Tuesday, February 26, 2002

Lalita Tademy

"An Examined Life"

MS. LEE: Please take your seats as quickly as possible. We're going to start.

Yesterday I was addressing you as assembly hall monitor, and today I'm addressing you as the prune-faced headmistress who is giving an assembly on manners. Yesterday we had 51 no-shows to the wineries. Now, the issue is not money, because those 51 no-shows paid. The issue is waste. It's very embarrassing for this organization to have 51 lunches sitting there that have to be thrown out because of food codes, as we all know. It makes us look very entitled, to use a word that's come up very frequently during these programs, and so I'm saying this now because we have a dinner coming up tonight which a lot of people have worked on very hard, and we have planned for a certain amount of food. So if you are taking it into your head to cut out of this dinner, know that attendance will be taken.

End of lecture.

Our speaker today is Lalita Tademy. It rhymes with "academy," if you have wondered. I am a

fan of hers because I read Cane River and found it one of the most moving books I had ever read. I'm going to have Joan Lonergan introduce her and then we will get right into her talk. Thank you.

MS. LONERGAN: Good morning. I just want to say, after moving here ten years ago from New Hampshire, don't you just love California? It's February out there. Thank God. It's wonderful.

It's a great pleasure for me to introduce Lalita Tademy. The lead article in the January issue of Gentry Magazine is an interview with Lalita entitled "Labor of love." I am sure the title referred to the effort she put into writing Cane River and to my experience of trying to engage her to address us today. It was well worth it on both accounts, and I'm delighted, as you soon will be, to have her with us this morning.

Lalita Tademy is a California native and Silicon Valley success story who walked away from the executive offices of Sun Microsystems to research and write a fictionalized account of four generations of colored Creole slave women who were her ancestors.

Ms. Tademy is no stranger to interviews and good press. She has been featured for her

corporate contributions in Fortune, Black Enterprise, and Ebony magazines. As a writer she has been featured in publications ranging from Good Housekeeping to People Magazine and appeared on NBC's "Today Show" and CBS's "Early Show." Cane River spent 17 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her 2001 summer book club.

Because Lalita has become as overcommitted and intense about her writing as she was about her corporate responsibilities, she does not see her life as a good example of balance. I agree. I do see her life, first as a very successful businesswoman and now as a published author as an examined life, one in which she was able to step off the fast track and determine a new direction, one based on her understanding of her own needs and expectations. She may not have balance, but she has dared to know herself. She has courage, conviction, character, and passion. What better attributes could we all model for the children in our care? Very few people who hear Lalita's story will stop to reassess their lives as fully as she has done. I think they will begin to search for silence in the chaos of their own lives and find their own voices deep within themselves.

I recently read an interview in The New York Times with Ann Richards, former governor of Texas. She said, "I really did come to a recognition that I had the choice about my life. So much of what I had done previously I felt I was obligated to do."

Lalita has written an important and compelling work about the indomitable spirit and will of the family of women who each in her own way ultimately triumph. Because it is an account based on familial relationships and not servitude, and on responsibilities, not vulnerabilities, the women are real, strong, and self-determining to a degree I have never experienced in literature about slavery, the Civil War, and reconstruction. She has made this work powerful because although it is about her family, it is really about us in the larger picture of human experience. Please join me in welcoming Lalita Tademy.

MS. TADEMY: I feel pretty honored that you chose to be here instead of out in the sun. Thank you so much.

So I'm standing here in front of you, I have done a few things in my life, but I'm standing in front of you this morning because I wrote a book, and I wrote a book about my ancestors. I made it fiction. It covers over 100 years, and as Joan said, it is about four generations of colored Creole slave women who lived and died in Louisiana. And this is central Louisiana, not New Orleans. Not "Nawlins". And Cane River is a real place, and it's a magical sort of place. It is beautiful, it is haunting, it is the picture of what you carry in your mind even if you haven't been there, what Louisiana is, with the dripping moss, and the cypress trees that just grow right out of the water majestically, and the sun or the moon that strikes the water in just an amazing way, very lush, very green, very beautiful. It's a physically haunting place, but it's also a state of mind.

And what I discovered over time&emdash;and you'll learn more about that than you want to know this morning&emdash;is that my ancestors came from this place. Prior to 1995 I didn't even know Cane River existed. I was a California girl, and we had gone back to Louisiana every summer when I was growing up because my parents were born there, but I didn't really know that much about it.

And these women, these four women, my great-great-great-great-grandmother through my great-grandmother, became a very real inspiration to me, and they became real to me. There were times when I felt that they actually were leading me by the hand on a personal journey, which is pretty amazing for such a logical, practical, black-and-white kind of person like I am, to actually admit that.

