Letty Cottin Pogrebin

If you are an American child of the 1960s, particularly a female, the name Letty Cottin Pogrebin is probably familiar to you. As I sat down to write this, I went to a drawer in my dresser and pulled out a copy of Ms. Magazine from May of 1973 – forty years ago! This issue featured a cover story on Motherhood written by Ms. Cottin Pogrebin. I have kept it in my dresser drawer for all these years, and pulled it out in February 1999 when we went to hear her speak and I was able to ask her to sign it for me. Here we are fifteen years later and I just pulled it out of that same drawer. She wrote “For Rebecca, Barry, Simmie, and Dina – A Free to Be Family.”

I still remember how she ended that piece. She was talking about the trials and tribulations of trying to juggle a successful career with a family (a topic that to this day never seems to grow tired). She related that one of her daughters asked if she ever wished she had never had children in the first place. “Sometimes my life is a little too full because I have you children,” she said, “but for me, it would be much too empty if I didn’t.”

For those of you who are not familiar with her, the following is excerpted from the biography on her web site http://www.lettycottinpogrebin.com/index.htm:

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is an author, activist, and national lecturer. A founding editor and writer for Ms. magazine, Pogrebin is also the author of ten books, among them two memoirs – Getting Over Getting Older, and Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America – the novel, Three Daughters, and the newly published How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who's Sick.

She is also the editor of the anthology, Stories for Free Children, and was the consulting editor on Free to Be, You and Me and Free to Be...A Family, Marlo Thomas’ ground-breaking children's books, record and television specials.  Besides her twenty year affiliation with Ms. Magazine, Pogrebin has published articles and op-eds in The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Boston Globe, among other publications. She is a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus; the Ms. Foundation for Women; the UJA-Federation Task Force on Women, and the International Center for Peace in the Middle East.

Her recently published book caught my eye. I had not been aware of her breast cancer diagnosis a few years ago. But when I saw that she was to be speaking in Manhattan, I was anxious to hear what she had to say. Last night, Barry and I attended an interview with Ms. Cottin Pogrebin conducted by her daughter, Abigail Pogrebin.

Ms. Cottin Pogrebin was also treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and she took advantage of the hours spent in the various waiting rooms there to meet and interview people for the book she realized she had to write. Her frustration at the behavior of some of her friends and family is tempered with tremendous understanding and compassion for the difficult issues that friends and families of patients often confront. She is the first to admit that, prior to her own illness, she often said and did some of the things that were not helpful or even upsetting to her as a cancer patient.

What is fascinating is that she and so many of the people she interviewed seemed to have similar reactions to the usual “comforting words” that well-meaning people say all the time. Things like “God does not give us more than we can handle,” “if you think you have it bad, you should hear what happened to me,” and suggestions that one’s doctors may not be the most expert can sound trite at best and downright agonizing at worst.

This could not have been an easy book to write, and she talked about friends calling and apologizing when they thought they were reading about something they might have done. But I am glad she wrote it, because it is a much less painful way for people to learn these lessons than the one we have experienced during this past year. Barry and I hope to spend what is predicted to be a rainy Saturday in NY reading the book together. 

Love,

Rebecca