What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? In January 2005, Larry Summers (BELOW), then the president of Harvard, was conducting a lunchtime discussion with his faculty when he wondered aloud why more women didn’t hold tenured positions in the hard sciences at their university. Maybe women didn’t want to work as hard as men? Or they weren’t as naturally gifted in the sciences, at least not at the highest end? Or maybe, he granted, social and cultural forces might be at work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers
As a woman who had wanted passionately to be a theoretical physicist and who had overcome many obstacles to earn a degree in that field from Yale, I knew that laziness and a lack of natural talent didn’t account for my decision to walk away from physics and become a writer. I actually was friends with Larry Summers (we had met during my years as a high school debater), so I sat down to write him an email describing the forces that had hindered me from achieving my dream. At two in the morning, I realized the email was nearly thirty pages long, single spaced. I also realized I didn’t really understand all the reasons I had left physics. And I realized I wanted to write a book in which I attempted to find the answers.
Six years later (in 2011), I had finished re-examining my own life and conducting the research necessary to understand if young women today faced similar challenges to the ones I had faced years earlier (they did). I had an amazingly difficult time finding a publisher for the book (who but the few female scientists in the country would want to read it?), until I managed to convince an editor at The New York Times to run an excerpt in the Sunday magazine. The essay went viral, at which I added a final chapter to my book, summarizing and/or quoting the thousands of responses I had received from women and people of color who wanted to add their experiences to my own.
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. At the kitchen table in my cozy bungalow in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
What were your writing habits while writing this memoir- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I took notes in a series of Moleskines (BELOW), then typed each chapter on my laptop as I researched it, moving ahead chronologically from my youngest years to my experiences researching the book in the early 2000s. I usually worked in the mornings, before I needed to get ready to teach or run the MFA program or serve on some committee or raise my son. No music. Lots of coffee (though I eventually realized the caffeine was making me anxious and switched—slowly and painfully—to decaf). Endless games of computer solitaire when I got stuck. And then endless rounds of revision (mostly cutting, cutting, cutting).
Out of all the specific memories you write about in this memoir, which ONE MEMORY was the most emotional for you to write about? And can you share that specific excerpt with us here. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer, and please provide page numbers as reference. In this excerpt, I am meeting (as an adult) with the professor I had idolized as an undergraduate; I took two courses from him, and he served as the advisor for my senior research project.
I save Roger Howe for last. “How nice to hear from you!” he wrote in response to my email. “I do remember you, and I tried to find out where you had gone after graduation, because I wanted to let you know about a sequel to your project. But the Physics Department couldn’t give me any contact information.” He seemed enthusiastic about my book, adding that the physics department now has a female chair and she is “a fierce advocate of women in physics.
We made an appointment to meet in his office—I joked I wanted to compare its level of messiness to the way it looked 35 years ago, and he warned me the new office, which used to belong to Professor Kakutani, is more of a mess than the old, but I never get the chance to check because when I arrive—admittedly, a few minutes early—the door is closed, and I hear a familiar voice apologize, “I’m not really dressed.” The door opens a crack; I glimpse my former advisor in a T-shirt and sweatpants, and he asks me to wait while he puts on something more appropriate. Oh well, I think, he must have come straight from the squash court, and I use the time to climb to the top floor to use the ladies room; someone has tacked a poster of “Famous Women in Math” beside the restroom, but the larger poster of famous male mathematicians is still given pride of place on the main floor.
Roger’s door remains shut, so I listen to a calculus review session led by a graduate student with long, tangled hair who stands at the board writing in barely legible numbers and offering an explanation so unilluminating I could do a better job despite not having taken a math course since 1977. Roger emerges in a button-down blue shirt, khakis, and sunglasses. Despite his assertion he is too old to play squash, he appears remarkably youthful, even when you consider that when I studied with him, he was the youngest full professor at Yale. He might be a little more gaunt and ethereal, but by any standards he is still a strikingly appealing man.
He suggests we grab a sandwich around the corner, and as we sit waiting for our paninis I ask about his childhood, expecting a story about how, like Jesus among the elders, he startled his teachers with his precocity. In fact, Roger’s childhood seems oddly like mine. Or rather, my childhood if I’d had a father who was a chemist for the Manhattan Project and encouraged my scientific curiosity at every step. Roger grew up in Ithaca, which resembles my hometown in upstate New York, except instead of decaying Borscht Belt resorts and a community college designed to train students for the hotel industry, Ithaca can boast two major universities. In fifth grade, Roger’s father bought him a set of Dover math books, and he demonstrated enough aptitude that his father told him that he was smart, his teacher predicted he would grow up to become a mathematician, and his principal saw fit to skip him from fifth grade to sixth.
In tenth grade, Roger found a calculus book and, like me, thought the subject was “really cool.” At the start of his senior year, he solved a problem no one else in his class could solve, and the teacher sent him to Cornell to find a course more in keeping with his abilities. But even at Harvard, he wasn’t immediately recognized as a genius. He was told not to take the most rigorous math class and advised he wasn’t ready to take advanced chemistry because he “didn’t have the math.” But Roger was confident enough to ignore what people told him. He sat in on the more advanced classes, figuring he could do whatever math the course required. There might have been a few zigzags, but Roger’s talents were quickly recognized and he was sucked into the world of upper-level seminars, research projects, and competitions that define the career of a top mathematician. After earning a doctoral degree at Berkeley and teaching a few years at another college, he arrived at Yale in 1974, the same year I did.
