Reading Myself in The Red Book

In 2 weeks I will attend my 20th college reunion. 2 weeks ago I told two of my colleagues at China Foreign Affairs University that I will attend my 20th reunion instead of going on a school-sponsored excursion in China. They responded by discussing how awkward their reunions were for high school and college. They met people at these reunions who they barely remembered. One colleague described herself as very shy, so she did not have many friends in high school or college. My other colleague told us that her reunions were always awkward because she kept in touch with former classmates through Facebook and Twitter, leaving almost nothing new to discuss at a formal reunion. I told them my case is different because Harvard University has alumni reports called “The [Number]th Anniversary Report,” so I have received the 5th, 10th, and 15th anniversary reports before I went to every reunion. The report is unofficially called “the red book” because it comes in a red cover, the Harvard Crimson red. Each book contains classmates’ names, location, occupation, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and social media web site addresses. I expect my red book to arrive by next Friday, May 18, because I go to my reunion in Boston on May 19.

Before I went to the 15th Reunion in 2013 I discovered a novel called The Red Book, written by Deborah Copaken Kogan. It’s about four women who were roommates in the class of 1989 and return to Harvard in 2009. One of the characters in the novel is Clover Love. She is the female version of me. She came from a commune in California, was born to Hippie parents who practiced free love (hence the last name “Love”), and conceived in a field of clovers (hence, “Clover”).

I grew up with hippie parents who were traveling musicians. Communes were a temporary home for me. More often I found home in my parents’ station wagon, with temporary stops at relatives’ houses, college campuses, national forests, air force bases, and highway rest stops, among other places. Clover Love grew up in extreme, abject poverty, barely able to watch television or eat food while she grew up. Her mother was a black, feminist, poet activist. Her father was a white musician who met her mother when he stopped by the commune to play music. My mother is a white feminist singer-songwriting political activist who was at protest marches in the 1960s and 1970s. My father is a black musician and philosopher who met my mother as he was stationed in Tucson, Arizona, at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, nearing retirement after 20 years of service.

Clover witnessed rampant drug use and orgies. My parents smoked marijuana together and played music together, often in front of large crowds. Clover Love was a child of nature, but she hated the hippie environment and did not tell her parents that she applied to Harvard. I accepted my hippie lifestyle until I realized that, because we were poor, I couldn’t do many things I wanted to do. By the time I was 8 I decided to leave it, abandoning home school and entering public school. My parents’ hippie community created a parallel existence for me, a different universe with opposite rules.

Once Clover Love got to Harvard she abandoned her hippie heritage. She became an investment banker dealing in mortgage-backed securities at Lehman Brothers until it went bankrupt. She defines her life entirely by her job and her income. I would have had the same experience at Harvard and made the same decisions as Clover Love, except that my heart was broken during my Freshman year of college and I spent the remaining three years suffering depression.
Reading about Clover Love gave me a completely different perspective about how my life could have turned out “if only” certain events had gone differently (if only my heart had not been broken....)

I already knew about the Homeless to Harvard story, expressed by Lauralee Summer (Learning Joy from Dogs without Collars, Simon & Schuster, 2004) and by Elizabeth Murray, but this is the first reference, fictional or biographical, that I read containing the Hippie to Harvard story.

Reading this novel gave me a renewed appreciation for all that I have experienced since graduating. After I read the novel, I contacted Ms. Copaken to find out if the Clover Love character is based on a real person. Ms. Copaken told me the character is completely made up, but based on the model of someone like that growing up in the 1970s. At our 15th Reunion (Ms. Copaken’s 25th Reunion) I saw her speak about the novel. She told us that the motif of the novel is the shedding of people’s masks as they reunite after the 20th year. She said, at least for her class, their true selves came out as people realized they were all dealing with different kinds of successes and challenges in life.