The novel takes place in Cane River, and I just have to tell you a little bit about it. I'm not going to belabor it, but I need to tell you just a little bit about it, just so you get a flavor of it. Cane River was very challenging to my notions of what slavery was in the US, and what historical trends took place, and it didn't turn everything on its ear, but it made me readjust a lot of my thinking, because Cane River had three classes of people in it. There were white planters. I knew all about that. Simon Legree and whips and chains and beatings and horrible and you hissed them and it's terrible.

But it also had a group of people who also owned plantations and they were free people of color. And they also owned slaves. And many of them were second, third generation of being freed, and this is in the 1800s; the early 1800s to the middle 1800s. That wasn't a totally new concept, but it was something to struggle to get my arms around.

And then the third bucket of people in Cane River were the slaves that could be owned by either the white plantation owners or the free people of color.

I had done genealogy work off and on, just sort of filling in cracks, for a couple of decades. And I had no idea where my people fit in this, whether we came from the free people of color or whether we came from the slave side. And that was okay. I was sort of content with my stories about my great-grandmother. Her name was Emily. And my mother would talk about her reverentially. Amazingly reverentially. She would talk about Emily and I had pictures of her, and she was very small, under five feet, and she was very elegant. She had a very long neck and she was amazing. And my mother would talk about her and she said, "She's just like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis."

And I had also heard her brothers talk about Emily, and I knew that my great-grandmother dipped snuff, that she lived in the backwoods, that she made homemade wine and was buzzed every day, and I couldn't make it all fit. I just couldn't get that Kennedy thing going. But that's what hooks you. You know, that's the intrigue, when you can't make all the pieces fit. It's bumpy, and you have got to try to put it together.

So I was intrigued with this woman, and I wanted to know more about her, and I wanted to know where she came from and how she had this elegant bearing. And I wanted to know who her mother was and I wanted to know who her mother's mother was.

But again, let's go back all the way back to 1995. In 1995 this was not on the top of my mind, because I was a vice president and general manager at Sun Microsystems. I worked 60, 70 hours a week. I got between 100 and 150 e-mails a day. I had a lot of groups under me. Somebody was doing business somewhere on the planet every hour of the day. There was a lot to do, and I was very busy doing it. I was at the peak of my career. I had been doing this and climbing the corporate ladder for almost 20 years. I had loved it. It was satisfying, it was thrilling, pulling off deals, putting together organizations, making things happen. I loved it.

But I was starting to run out of steam. I was starting to feel repetitive, I was starting to feel stale, and I was starting to feel as if this was not what I was supposed to be doing.

So in 1995, I did something that was so amazingly crazy. I walked away. I didn't know how to explain to anyone&emdash;and believe me, the biggest critic was my mother&emdash;I didn't know how to explain to anyone why I would walk away from a very good position into nothingness. And it was nothingness. I didn't walk away to write a book. I walked away because I felt that there was something else that I was supposed to do, and I felt that what I was doing was not going to take me there. And I couldn't hear. There was too much noise. I just couldn't hear. I needed silence. I needed to just be with myself and let things evolve. And I just had some confidence that they would.

So I left on a Friday. And the weekend happened, and you know, you don't have any work to take home on the weekend when you don't have a job anymore, but you know, it's still a weekend. I kind of got through it.

But Monday morning, I woke up and I waited to be filled with the spirit of what I was supposed

to do next. And I waited to be filled. And Friday, I was still waiting, and a month from Friday I was still waiting, and I wasn't filled. And I had no clue as to what I was supposed to do. And it was a very frightening time. It was very scary. It's very scary when you're used to just high-velocity decision-making, when you're used to organizing and constructing and maintaining and initiating, and you're just sort of listening, and you don't even know what you're listening for.

And so purely to pass the time, I began to seriously attack genealogy. I began to really go after who was Emily, and who were her parents, and who came before her. And not knowing any different way to live life, I attacked it with the same ferocity, unfortunately, that I used in my corporate life, so that before long, I was obsessive, and I was traveling back to Louisiana and I was spending hours in archives in courthouses and rummaging around people's attics and tricking them out of photographs and tricking them out of stories and spending a lot of time in nursing homes with little hidden tape recorders and just trying to get stories and just trying to get a flow of what it was.

Eighteen months later, I had hired a genealogist, a professional genealogist, who was a specialist on the Cane River area. I had hired this genealogist because all of the records were in French. This was a French-speaking area, and I didn't speak French. Big, big drawback. And so I hired her very specifically to find Emily's grandmother. I didn't even have a name, but I hired her to do that. And this might be the definition of obsessive. I didn't have her name. I didn't really have any great reason to believe that she could be uncovered. I hired a genealogist and paid her by the hour for 18 months on the off chance that she could find some clue that would lead me back in time to these women.

