Malcolm Gladwell: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] And so that was the role I felt I filled in my family, since everyone was so either uninterested — the notion that you would sit around a dinner table and recount hilarious stories from the day was utterly absent from my childhood. And when I discovered much later on that there were families where this happened, I was just in awe. There’s two kinds of influences. There’s negative and positive influences. You just left out the negative ones, I think. [laughter] I could imagine maybe your father, the mathematician, was not a natural storyteller. But if I think of your mother, Joyce Gladwell — I’ve been reading her book — it was published in 1969. You even make a cameo appearance on page 178. It’s called Brown Face, Big Master. It’s a memoir and it’s full of great stories. What I find profound in that is her notion of both the importance of struggle and issues of race and feminism and fighting for your family, but also repeatedly being subjected to what she calls “the medicine of acceptance,” and how you can combine those two things — struggle and medicine of acceptance — in a life that also finds God. And she’s full of profound stories on that. So did you get your storytelling nature from her?…

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