On Gloria’s New Book and the Value of Life on the Road

Robin Morgan in Women's Media Center:

GloriaRobin: It’s a time for great celebration because My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem, is finally out. Tell us about it.

Gloria: About twenty years ago I realized that I was writing least about what I was doing most, which was traveling and organizing on the road. So I began this book—I would work on it one month in the summer and then not for the other eleven months. My hope for it is that it conveys some of the seduction of the road. I noticed that when I say I’m going to another country, people say, “Oh, how interesting,” and when I say I’m traveling here, they say, “Oh, it must be so tiring.”

So I think there is a great lack that should be filled by, I don’t know, rules that every elected politician needs to spend at least two years [on the road] before they run, and have booster shots of a few weeks every few years …

Robin: What different politicians that would make!

Gloria: I think the road is my form of meditation. It forces you to live in the present—you really have no choice. And it is so unexpected; the country is so much more diverse and interesting and exciting and full of energy than the generalizations on television or on the Web about “the American People,” as if we were one lump. And especially now, because it is profoundly shifting in many ways—we are about to become a majority country of people of color, not European Americans.

More here.