In 1997, 18 months after I left my job, still unable to explain to my mother what I was doing, the genealogist found the bill of sale of my great-great-great-great-grandmother, Elisabeth, who had been sold in 1850 for $800. As you can imagine, it was staggering. It was staggering as a document, and my first reaction to it was absolutely inappropriate. I was ecstatic. I was just elated because they existed. It was real, and her name was on this paper, not only her name but her daughter's name. Not only her daughter's name, but her granddaughter's name, who was my great-great-grandmother, and I could tie them all in together.

But very quickly, I realized what I had in my hand, which was a bill of sale. It was people selling people. It was people selling my ancestors, and I was angry. And on the left-hand side of that bill of sale was the slave name, Elisabeth. There were 30 slaves that were sold at the same time, and 11 of them were related. There was the name on the left-hand side, the age, whether they were guaranteed or not guaranteed. On the right-hand side was who had purchased them and the amount of money. And it was infuriating, until I really had to concentrate on that right-hand side, as well, and realize that these were my ancestors, too, and some of these people that had bought these people were in my direct line.

So that bill of sale triggered a real need to write this down and to capture this. And I felt that I was in a very unique position to do so. I felt that I had the time, I had the passion, I had the energy in order to write this as a book, to preserve this for my family. There was only one small obstacle to this. And that is, I never had written so much as a short story before, but I considered that something you could learn. Talk about arrogant. But I had over 1,000 documents and I wanted to read them and I thought that the stories were too important to leave untold. And it passed from obsession to a dream, and my dream was to bring these marginalized voices alive and to have them tell their own story, not a Gone with the Wind story, but their own story from a unique perspective. And that was my dream. And it was a dream because it was so impossible. It was so impossible to think that I could actually accomplish it. But it did become my dream.

And I will tell you that the opportunity to speak to educators is interesting to me, and as Joan said, I'm a little reluctant to come out to play. But educators are sort of different and I have a real affinity, and this dream is tied into that, because I personally believe&emdash;I know&emdash;I know that literature saved me as a child. Not reading. Reading was the tool. Reading was the building block. But it was literature that saved me as a child.

I grew up not that far from here, in a town called Castro Valley, and in the 1950s my parents moved there as the first black family. I was always the only black kid in not only my class but the school, and it went that way from the fourth grade through high school. It was a very isolating experience. It was a very tough experience. There were people that spit on me every single day going to school over a period of years. I truly believed, whether it was reasonable to believe this or not, that I was going to be killed, that I would never graduate high school, that I'd just never make it, because we got death threats so often.

So it was a very cloistered sort of upbringing, and what saved me was the ability to pick up a book and to see life defined in a different way. There's sort of a publishing rag called Book Magazine for the publishing industry. They picked some authors and they asked them to pick the best 15 characters of the 100 years between 1900 and 2000. And what they gave is a little cheat sheet of 500 choices, and you had to pick the top 15. Before I ever looked at the list, I knew who my number one character was, and by "best," you know, best can mean anything, so I redefined it to the most memorable and the most impactful to me. I really sort of stewed on this a while, and the character I chose was Atticus Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird. Doesn't this seem a little strange to you, white, male, southerner? But yet what that did for me in reading it as a child is, it said, "Not everyone thinks the way that the people around you think. There are different places in the world and there are different thought processes and there are different choices that people are making about what to do with their lives and how to live them. There are different value sets out there."

That was more significant to me than someone sitting down and talking to me for hours or trying to soothe me through things or walking me to school or any of the things that they could have done.

So I want to acknowledge your role in what you do with the children in your care, and I want it

as my dream to be able to add to that body of literature somehow. And trust me, I don't that Cane River is To Kill a Mockingbird. But I wanted to add something to the body of literature that perhaps somebody could read and say, "I can identify with that," or, "I can understand that now," or, "I can connect with that in some way that I haven't been able to before," particularly since I'm talking about resiliency, making choices in very tough times, independence, even when the circumstances seem as if there is no independence possible, is victimization, but choosing not to become a victim.

So moving on&emdash;and I will get to balance, really&emdash;about a month ago, I spoke with a writer friend who had just had a manuscript that she'd been working on for four years rejected by several publishing houses in New York. Very tragic, very tragic time. And she asked in great dismay, "How could it be that you could have two successful disparate careers? How could that be possible? You know, I'm trying on this one, and I'm just having such a hard time. How could you do two?"

And of course, I didn't have a good answer for her immediately. You know how you think of the perfect answer three hours later? But I do think that there are some important things about the question. Everybody has some talent or talents to exploit, although everybody does not get an opportunity to develop them. And so let's just assume that there's talent there that's available. I do think that there are four things that are very helpful in attaining what she was calling success, and it's all in definitions. But I do think you need to prepare yourself. And that's where you play such a huge role here as educators. The preparation to be academic is really just the pursuit of knowledge and just preparing yourself and just getting ready to be successful, whatever that means. I do believe that you have to work hard, and you know, a lot of those weeks that topped 80 hours or 85 hours, you know, that was working really, really hard. There are dues to pay. It squeezes out a lot of balance.

