i'm so happy to me this is me for to screen be my guest today and i can't tell you what a treat we're going to have because mimi has a new book it's called when history is personal and we had the historical society here just a couple weeks ago we talked about doing a history of personal history and felt why not have a program called public memory and this is our first guest doing public memory and does she have memory and this book is when history is personal to me word has it in the community for quite a while  words and have been pleased to have to be part of it her book is incredibly insightful and absolutely beautiful in so many ways it's hard to put down their good the essays and who live her tell us a little bit more about them but i love that one gentleman was describing her book and i just thought i did a beautifully and i totally agree with  little bit about how this book started and i know it's been going for a while and so please tell us a little bit well it it started like one of my other books as well which is i wrote a book several essays maybe six or seven or eight that were published and i began to see that they there was a larger theme in there and that it actually came from having an image of when i was a little kid eight years old i would put together a box of an object for about half of objects into a time capsule and barry did in my backyard and i started to realize that i thought these essays were adult version of the time capsule that i wanted to capture the things in my life that mattered to me but with the idea of creating the world that i live in the history the politics the culture that shaped that so then the title came when history is personal and then i began to write the rest of the pieces with that in mind that all the criteria were was that each essay matter to me personally but also tell a larger story and so that was how the book came to be and i think people can so relate to this because you were talking about as a child digging a little hole and putting your special special things in it and lo and behold we had done one here so when ur skis lived on more street and they gathered all together on christmas new years eve didn't believe it was and everybody had to put something in and it was all buried and in another two hundred years or so summer's going to pick it up and  room our skis are now living in palo alto but still be thrilled to know that we're still remembering right and i think at the time when i was eight i put in my second favorite yo yo and i put in my pink lady trading card and that the paper cups with a string that used to listen listen and i think as an adult the some of the things that that were princeton related that are in the book is a story about living in glen a friendships in the book is with the moorings and what i learned about racism from especially from don moore and a speech that he gave fifty years after i knew him and didn't know the story so that's the one of the story says in the book which is perfectly wonderful so that's one of my objects that i have loved him an essay and another one is about evelyn place which is where we live now and have lived since hundred seventy and which has an amazing history as well so wonderful history and as you know quite some of it because i practically lived across three barber sigman and paul sigmund lives there and our children with the we've raised each other's children to be for us and just had wonderful fun mean outrageous times and there you were next to or not one of my favorite stories was when barbara was celebrating her fiftieth birthday and it was perfectly beautiful anybody could come who was over fifty now anybody who is over fifty was invited dessert period yes it was it was sisters so that she can read and meet the details are worth i think the whole neighborhood we've been urged to do you who lives on harrison street not whose children don't know this story's wonderful story and michael graves is right across the street i mean this this literary salon they had come from europe and had a literary salon in which einstein and oppenheimer and lots of lots of other people would come has been for years and it's wonderful that we can get some of this is true because not all of us have the time to go and read specifically about these various people but here's this wonderful book and all of a sudden you hear oh whole wonderful neighbor now and it's i think it's somewhat a metaphor for a lot of the stories that i'm telling which is that the connection between the past and the present you don't always see it but you experience it through stories that people brady underground room was really real and i can remember being day can too the under level or grant basement whatever you call it to them i could see that indeed it was the end of their right but you know with the college there with three different stories that i heard i love it and then there was actually a fourth after i wrote the essay and so i just tell them all and one of the things that i think i'm trying to do is not be the historian  but be the person who receives these stories and i get to choose which one i like the best which one i tell first and then i did tell the others as well but it's so it's history through the lens of  and i just feel very wonderful that i know you know i can pass this book on to my children who also know you and next door neighbors and people who are no longer with us i really gives wife who called i had sent her a book and don has passed away i think a month month and a half to room and she said it was the best present she ever got because she felt as if don was still there here and that she read it with smiles and tears and so that was a gift for me indeed i must admit i felt that way about do you know i mean there's a movie pieces in here so i couldn't have been more pleased i dickey talked to were of little bit about nugget and looking for nuggets and pieces as you're writing and in huge pile of dirt you go back and you get those nuggets and that's what you work with and then she had correct writing conway and the road is that they do tell a personal story but in a larger context and so when you do you that's what they were my inspiration of so that when you read russell baker's story which he calls the story of a lazy boy and his pushy mother you really understand the depression in a way that is very different than if you read it in your high school history book or  telling the larger snorri and the same i think this is why this war that's what i was trying to do really does work because you do both so that's what i was hoping to do through it are very nice to hear that oh it's just wonderful i think community because it is now you that is just coming more first but it will be here any minute and we're going to be hearing more from mimi and mr i'm sure we will and what a treat you have this two reasons are spectacular and they're all just around here or were her grandfather was a grandmother and they go back and i don't know i just need to say i enjoyed tremendously and this is why we're here so i am but i would love for you to read a little piece and i'm now let's see i maybe i'll read the beginning of the evelyn place  it's that ok it's called off the king's highway because that was what nassau street used to be called and i'll just i'll just read the beginning of it i think off the king's highway now