When Sonia Sotomayor was 7 years old and hospitalized with diabetes, she learned to give herself insulin shots by practicing on an orange. At home, her mother showed her how to light a burner on the stove with a match, and together they would fill a pot with water to cover the syringe and needle. Sonia was taught to wait for a boil and then to wait five minutes more. The daily shots became her way of fending off conflict between her parents: Her father’s hands trembled because of his alcoholism, and her mother, a nurse who worked long hours, would get angry when she couldn’t rely on him. “The last thing I wanted was for them to fight about me,” Sotomayor relates in her new memoir. “It then dawned on me: If I needed to have these shots every day for the rest of my life, the only way I’d survive was to do it myself.”
It’s a childhood memory that remains strong. It also contains the elements — resourceful intelligence, acute sensitivity to family, and self-reliance — that would one day propel the little girl at the stove to the Supreme Court. “I’ve spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me,” Sotomayor tells an acquaintance many years later, when he asks whether becoming a judge will be difficult for her. Yes, she has. And by the time you close “My Beloved World,” you understand how she has mastered judging, too.
This is not a confessional memoir. Sotomayor discloses little about her marriage, in her 20s, to her high school sweetheart, or about their divorce. She is coy about how her years as a student at Yale Law School, in the late 1970s, may have shaped her legal views. The book ends as Sotomayor reaches the bench as a federal district judge in New York, so she offers no juicy bits, or even bland ones, about her nomination to the Supreme Court, or its work or her colleagues. That can be the sequel.
Meanwhile, this book delivers on its promise of intimacy in its depictions of Sotomayor’s family, the corner of Puerto Rican immigrant New York where she was raised and the link she feels to the island where she spent childhood summers eating her fill of mangoes (always keeping an eye on her blood sugar level). This is a woman who knows where she comes from and has the force to bring you there. Sotomayor does this by being cleareyed about the flaws of the adults who raised her — she lets them be complicated. Her grandmother’s South Bronx apartment was Sotomayor’s safe harbor, a place of music and the “happiest smells” of garlic and onions. But her grandmother blamed Sotomayor’s mother for her son’s drinking, even as it turned him into a kind of monster. “I saw my father receding from us, disappearing behind that twisted mask,” Sotomayor writes of watching him drink at parties. “It was like being trapped in a horror film, complete with his lumbering Frankenstein walk as he made his exit and the looming certainty that there would be screaming when we got home.”
Sotomayor’s father died when she was 9, and she thinks to herself, with the sharp pragmatism of a child that age, “Maybe it would be easier this way.” But Sotomayor’s mother did not rise with relief from her loss; she shut herself in her dark bedroom for a long season of grief. So Sotomayor became a library rat, though without any guidance. (She’d never heard of “Alice in Wonderland” until she got to Princeton years later.) Finally, after months of lonely reading and evenings spent silent with her younger brother in front of the television, Sotomayor literally hurled herself at her mother’s door and screamed at her not to die too. It’s another example of her will, and of her instinct for self-preservation. She tells us that her anger with her mother lingered — another bracing dose of honesty. But she also credits her mother with taking steps to better her children’s future: speaking English with them; buying the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Sotomayor responded by figuring out how to excel in school. She asked the smartest girl in her class how to study. In high school, she joined a debating team, and learned how to structure an argument and speak in public. An older student told her about something she’d never heard of — the Ivy League — and she followed him to Princeton. “Qualifying for financial aid was the easiest part,” she writes. “There were no assets to report.”