The third is really critical, and that is, I think that you have to seize opportunities not only when they arise, but often before they arise. You have to be prepared to take big risks for big rewards, and to know what it is that you personally are willing to do and what you're willing to risk. It's uncharted territory, and either very good or very bad things can happen. But I think you have to be prepared to take the risk.

The fourth thing, which is what I didn't have the presence of mind to tell my friend when she

was asking the question, and what I think is just as important, if not more important than the first

three, is that you have to be willing to get back up, because you're going to be knocked down. At some point it's going to happen. And you have to be ready to get back up when you really don't want to. You just kind of want to moan for a while.

I had an experience with Cane River of writing a book, and initially I was just going to self-publish. I just wanted to do it for my family. I was going to self-publish, and I had checked out how the absolute fewest copies that would hit my pocketbook the least that I could print up, and then I'd pass them out to family and I could be done and I could go on to real life.

As I was writing, I decided that I really wanted to have a broader audience, and so I was going to go the traditional route, I was going to get an agent, and then I was going to get it published and it would all just roll out.

After the first ten rejections by agents, I realized that wasn't quite so easy. And it was really difficult. But the thing is that I went through 13 rejections, and I just kept sending it out. I had what I called a 24-hour pout rule, which is I'd send it out, and I'd get the bad news back. And I gave myself 24 hours of wallowing. It didn't matter. I could cry, I could just go in a fetal position. I could just go and see nonstop movies, whatever it was. But after 24 hours, it was get a grip, get back, and start rewriting. And you got to make it better because it isn't good enough yet.

One of my rejections that came back defied the 24-hour pout rule, and it was very significant, and it almost knocked me out of the game. The rejection came back, and the agent said, "I'm sorry. I don't want to represent this book. Slavery has been done."

Now, tell me I'm a bad writer. That's okay. I'll just go and rewrite some more. I'll practice. I'll make it better. I can control that. But if you're telling me that a lot of the history of our country and that my ancestors are invalid, that no matter what, it's not going to work, that's an entirely different kettle of fish. And I just couldn't get back from that one actually for weeks. I just couldn't bring myself to go back and rewrite anymore. And I carried this around in my head, "Slavery had been done." It just echoed and echoed and echoed. "Slavery has been done. Slavery has been done."

And one morning, I got up and my first thought was, "Slavery's been done." And then I said, "Wait a minute. Love has been done. And it can be done again."

And so I got back, got back on the horse, and kept rewriting. And lucky 14, I got the agent, which triggered more rewriting, sending it out to publishing houses, a wild bidding war, a lot of the majors wanted it, and it was just the beginning of a wonderful, wonderful ride. So it's getting back up. It's just getting back up, even when you think it makes no sense to do so.

So Cane River was not born of balance, which is why I had a little trouble trying to figure out what I could possibly say about balance to this crowd. I sort of think that I am the antibalance. It was really about obsession and dream and passion, and I wanted to bring honor to these women and it was stubbornness and it was all of those things rolled into one. But it has become my proudest accomplishment. And it's become my proudest accomplishment not because of any commercial success. Not because of it represents a portion of our country's history and I'm pleased to have it presented in a different way. For me, there is a

tremendous sense of accomplishment because I had the courage to let the idea of balance go, and as a

result of it, I believe that my life now is more balanced than it has ever been, ever. But I had to let it go.

Sometimes when I'm writing I get incredibly incompetent at life. I drop things, I forget appointments, I don't eat until I find that I'm starving. And I go down to the kitchen and I open a can of tuna, or I grab a piece of bread, or I make a really quick salad or whatever. But you know, over the course of a week, I have got a balanced meal going, but it's never at the same time.

And I feel that that's the balance of my life, which is: I don't believe that I can have it all. It's just sort of the way that I am, and it's not clear to me that I am going to ever have it at the same time. But I do think that I can have it over a period of time. So I just have to define what that time period is, and try to make it so that it's not too long.

So I'll conclude and then I'd be pleased to take some questions.

An examined life. I believe that an examined life is really letting go of other people's expectations of what it is you're supposed to do. Letting go of other people's definitions of achievement and failure and happiness and balance and just creating your own definition of what works for you. So I would never claim to have a balanced life in any traditional way, but I actually do believe that my life is balanced for me. But it wouldn't work for you. Trust me.

Fortunately, what I have found on the other side of 50 is that a lot of the things that you had to do when you were younger aren't quite as critical and that there's more room and more possibilities, and I believe that the examined life is about opening yourself up to the possibilities. And if you're lucky enough to find a passion, to explore it to its fullest.

Thank you. Are there any questions?

MS. GRIFFITH: Good morning. Thank you

for that. I'm Betsy Griffith. I'm a headmistress, but I was a historian first, so I'm very eager to hear about Emily and Elisabeth and would you tell us more about these women in your life?

