change. What California had lacked was community and cohesiveness, and this was a big reason why I felt like I did not fit in there—everyone was focused on themselves and their appearance. At Brandeis, I was living off campus not far from the hospital, and during the first blizzard, they put out a call for anyone with a four-wheel drive to take doctors to the hospital. I had never seen this level of community responsibility before; it was absolutely extraordinary! Had I never left the West Coast, I might never have become interested in helping at-risk kids and families. By engaging in the same social immersion and hands-on learning in Boston that I had participated in through raising animals and attending The Chadwick School, I began to thrive in my new environment.
When I studied abroad at the University of Edinburgh in my junior year, I found that the magic of learning once again lay not just in the classroom, but in the environment at large. I fell in love with the pub scene in Edinburgh, for the pubs were essentially community centers. People could drink, play cards, or have intellectual discussions that lasted for hours, and the ability to temporarily inhabit a space in which anyone can engage in various activities is an absolute blessing. In the United States at the time, there was no place in which people from so many different backgrounds could congregate and do what they pleased; in Edinburgh, the pubs provided an essential social service. As I bounded between pubs with friends, sampling different cider flavors and stopping on the street to buy some of Edinburgh’s renowned ‘spuds’ (baked potatoes), I once again contemplated the value of going out into the world and letting the world teach you instead of sitting around and waiting for a learning experience to emerge. My lifelong affinity for hands-on education that had begun with animals at home had traveled with me across the Atlantic Ocean, and it would continue to travel with me for decades afterward.
My learning experiences have taught me that encouraging children to be curious and explore the world around them from a young age is one of the most critical services that a parent or teacher can provide. Traveling early in life and participating in enriching extracurriculars are experiences that not all children may be fortunate to have, but what they need first and foremost is an adult to invest in them. My vibrant education would not have been possible without parents who saw enough potential in me to let me take care of our animals and teachers who believed that I could thrive in high-caliber academic institutions. As a parent or a teacher, you can either encourage curiosity or you can shut it down. An adult’s willingness to answer a child’s questions and teach them new skills or vocabulary words is one of the most powerful signs of love and belonging that a child can receive. We all have curiosity and the ability to learn, but above all else, we want people to be curious and learn with.