For all her reticence in discussing her legal views, Sotomayor is frank about how much she benefited from affirmative action. (The constitutionality of race-conscious university admissions is on the court’s docket this year, with a case brought by a white plaintiff denied entrance to the University of Texas.) She received a C on her first midterm paper because she didn’t know how to write an essay. And she remembers regular letters to The Daily Princetonian complaining that students like her were displacing worthier applicants. Sotomayor dealt with all this by joining a Puerto Rican student group that concentrated on recruiting more Latino students. Hardly a radical, she was more the type that got tapped for a student-faculty committee. In class, she spun her self-doubt into motivation and won the Pyne Prize, the highest award Princeton gives to a senior, as well as graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Her account of these years is a textbook description of grit. “That tide of insecurity would come in and out over the years, sometimes stranding me for a while but occasionally lifting me just beyond what I thought I could accomplish,” she writes. “Either way, it would wash over the same bedrock certainty: ultimately, I know myself.”
That self-knowledge isn’t just about striving. It also enables Sotomayor to see that when she’s hard at work, she sometimes misses social cues. At the law firm she later joined, a colleague called her “one tough bitch.” Stung, she has made sure since then to hang on to a secretary who “holds a mirror up when she notices me getting intimidating or too abrupt, an effect only amplified by the trappings of my current office.” This passage deftly turns aside the anonymous (and refuted) attacks on Sotomayor’s temperament before her 2009 nomination to the Supreme Court.
I’m all for kindness from on high, but I’m glad Sotomayor still fires aggressive questions from the bench. Watching her recently, I thought of the mock juror who once told her, back in her law-student days, that he had voted against her because he didn’t like brassy Jewish women. Good for her for staying brassy, and for telling this story without sweating it.
In this, as in her stance on affirmative action, Sotomayor’s memoir contrasts with Clarence Thomas’s 2007 autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.” Where she learned to see school as her giant oyster, and to shrug off the world’s slights, Thomas emerged from his hardscrabble upbringing in a defensive crouch, deriding college and law school for turning him into an “educated fool.” No wonder the two justices of color have such divergent voting records. Their future years on the bench will reveal which book, and which lessons learned in childhood, will have more influence.
Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and the Truman Capote fellow at Yale Law School. Her book about bullying,“Sticks and Stones,” will be published next month.
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“I think this fish has found her pond.”
That’s what Sonia Sotomayor told a friend after her first day in open court as a new federal judge back in 1992. She had been so terrified, she recalls in her new memoir, that her knees were literally knocking together as she began addressing the courtroom from the bench. And yet the minute she jumped in with a question for the litigants, the panic passed, and she realized she would be just fine.
More than fine, it turns out: from federal court for the Southern District of New York she would move on to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and in 2009 she was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
In nominating Judge Sotomayor to the highest court in the land, President Obama pointed out that her life story was the embodiment of the American dream. She grew up poor in a Bronx housing project at a time when gangs were carving up the neighborhood, learned she had juvenile diabetes when she was 7 and lost her father a couple of years later. She would go on to Princeton (where she won the prestigious Pyne Prize), Yale Law School, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and ultimately the Supreme Court, where she became the nation’s first Hispanic justice.
But if the outlines of Justice Sotomayor’s life are well known by now, her searching and emotionally intimate memoir, “My Beloved World,” nonetheless has the power to surprise and move the reader. Whereas the justice’s legal writings have been described by reporters as dry, methodical and technical, this account of her life is revealing, keenly observed and deeply felt.
The book sheds little new light on how she views issues that might come before the Supreme Court (aside from some candid talk about resistance she encountered, as a student, from critics of affirmative action), but it stands very much on its own — not unlike Barack Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” — as a compelling and powerfully written memoir about identity and coming of age.
Through evocative, plain-spoken prose Justice Sotomayor engages in an earnest, soul-searching look back at her childhood as the daughter of Puerto Rican parents and at her education and years as a lawyer. She provides a visceral sense of what it was like to grow up with a dysfunctional family, overshadowed by her alcoholic father’s unpredictable behavior, and what it was like to grow up in the Bronx in the 1960s and ’70s, in a neighborhood where stairwells were to be avoided (because of muggers and addicts shooting up), and where tourniquets and glassine packets littered the sidewalks.