MS. TADEMY: Oh, all right. You mean now. All right. Elisabeth is the furthest back that I could go. She was born in 1799. And Emily, who is sort of the end of these four women, died in 1936.

So that's the time span.

Elisabeth was actually unique among the four in that she was not born either in Cane River or Louisiana. She was born in Virginia, and she was sold into a plantation, their bond plantation in central Louisiana. I went back and reconstructed that plantation. She had four children by another slave there. She came to it English-speaking, but the entire area was French-speaking, so she had to sort of change her ways. There was no marriage, because they were slaves. There was coupling and again, it was one of the research things that I found so fascinating. I had read a lot about the unstable families and families being ripped apart and what I found in Cane River among my ancestors were large intact families that went on for generations. And that isn't necessarily true everywhere. But I represented what I found by the facts.

And Elisabeth, I believe&emdash;I had to project this and that's why I wrote it as fiction&emdash; Elisabeth came in as a slave and she was a cook. She had a daughter, whose name was Suzette. Suzette was Catholic. She was confirmed along with both white children and she was the only slave in 1830-something. She was French-speaking, and she was a house slave. She was a companion to the niece of the plantation owner, and she considered herself more aspiring to be like the people in the big house than her brother and sisters in the field.

Suzette was raped by a Frenchman who was a friend of the family, and when she was 13 she had her first child, and that was a boy. And then she had another child, who was my great-great-grandmother, Philomene, when she was 16. Philomene is the one that was the strongest character to me of all of them. And Philomene was born in Cane River, grew up in Cane River, grew up in the house. They were a series of cooks. They sort of passed the cook mantle on, regardless of the fact that they were going from plantation to plantation. They were cooks.

Philomene was one strong lady, and Philomene is the one whose voice I heard a lot. So if at any time I would want to give up, I was so afraid of what Philomene would do that I just set myself right back down and kept on going.

Philomene was amazing. She never learned to read or write. She was born into slavery. All of these women survived into freedom times. And they were all very long-lived. They lived a long time. Philomene actually manipulated and ended up with land. She got land through a plantation owner that was smitten, and she had eight children by him. And he left her blocks of land in central Louisiana. That wasn't unheard of, but it wasn't necessarily common. And so you could tell just that her force of will was tremendous for her to be able to pull this off.

And I believe that that match between Philomene and a Frenchman was one of limited options but choice, that she decided that she was going to do this for her children and she was going to give them a birthright, and the person that was best able to do that is who she decided she was going to couple with.

Philomene had a daughter, Emily, who was pampered. She was sent down to New Orleans, she was

taught to read and write in both French and English, and she had a love match with a Frenchman that

actually was the only match of her entire life. In this area and during this time what was very interesting historically to me, at any rate, was how every decade the attitudes shifted. And one of the reasons that Cane River is so interesting and central Louisiana was so interesting, as is New Orleans, was this French sensibility. But Cane River was very isolated, and the French&emdash;I really apologize to anybody who's French here, because I'm going to just do one of these generalizations that would drive people crazy&emdash;but the French didn't want anybody telling them what to do. So this was sort of an, "I don't care what your laws are. This is the way that we want it to be, and this is our French community and say whatever you want to, we're doing things our way."

A lot of that French way was about feeling that black folks were exotic, and in some cases that those matches were heavily felt matches. And I can document this in what was given to the children which in some cases almost defied the law. In some cases it did defy the law. And in some cases they couldn't get around the law in order to do what they wanted to do to provide for their own children because they were considered black.

So it's four generations of women. Each one had a different character, and what I have found&emdash;I find this actually more among teenage girls that read Cane River than anything else&emdash;is that they do this game of which one they're like. Because they have very different personalities. And I don't know quite why that is, but that's happened from many, many different parts of the country, where they'll come up to me afterwards and say, "Well, I'm Emily," you know, or, "I'm Philomene." So at any rate, thanks. Question.

MS. ABBOTT: I can't remember how you said it, but I was amused when you said you thought it was easy to write. Would you talk with us a little bit about how you actually approached the writing, how you went from there to the book?

MS. TADEMY: I never thought it was easy to write. I never thought it was easy. What I said was, I was amazingly arrogant in that I thought I could teach myself to do it. So both of those are true.

In writing, what I found to be the biggest obstacle in the beginning was the fact that I was a corporate person through and through. And so I wrote the entire manuscript for Cane River by hand. Because as soon as I would sit down to the computer&emdash;I would spreadsheet, you know&emdash;I would go into a whole different mode. And after a while of trying that, you know, I said, "This just isn't working."

So I would have to get out the pen and in the beginning, again, in the beginning, I also had to wear lucky socks every day. But I had to have a certain kind of pen, I had to have a notebook that was a certain size, whatever. But I did it with an incredible amount of discipline. What a surprise. And the discipline for me was&emdash;I believe a huge, huge amount of writing is about showing up. It's just about doing it.