When I tell him one reason I didn’t go to graduate school was that I compared myself to him and judged my talents wanting, he shakes his head and says, “But you were an undergraduate!” I want to ask if he thought I was any good at math, but I am afraid of what I might hear, so I come at the question more obliquely. “I hated the way I had to keep asking for help. I hated not making any progress for so many months.”
He looks puzzled. “But you solved it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “At the end I really understood what I was doing. But it took me such a long time.”
“But that’s just how it is,” he says. “You don’t see it until you do, and then you wonder why you didn’t see it all along.”
“Really?” I say. “I got discouraged because I needed so much time to figure out what you already knew. And I couldn’t finish Professor Kakutani’s course in real analysis.”
Roger shrugs. There are a lot of different math personalities. Different mathematicians are good at different fields.
I use this as an opening to ask if he ever noticed any differences between the ways male and female students approach problems, whether they have different “math personalities.” No, he says. Then again, he can’t get inside his students’ heads. He did have two female students go on in math, and both have done fairly well.
That’s great, I say, then ask why even today there are no female professors on Yale’s math faculty. No tenured women, Roger corrects me. Just recently, the department voted to hire a woman for a tenure-track job.[1] Well, that’s still not very many. Why has it taken so long to hire even one female mathematician?
Roger stares into the distance. “I guess I just haven’t seen that many women whose work I’m excited about.” I watch him mull over his answer, the way I used to watch him visualize n-dimensional toruses. “Maybe women are victims of misperception,” he says. Not long ago, one of his colleagues admitted that back when all of them were starting out, there were two people in his field, a woman and a man, and this colleague assumed the man must be the better mathematician, but the woman has gone on to do better work.
Hearing all this upsets me so much I come straight out and ask Roger how my project compared to all the other undergraduate research projects he must have supervised since the seventies.
His eyebrows lift, as if to express the mathematical symbol for puzzlement. Actually, he hasn’t supervised more than two or three undergraduates. “It’s very unusual for any undergraduate to do an independent project in mathematics.” He pauses. “By that measure, I would have to say that what you did was exceptional.”
“Exceptional?” I don’t know whether I want to lean over the table and kiss him, or wrap my hands around his throat. I ask why he never told me this before.
The question takes him aback. He guesses he didn’t used to think in those terms, which either means he was more concerned about his own career than his students’, or he didn’t think about encouraging women to go on in math. I ask if he ever tells any of his undergraduates they ought to go on for their PhDs; after all, he is now the Director of Undergraduate Studies. But Roger says he has never encouraged anyone to go on in math, and probably never will. “It’s a very hard life. You need to enjoy it. There’s a lot of pressure being a mathematician. The life, the culture, it’s very hard. Teaching at a place like Yale, a mathematician has so many pressures and responsibilities, even apart from the pressures of carrying out one’s research.”
We sit in silence until I ask why he contacted the physics department to get in touch with me. Visibly relieved, he pulls out a paperback titled Non-Abelian Harmonic Analysis Applications of SL (2, R), which he co-authored with a mathematician named Eng Chye Tan. (The book’s ranking on Amazon, which I later discover to be 7,715,384, makes me feel better about my own books’ numbers.) Roger shows me the five pages taken up by the group theoretical proof of Huygens’ Principle and apologizes for not having acknowledged my contribution to the work. I tell him that I don’t mind (I am tempted to say all I did was take dictation). But deep inside, I wish I might have left even the tiniest footnote in the world of non-abelian harmonic analysis.
A colleague stops by, and I sit wondering what would have happened if Roger had told me all those years ago that my ability to solve his problem was exceptional. A math professor at the University of Michigan once assured me a recommendation from Roger Howe, combined with a contribution to a published paper, would have placed me at the top of any graduate school’s pool of applicants. Would I have gone on to produce work my former advisor found exciting? Would I have been willing to disappear down the same rabbit hole of mathematics as Roger and this shaggy, pot-bellied colleague?
[1] Later, the math faculty also hired a tenured female professor.
The Eileen I am now recoils in horror. But I never would have become the Eileen I am now if I had gone to graduate school in theoretical physics. And the Eileen I used to be … that Eileen would have been incredibly proud to have her name in the book she is holding in her hand.
Can you describe the emotional process of writing about this ONE MEMORY? The emotional part was meeting and interviewing Roger (BELOW); transcribing the interview into the book was easy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Evans_Howe
Eileen Pollack is a writer whose novel Breaking and Entering, about the deep divisions between blue and red America, was named a 2012 New York Times Editor’s Choice selection.
Eileen’s essay “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” was published in the Sunday, October 6, 2013, issue of The New York Times Magazine and went viral; the essay is an excerpt from her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still A Boys’ Club, published in 2015 by Beacon Press.
A native of the Jewish Catskills, Eileen also is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes and Paradise, New York, as well as two collections of short fiction, In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic. Her innovative work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain, Sam Rockwell, and Michael Greyeyes. A long-time faculty member and former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, she now lives in Boston and offers her services as a freelance editor and writing coach.