‘Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury’
By Drew Gilpin Faust
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages

No sooner did Harvard’s 28th president, Drew Gilpin Faust, come on the phone than I popped the Harvard question — why her new memoir skirts the apex of her academic trajectory, her presidency at Harvard, which is in the news.

“I don’t think I will ever write about Harvard,” is the response from Ms. Faust, whom I met as a student and came to admire greatly. “Someone can dig through the Harvard archives when those materials become open to the public and figure out what went on. But that’s not a story that I want to tell.”

What interests the historian turned president, instead, is what came before she rose to that prestigious academic post in 2007. “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury” delves into Ms. Faust’s upbringing at the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. There, the racial, gender, and socioeconomic formations of 1950s and 1960s America sparked within her an irresistible instinct for resistance — or, as the book’s title declares, “Necessary Trouble.” 

“I wanted to write about my experiences growing up because I felt that that was an era that has gotten to be so distant in the past that people don’t really understand it all that well anymore,” Ms. Faust says, speaking from her home at Cambridge, a short stroll from Harvard Yard. After a decorated academic career studying the voices that have told America’s story, she decided that she “wanted to be one of those voices.”

Ms. Faust explains that it was “psychotherapy” to explore the forces that shaped her younger self while writing the book, a project in which she immersed herself during the isolation of the Covid pandemic. She illustrates her strained relationship with her mother, Catherine Gilpin, who died on Christmas Eve in 1966, when Ms. Faust was nineteen. “She was, in a sense,” Ms. Faust reflects, “the victim of all these constraints that she felt were inescapable in her life.” 

“It’s a man’s world, sweetie,” Gilpin would tell her daughter, repeating the mantra of her era. “You better figure that out.” While Ms. Faust had to wear “little frilly clothes that itched,” her three brothers did not. Indeed, they were encouraged to forge careers in the public sphere, but “the single expectation of me,” she says, “was that I would become a mother and a wife.” 

From an early age, Ms. Faust rejected that assumption. “I was just difficult,” she explains. “I wanted my way. I was bossy. I wasn’t going to do what I was told if I didn’t think it made sense. I came to think very early on that I was pretty smart and I was really good in school. And so I would always try to argue with everybody about everything and skewer them with my logic.”

At age 9, she wrote a letter to President Eisenhower imploring him to end segregation. “So what if their skin is Black?” she asked him in 1957, her penciled, all-caps lettering as sharp as her critique of the president’s policy. “They still have feelings, but most of all are God’s people!”

“I was pretty bossy to President Eisenhower, wasn’t I?” Ms. Faust says, laughing. She declared to him that segregation was anti-Christian — an appeal that Martin Luther King Jr. also used to persuade white Southerners to change their attitudes towards Black Americans. “That was my most powerful weapon,” Ms. Faust recalls. “If I was going to argue with the president, what better to do than to invoke God?”

Impelled to change the future, Ms. Faust gravitated toward the study of the past. She earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975 and wrote her first book on defenses of slavery mounted by white Southerners in the 19th century. It was inspired by her own experiences with the legacy of American bondage. At the cemetery where generations of her family are buried, her grandmother, Isabella Tyson, arranged in 1957 for a plaque that memorialized the enslaved people buried there as “servants” who were “faithful and devoted.” 

Ms. Faust’s disgust at this glorification, she says, was “the foundation of my career as a scholar.” Her first book, which explored the defense of slavery by white Southerners in the 19th century, built upon questions that animated her childhood, like, she says, “how do people do actions and have beliefs that we see today as unthinkable? How were they made thinkable in the past?”

Another historical thread in the book is the indelible imprint of war, which, Ms. Faust says, “distorted family life.” Her family tree boasts three generations of men in uniform, citizen soldiers who volunteered in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. As she writes in the book, “men make war, and war makes men.”

The memoir positions Ms. Faust as the unlikely product of a segregated, male-dominated society that is of “almost unimaginable difference from our own lives,” she says. To retell this history is to remind modern audiences of how far America has come, how much more it can go, and, as the author writes, “why we don’t want to live in such a world again.”

Ms. Faust pieced together her childhood years using notebook entries, elementary school report cards, and letters she sent throughout her life whose recipients presented them to her once when she became president of Harvard. “I was just a hoarder of paper,” says Ms. Faust. She plans to donate boxes of that paper to Harvard’s archives for the next generation of historians to discover.

Though she might not want to write about it, Ms. Faust’s 12-year presidency at Harvard played no small part in expanding the world of academia. Not only was she the first female president, but she was also the first to have been raised in the South and the first since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from the university. Yet, upon her appointment as the 28th person in history to hold that role, she famously asserted that “I’m not the woman president of Harvard, I’m the president of Harvard.”

I asked Ms. Faust about a bit of wisdom —  “The Parking Space Theory of Life” — that she included in her first Baccalaureate address to graduating seniors. She referenced it in each subsequent address during her presidency.

“Don’t park ten blocks away from your destination because you think you won’t find a closer space,” the theory instructs. “Go where you want to be.” It’s clear that the lesson emerges from Ms. Faust’s own life story.

“If people force themselves to do something that really is not meaningful to them, they’re not going to do it well,” Ms. Faust says. “They’re not going to have rewarding lives. They’re going to just feel imprisoned by the choices they’ve made.” For young people today, she says the theory means, “try for what you really want. Don’t give up before you even try.”