And so I had a rule, and my rule was that I had three hours of chair time every day that was mandatory. That was seven days a week. I had to have three hours where I was not allowed to get up for anything. Nothing. Not a fresh cup of tea, not to answer the phone or the doorbell or anything. It was three hours sitting there with my hand moving somehow, even if I was just going to throw it all out.

In the beginning I wrote in order to get to know the characters. So for a couple of months, I wrote as a diary. You know, "Hi. My name is Emily. I need to get up and milk the cow this morning, and then I need to do this, and then I need to do that."

And I just tried to get acquainted with who these people were. And then I started throwing them in rooms together and provoking situations, to see how they would react to one another. And after a couple of months, I felt that I knew them. And I did all of that before I ever did a chapter 1, before I ever started to string the story together, before I ever started to try to introduce dramatic tension or pacing or whatever.

Now, some of the corporate stuff just wouldn't die, so I decided I needed to incorporate it. So many writers can write without an outline. I can't. But I can't have one outline. I have about six. So I have a plot outline, I have a scene outline, I have a mood outline. You know, I have a lot of outlines and that makes me feel better. And then I can sit down and sort of do all of that, and then start to weave it together.

But a lot of the writing process was just starting to get things on paper. And then I went and took a creative writing class at Stanford, which was continuing education, you know, six weeks in the evening, one time a week, for six times. By then I needed some external validation that I was at least going in the right direction. There were five homework assignments where we'd have to come back the next week and turn something in. And I took two of those and I sent one to the Palo Alto Weekly short story contest, and I sent one to the San Francisco Chronicle, and both of them were accepted for publication. So that was a boost that somebody was sort of getting into the concept of how they were writing.

But a lot of it, again, was sitting down, dressed, exercised, fit, by 8:30 in the morning, because I'm a morning person. A lot of people are night. Some lucky people are anytime. But it was sitting down by 8:30 and not getting up for a minimum of three hours. And then it became longer. And when I'm editing, I can actually edit all day long. But when I'm doing virgin page, my brain shorts out. Four is the longest I have ever been able to go without having a nervous breakdown.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I should preface my question by telling you that my school sits in the Silicon Valley, so many of my parents are of the type that you represented before moving into the writing business.

MS. TADEMY: "You people."

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I'm curious about your former network and your former colleagues and their interest in what you're doing now. What kind of interest did you have from the dot-com business?

MS. TADEMY: I have more envy than I have ever expected from people. I don't know if you have ever left a job, you know. Forget about any of the details. If you have ever left a job and once you leave, everybody comes to you and tells you their deepest secrets. I don't know if anybody has had that experience, but I have had it a lot, where they couldn't tell you before because you were part of the establishment, you were part of the organization, you were whatever. But as soon as you are removed from that, you learn things that are amazing.

What I learned is that there is just a groundswell of frustrated folks that would like to be doing something different and something that is more nurturing in a creative vein. And it's not necessarily that they feel that they want to write a book, but it's that they feel that they want to do something that can generate the same energy or passion that they see here. Some of what I'm calling envy is around commercial success, because you know, it's kind of magic to be touched by Oprah. Kinda. But that really isn't it, for the most part. I find a lot of people in Silicon Valley that I knew before really want to talk about their dreams. They want to talk about their dreams. And they feel far more free to be able to do that because I'm not a part of that world in the same way anymore.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I'm wondering what you did with the emotions that I imagine were provoked in this process.

MS. TADEMY: That's a great question. They're still here. Actually, one of the things that I had not counted on was how much baggage you have to sift through&emdash;I think I just mixed a metaphor that made no sense&emdash;how much stuff you have to sift through in order to put things out there. At first you just sort of throw it all out there, but in a writer's life, you're constantly examining, constantly, constantly, and you're constantly emoting.

I began this process with anger. I mean, I really had a lot of anger around any number of things. And suddenly, you know, I'm thinking about something that happened to me when I'm seven years old, and that's not where I expected to go. I thought I was going back to 1834, and suddenly, I'm seven? What does that have to do with anything?

So there were a lot of free-flowing emotions. What I finally decided to do was to just do a first draft and to do a first draft where I wasn't trying to edit any of that out. It was just out there, just ugly and throbbing and right in the middle of the table. And on a day-by-day basis, I lost 40 pounds. I walked a lot. I walked a lot of the anger off. I really did. I literally walked a lot, because I just would be so filled with all of this stuff, and I would sort of rage about our country's history, about what I felt could have gone differently, about the times, and the impact that the times had, and how it held people back, how hard they had to fight for the things that we take for granted today.

