It’s not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.

Like Toni Morrison, Barbara Tuchman talked and wrote extensively about her specific practices; she even wrote a whole book on her methods, Practicing History.

As Carl Van Doren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, “He had wanted wealth only that he might be free, and to be free only that he might be useful.

Bill Meehan, intellectual provocateur and caring friend, encouraged and challenged me to widen and deepen the scope of what this book is all about. “Don’t waste your time— or your words— on the little questions,” he’d hammer at me. “Go for the big questions, the questions of truth and wisdom and meaning. You need to be more of a poet and less of an analyst, more of a philosopher and less of a strategist” I’ve always built my books on a foundation of rigorous research and empirical evidence, and What to Make of a Life is no exception.

A metaphor’s desire to transcend diminishes any human story; its ambition to illuminate blinds those who create metaphors. In my distrust of metaphors I feel a kinship to George Eliot: “We all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.” This, I know, is what my husband was questioning years ago. But my abandonment of my first language is personal, so deeply personal that I resist any interpretation—political or historical or ethnographical.