Malcolm Gladwell: recommendation

Transcript context

…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? Well, my mother is very quiet. She is a lovely writer and a great storyteller when she writes, but she’s not one to regale the room. Some people who write books, what they’re really doing is, they’re just putting down on paper the stories they tell in public. My mother was putting down on paper the stories she would never tell in public. It’s funny — she’s not unusual in this. This is why I always urge people to sit down with their parents while their parents are still with them, and turn on the tape recorder and force them to tell stories because surprising numbers of people don’t — unless they’re forced to, unless it’s a deliberate act — don’t tell the stories from their life that are meaningful. Writing that book was a very deliberate act on my mother’s part. She was trying to make sense of . . . One hesitates to call one’s own mother’s life extraordinary. It wasn’t that it was extraordinary; it was just unusual. She was a black woman trying to marry a white man in England in the ’50s. So they were a little bit of an oddity. Can I tell my favorite story about my father from this era? Tell your favorite story, sure.…

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