So for all of these emotions, some of which were directly related to the book and some of which were not related to the book at all, I just had to do the best I could every day. Unfortunately, there were times when friends took the brunt, because I was just in a bad mood. I mean, you live with a plantation in your head for nine months, you're in a bad mood. And I just tried to write it out. What I subsequently did is, I

wrote the anger out. I wrote out all the cues that said, "Okay, here comes the bad guy, you're supposed to hiss now." And I rewrote that so that I would have to project myself to be in their heads.

Part of the journey for me that's very lasting was that right-hand side of the bill of sale, and having to reconcile the fact that my great-great-grandmother&emdash;I totally identified with the women. But I had to realize that my great-great-great-grandfather was there, too, and then I wrote in his voice. You know, I had chapters that are written through that character. Writing through a character should be a therapeutic technique, if it's not one. It really puts you in somebody else's shoes. It forces you to stay there, and it forces you to confront some things that you don't want to. I feel the better for it, but it's a very ugly process.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: How did your family react to your book?

MS. TADEMY: Uh-huh. I have sort of alluded to it before. My mother was the big one.

Whatever happened happened with everybody else, but with my mother, I was very, very concerned, because she brought us up to be this way, and she is this way. She's private. And when I was just

researching, before even writing the book, when I was just researching, she could not get her mind around the concept of why I would go back to such an ugly time in our country's past and why I felt compelled to do this, and why I kept poking and prodding it.

Then when I brought it more immediately home and it was not just talking about that time, but it was talking about our ancestors and people that she remembered&emdash;she remembered Emily very, very well&emdash;she said to me one day, "I just don't understand. Why are you putting our family business in the street?"

And I tried to explain to her that we have different philosophies, and that my philosophy really is that you can't ignore history. You just can't do it. If you ignore history, you never get smarter, and you just go over it again and again without having learned anything, and it was really a necessary thing for me to do. But she just didn't get it. She also knew how headstrong I was and that I was going to continue on. So she was supportive as she would be for a daughter, period. But she wished that it hadn't happened.

And then she saw me on TV. And then she became queen bee of her church. She's pretty happy now. Actually, in all truthfulness, my family was amazingly supportive. Amazingly. And again, especially in the beginning, I didn't know what was going to happen with all of this. I thought I was going to self-publish and just hand out something. And they didn't get it. They didn't get why this had captured me so much. They didn't get why I would walk away from a really good job that I had spent my life preparing for. But they were always, always supportive and ready to back me in whatever it was that I was going to do.

MS. BENNETT: What was your journey from isolated little girl who was fearful and interested in Atticus Finch to the Silicon Valley?

MS. TADEMY: Well, I hadn't quite thought of it in those terms. Yes, there's a linear thing going on there. I just decided early on that I was going to be independent and I was not going to allow anyone to live in fear, and that I was going to be independent enough, able to take care of myself enough, whatever that took, so that I wouldn't feel so vulnerable. Because growing up, I just felt sort of pushed around by forces and I felt very vulnerable. So I decided that I was going to do the right stuff. So I went to school and I got my MBA and I climbed up the corporate ladder and I came up through marketing and I punched every ticket you were supposed to punch, and whatever. And I think that it was in direct reaction to feeling so powerless as a child, which is why this latest transition in the examined life is so interesting to me, because then I had to let it all go again and turn around and see if something else could bloom.

So I'm actually a great believer in life changes. I'm a great believer that people can change, because I know I have. And there have been different stages, and the fundamental principles, what I value and what I believe in are pretty much the same, but a lot of the approach and methodology are very different, and I believe that I'm a different person. But that transition was really one of wanting to be in control, and then writing the book was one of letting go of control and letting it happen.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Where do you go from here?

MS. TADEMY: So yesterday in that beautiful, beautiful day, I sat out in the sun and I edited a chapter from my next book, and I edited the entire chapter. I can't believe how productive I was. It was wonderful. I'm writing another book, and the "where do I go from here"&emdash;it's really still a little bit difficult for me to think of myself as an author. And I have let go of thinking of myself as a corporate exec, so I don't know. Whatever. But I have at least one more book in me. And I will do that. And I have just a ton of passion around it. I have a ton of&emdash;this is the key point&emdash;anger. I have a ton of anger around it, too. It's historical, and I'm fascinated with how I think things could have been different, and that's really fueling to go in and to write this again. Whether I have a third book, I have no clue.

But the good part is&emdash;this is the good part&emdash;the good part is, I just have a blind faith that things will come out fine, whatever the next stage is, whether that's continuing on the same path or a totally different path. I always worry about what is the next step. It was always the chess move. If it wasn't at least three moves ahead, just get up and walk away.

So I don't know. I don't know. But it's going to come out okay.

DR. POLLYCOVE: My question is: When I finish a good book which did not come out of my own direct inspiration and divine communication, I hate to leave those characters. You know, I wonder what happened to them. I want to read the sequel. And what is your experience with these wonderful, diverse women now that, quote, "their story is told"?