called nassau street you'll find a cul de sac of six houses and where number four second house on the left it's a white colonial circa one thousand zero two with black shutters and a large front door in and pillars it wouldn't steps that ice over every winter in a cherry red door that was black in one nine hundred seventy when we moved in there's a button in our home next to the kitchen that rings on the third floor hauling the servants i press it now and then hoping someone from the past will appear but so far we've received only written messages quote helen was here in one nine hundred twenty two scrolled beneath three layers of wallpaper we stripped off the dining room wall and boat house the old princeton house i lived in it from one thousand nine hundred forty four to fifty eight and written across the top of the charity solicitation letter from chicago a few years back no servant has descended the steps back steps our children discovered when stu and i were in the basement inspecting the furnace with mr mackley the last owner in dreams those stairs lead to hidden velvet chambers in real life and they end up ok last time i thought myself lucky when i told the judge that i live in princeton and them a writer and professor and my mother had been held up at gunpoint in the parking garage i soon heard thank you very much for your services number six of jury duty i planned to say all that again but just in case i asked a friend who is a retired new jersey prosecutor but what outfits to use definitely reject in the jury selection i was thinking high black boots are it's even there it's black parade tipped over my eyebrows something ultra liberal liberal and slightly kooky people often call to find out how to avoid judy d but you are the first to ask me what to wear she laughed as if i told a bad joke and gave nothing away i was clearly on my own and in this additional to this what when i wrote this piece i asked her to read it because she's a prosecutor and i thought well you know i wanted to make sure i got some of the facts right or that there were things that i might not have been thinking about and so so she felt she read it and she said well yes i'll read it and i'll tell you what you got wrong and i said well no you can't tell me what i got wrong because i'm the juror and it's from my perspective yeah so she said so we made a deal we said i would footnote where there was something in the jury that i didn't know that she is a prosecutor new and so in the book it's kind little there are footnotes in which i say either later i find out or my friend the prosecutor read it later but they were interesting things they were so that for example as a at the very basic level none of us a new trend in state prison was for really high serious crimes we just thought prison you know so but that was really if you knew that  you knew that whatever this person was in was he was already in the prison he was a prisoner whatever he did was was bad we didn't really know that we just knew that he was a that if you're asking someone outside of your own perspectives to tell you what you may not know you are enlarging what you do know especially if you put it in and i've been doing that a lot since then it's i call opie v opposing point of view and the same when stu died and i wrote this piece about the last his last day and the issues of hospital that we've had in the hospitalist and living wills that we faced and aster i had written the whole section from my point of view i then talk to lawyers and doctors and the second section also includes what i learned afterwards and i think it makes it a much richer piece as it is my personal story but it also is informed by what other people know that i could not know that i am right then and now and then even if you had not read all the small print exactly and then you know it is your day and age and that you your understandings i think well i hope your those connections i think that's what makes personal narrative reach to the reader and then in a good way is that you come from different backgrounds you know different things and yet you connect with small things like don't slam the screen door and that lets you enter into the experience in a way that if you don't come across those small things to the right you lose it so i love cynthia zero six quote two that you should look for this extraordinary in the ordinary yes and i think is wonderful let's hear it so children one of the essays is about don and my friendship and living near and pick that of the i had that photograph is one of twenty twenty five that are in the book and the the editors at universal nebraska press said they wanted that for the cover and but could i get permission well this photo is like within twenty four hours i had all the emails with all the permissions and i was just astounded because it shows what i had experienced it validated what i experience which was the special closeness that people had for each other whether they they lived somewhere else or they still lived in the neighborhood and that they could they were so still interconnected in a way that all of these permissions arrive and the other special treat i had is that michelle is now living in my house she's an adult and she's living so there's again that sense of the connection between the past in the present and we had a very nice chat about the house is about on stage oh i don't know if you doubt it i've been done on stage right several times and i think it's wonderfully worthwhile well the i write about it in the book from the point of view of what it is to be sixty five and decide that you are going to do theatre after doing writing for most of your life and i wanted was looking for something new and on stage is a group of seniors you had to be over fifty five who'd who gather stories from the community and then give it back to the community and again it's another dimension of personal narrative right now because it is memoir it's people stories they tell it to us we convert it's converted into monologues and then we tell them to various theatre schools hospitals prisons  and as if they were on story and then we have a talk back in which people tell us how they relate so it gets back to what you were talking about how do you connect and what surprised me all the time is how much it doesn't matter who told the story whether they are in a senior resource and trenton or they're in the public library in princeton or if they're in east windsor hokus does it matter just get away wherever rich or poor or whatever their ethnicity or race and people relate and they connect so that the the stories are are a bridge to keep that alive and going in letting people know it's not new it's been going on now what are you going to vote right and i just keep thinking oh please but when i heard that australia has really worked on this and made it different and here we one are and more school access and these children i mean it just breaks your heart absolutely prick your hurt or you know it's it's  right and these young people are telling their personal stories that's right and maybe that's a way to reach beyond the politics i think it is so i guess that's what and again my book is about is it tr to to use personal narrative to to connect people in a way that maybe especially in our polarized age the comes harder and harder so might i feel like the happiest if people