The young Sonia’s best friend was her cousin Nelson, with whom she began childhood “almost as twins, inseparable and, in our own eyes, virtually identical” — except that “he was smarter” and “had the father I wished for.” Nelson would become a heroin addict and die of AIDS before his 30th birthday. Why, Justice Sotomayor wonders, did she manage to survive when Nelson failed, “consumed by the same dangers that had surrounded me?”
The culture of machismo played a role, she writes, the “culture that pushes boys out onto the streets while protecting girls,” but her own force of will would prove crucial too.
That sense of discipline and perseverance stemmed partly from her determination to manage her diabetes (she started giving herself insulin shots at 7 because her parents seemed unable to deal with the procedure); partly from her awareness, as a child, of the precariousness of existence, slammed home by her father’s drinking and her mother’s angry response to his alcoholism (which took the form of working nights and weekends to avoid being at home). It was the love and protection of her grandmother Abuelita, says Justice Sotomayor, that gave her “a refuge from the chaos at home” and allowed her “to imagine the most improbable of possibilities for my life.”
The self-reliance she learned as a girl would serve her well in navigating the high altitudes of the Ivy League and later the world of law, but it would also have emotional fallout on her personal life. She says her marriage to her high school sweetheart, Kevin Noonan, fell apart partly because of the demands of her career, partly because her husband said he felt she did not really need him.
She didn’t think of “need as an essential part of love,” she says, but that was perhaps too rational a way of looking at it: “The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn’t have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.”
As a girl, Sonia became fascinated with the idea of becoming a lawyer or judge from watching “Perry Mason.” Her first dream, however, was of growing up to become a detective like her favorite heroine, Nancy Drew. Her mind worked in similar ways to Nancy’s, she told herself:
“I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on clues. I figured things out logically, and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the clear, focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out.” That rationality — and her sense of herself as “a creature of rules” — would prove useful in law school, and later when she was a prosecutor and judge.
“If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it,” she writes. “I have faith in the process of the law, and if it is carried out fairly, I can live with the results, whatever they may be. And knowing that the poor and minorities are disproportionately the victims of crimes, I’m loath to view the adversarial process of the law as class warfare by another name.”
Justice Sotomayor writes as someone with considerable self-knowledge, and she points out that there has been a recurrent pattern in her life. Whether it was Princeton, Yale Law, the Manhattan district attorney’s office or an appointment to the bench, the challenges of a new environment would initially lead to a period “of fevered insecurity, a reflexive terror that I’ll fall flat on my face,” followed by “ferocious compensatory effort.” She had learned from her mother, she says, that “a surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence.”
In college she received a C on her first midterm paper and realized she needed to learn how to construct more coherent arguments, and that she also needed to improve her English, which was “riddled with Spanish constructions and usage.” Over the next few summers, she says, she devoted each day’s lunch hour to grammar exercises and to learning 10 new words. She also tried to catch up on the classics — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Pride and Prejudice” — that she’d missed out on in her youth, when there was little to read around the house besides Reader’s Digest.
Fear of leaving anything to chance — another legacy of her unstable childhood — made her prepare intensively for classwork and legal cases. And her single-minded devotion to work paid off: just as she became adept at collecting gold stars as a schoolgirl, so she graduated from Princeton summa cum laude and, as a prosecutor, began racking up convictions. She credits her many mentors — includingJosé A. Cabranes at Yale and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who helped set her career as a federal judge in motion — with teaching her fundamental lessons along the way, which, she says ,she absorbed as a “happy sponge.”
For instance, she notes that Warren Murray, the bureau chief in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, taught her that, as a prosecutor, she could not appeal to logic alone, but needed to use emotion to make jurors feel the “moral responsibility to convict.”
The state’s case “is a narrative: the story of a crime,” she goes on. And: “It is the particulars that make a story real. In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.”
This insightful memoir underscores just how well Justice Sotomayor mastered the art of narrative. It’s an eloquent and affecting testament to the triumph of brains and hard work over circumstance, of a childhood dream realized through extraordinary will and dedication.