MS. TADEMY: They're done. I lived with these women a long time. They're done. And I really said it very facetiously, but one of the women, one of the women from Cane River, Philomene, really was frightening in her power. And it was really wonderful for inspiration. It was really wonderful for keeping me to the task, but it was exhausting and I felt&emdash;I can't even describe this, because I don't even believe in this stuff. But I really felt that she was right here, just sort of right here. You know, doing one of these things all the time.

When the book was done, it's like she walked around in the back and just sort of entered into me. I don't know how else to say it. It's kind of like I don't need to explore them anymore, because they're me. They came, they just all four of them came back, and they just integrated themselves, which is odd, because when I go places now and I read from the book, I'm reading a book, which is really different than it being these characters that lived and breathed for so long, you know, for the three years that it took. So now they're characters. They're characters and not entities, these living, breathing entities. But I understand them very well. They're done.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: You talked about the examined life, and I'd be interested in your timing in coming to your own decision when you were with Sun and how that evolved, how the going back the took place. Was it a dream? The dot-com corporate entity was fine at that point in time, 1995, there was so much going on, everything was just, you know, beginning to crest. It hadn't crested yet. And here you are at that point in time saying, "I'm out of here." So my question is, how does that decision unfold for you? It just didn't happen in 1995, but I'd be interested in hearing your comments.

MS. TADEMY: That's very astute. In 1995 I was pretty much an idiot for walking off. But I knew that it was time. There was no question. There was no question in my mind. The smart thing to do, if I had left a year and a half later, that would have been the time. That would have been the normal procedural spreadsheeted-out time. But I had already given up the spreadsheet mentally. Operationally, I still bring it back.

But in 1995 I had decided&emdash;actually I decided in 1994. I didn't walk in one day and say, "Okay, I'm walking out two weeks from now." In my head I had decided in 1994 that that part of my life was over, and it was just a matter of orchestrating it to the best financial advantage for myself, so that I could maintain some freedom.

My original intent was, you know, everything was hopping then and people would call four times a day, "Do you want to be CEO of this company that's going to crash day after tomorrow?"

And so there was also the mind-set of there are other things out there. Things can happen. And even though it was amazingly dangerous because the technology was speeding along so fast, I had decided

that I was going to take one year off. That was my deal with myself. And taking a year off is really,

really hard in the valley, because really about six months, seven months, you're starting to get so that

you don't know anything. You know, product life cycles have already started to tumble over one another.

But I decided one year, and that one year was going to allow me to pull back enough to figure it out. And for all I knew, I was going to just pop back into some other dot-commy kind of place. I had no idea. That's why I panicked on that first Monday. You know, Hey, time is running here, and why don't I know what I'm supposed to do yet? But that decision was not knowing what I was going toward. It was a decision about knowing that what I was doing was no longer serving me.

And it was no longer, in my opinion, serving anybody else. It was uninspired. I was doing my job. I was doing fine. I mean, I was doing my job. Nobody was complaining. But it wasn't really giving back, and it certainly wasn't filling me up. And I just really thought there was something out there that was going to do that. I can't make it more defined than that because it wasn't. It was very, very wiggly. It was very wiggly. And just so this doesn't seem like it's all predestined, probably for the first six months, the

first thing that I said to myself when I got up was, "Are you an idiot or what? How could you? You have

no source of income. What is wrong with you?" And then I would go about my day.

But it didn't make a lot of sense. And it was a struggle for a long time.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: We'd be pleased if you would just read a little bit or simulate one bit of your book so we can hear it through your words.

MS. TADEMY: I don't have my book with me. I don't have it with me. It's in the car. Sorry.

MS. LEE: Well, I think, Lalita, that you have a truly rare gift, which is speaking as beautifully as you write. It was wonderful.

It strikes me that she has given us a wonderful model of balance which is passion and discipline in equal measure. So thank you from all of us.

I'm going to ask Jessie-Lea to come describe the next part of the program, and ask you once again, please come back on time and quickly. Jessie-Lea.

MS. ABBOTT: I have to confess to being very embarrassed when I got dressed this morning. I

thought, okay, I'm finally going to relax. And I figured, I don't have to make any announcements. It

doesn't matter what I wear. Here I am.

I'm also very concerned that everyone in this room is going to start thinking about quitting work, and I'm the first. But we have to orchestrate this so that we also bring new leaders into the fray before we all disappear.

So to allow us to do that, my reminder is that when we come back at 11:00, we have the panel that, remember, did not show up in your program? So Ricki Pollycove is going to begin with about a 45-minute presentation, and then Wendy will join her. That's to be our moment to pull all of these ideas and concepts and thoughts that we've been having back into our work worlds, our real worlds, personal worlds, whatever it is that comes to our minds.

So we'll have a good, lively kind of a summing it all up, bringing it full circle discussion.

So as Liza said, we will be here on the nose of 11:00, and thank you.