Authors: Camille Peri; Kate Moses

Tags: #Child Rearing, #Motherhood, #General, #Parenting, #Family Relationships, #Family & Relationships, #Mothers, #Family, #&NEW

Because I Said So (53 page)

Kate Moses
is the author of
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath,
recipient of the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize and translated into thirteen languages. She is the coeditor, with Camille Peri, of the national bestselling, American Book Award–winning
Mothers Who Think:
Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
, and was a cofounder of
Salon
’s Mothers Who Think. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Gary Kamiya, and their two children, and is currently writing her second novel, inspired by the Fayum portraits described in “Mother of the World.”

Asra Q. Nomani
, born in Bombay, India, is a journalist and the author of
Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love,
selected by Beliefnet.com as one of the best spiritual books of 2003. She is also the author of
Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle
for the Soul of Islam.
A former reporter for the
Wall Street Journal,
she has written essays about Islam for the
Washington Post,
the
New York
C o n t r i b u t o r s ’ N o t e s

367

Times, Time
, and
Salon
; her work has also appeared in
Cosmopolitan
and
Sports Illustrated for Women.
She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, with her son Shibli, who has taken eight keys off her keyboard at last count, and near her supportive parents, Sajida and Zafar.

Debra Ollivier
, a contributor to the
Mothers Who Think
anthology, is the author of
Entre Nous: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her
Inner French Girl.
Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including
Salon
,
Harper’s, Playboy, Le Monde
, and
Les
Inrockuptibles
. Ollivier and her family divide their time between France and the United States.

Mariane Pearl
is the author of the memoir
A Mighty Heart
. She is an award-winning writer and documentary film director who produced and hosted a daily radio show for Radio France International and has written for
Télérama,
the
New York Times
, and
Salon
. She lives in New York with her son.

Camille Peri
is the coeditor, with Kate Moses, of the national bestselling, American Book Award–winning
Mothers Who Think: Tales of
Real-Life Parenthood
. She is a former senior editor at
Salon
and founding editor of Mothers Who Think. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, David Talbot, and their sons, Joseph Lyle and Nathaniel Augusto Talbot.

Marina Pineda-Kamariotis
is an immigration attorney who worked at La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco before going into private practice in 2001. She lives with her husband, Jim, and daughters Justine, seventeen, and Jasmine, fourteen, in South San Francisco.

Margaret Remick
is the pseudonym for a San Francisco writer prone to hyperbole and subjective thinking. She has written for
Salon
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and
Publishers Weekly.
An active advocate of public schools, she is currently working on a twisted vocabulary workbook for kids and a low-brow mystery. She lives with her three children and patient, inspiring husband.

368

C o n t r i b u t o r s ’ N o t e s

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
is the author of the novel
Why She Left Us
, which won an American Book Award in 2000. She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a contributor to the
Mothers Who
Think
anthology. She has two children, lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently working on her second book.

Mary Roach
is the author of the
New York Times
bestseller
Stiff:
The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
. She is a former
Salon
colum-nist and contributing editor at
Discover
magazine; her writing has also appeared in
Outside, Wired, The Believer, GQ
, and the
New York
Times Magazine.
She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Ed, and has two stepdaughters, Lily, who is nineteen, and Phoebe, fifteen. She is at work on her second book.

Dr. Karin L. Stanford
is a writer and professor of Pan African Studies and African American Politics at California State University, Northridge. Her most recent book is
Black Political Organizations in
the Post–Civil Rights Era,
coedited with Ollie Johnson. The author of numerous articles on black women and black politics, Dr. Stanford is the former director of the Washington, D.C., bureau of the RainbowPUSH Coalition and a former Congressional Black Caucus fellow. She and her daughter reside in Los Angeles.

Susan Straight
, a contributor to the
Mothers Who Think
anthology, has published five novels, including the most recent,
Highwire
Moon
, a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Commonwealth of California Gold Medal for Fiction, and named one of the year’s best novels by the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the
Washington Post
. Her new novel,
A Million Nightingales on the
Branches of My Heart
, will be published in 2005. Straight’s essays, articles, and short fiction have been published in numerous magazines and journals, including the
New York Times Magazine,
the
Los
Angeles Times Magazine, Harper’s, Salon, Zoetrope All-Story,
and
McSweeney’s
. Her short story, “Mines,” was chosen for the collection
Best American Short Stories 2003
and won a Pushcart Prize in Fiction.

Her commentaries are frequently heard on National Public Radio’s
All
C o n t r i b u t o r s ’ N o t e s

369

Things Considered.
Straight was born in Riverside, California, where she still lives with her three daughters.

Margaret Talbot
is a staff writer at the
New Yorker
magazine. She is one of the original contributors to the online Mothers Who Think.

Talbot lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Arthur Allen, and their children, Ike, eight, and Lucy, five.

Kristen Taylor
is a writer and cognitive psychologist. Her work has appeared in the
Los Angeles Times Magazine
, the
Christian Science
Monitor
, and in her column for the
Ventura County Star
. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Christian Gaines, and their two children, Lola and Luke.

Lisa Teasley
is the author of the story collection
Glow in the Dark
, winner of the 2002 Gold Pen Award and the Pacificus Foundation Award, as well as the novels
Dive
and the forthcoming
Heat Signature
.

Her other awards include the May Merrill Miller Award; the National Society of Arts & Letters Short Story Award, Los Angeles; and the Amaranth Review Award. A painter as well as a writer, Teasley has exhibited widely throughout the country. She is the mother of Imogen Teasley-Vlautin, who is nine years old. They live in Los Angeles.

Fufkin Vollmayer
is a lapsed journalist who worked for public radio and CNN. She now lives and writes in San Francisco, and tends to her children, her garden, and her sanity. She is the parent of two testosterone-filled toddler boys, Joaquin and Javier. Sleep permitting, she occasionally gets work done.

Ayelet Waldman
is the author of the novel
Daughter’s Keeper
and of the Mommy Track mystery series. Her novel
Love and Other
Impossible Pursuits
will be published in 2006. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and four children.

Katherine Whitney
is a writer and museum consultant. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.

ESSAY CREDITS

“The Scarlet Letter
Z
” copyright © by Asra Q. Nomani

“Survivor” copyright © by Andrea Lawson Gray
372

E s s a y C r e d i t s

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection was a team effort from start to finish. We’d like to thank, first, Ellen Levine and Marjorie Braman for their enthusiasm, wisdom, good humor, and extended deadlines as this book evolved.

We owe a debt of enormous gratitude to our children and husbands—Joe and Nat and David Talbot; Zachary and Celeste and Gary Kamiya—for being gracious and patient as we ruined vacations, forgot groceries, left you in front of the TV for far too many hours, or feigned only the most superficial interest in your work during our single-minded sprint to the finish on this book.

We especially want to thank Celeste, Zachary, Nat, and Joe for giving more to us as our children than we could ever hope to give you as parents. Much appreciation and love to Gary and David for keeping us fortified with unwavering dedication, unerring editorial insight, dry martinis, great home cooking, and boundless love.

Our thanks and apologies go out to our contributors’ children for letting your mothers ignore you while they wrote about you for us. We’d also like to thank Ruth Henrich, Beth Kephart, Debra Ollivier, Susan Straight, and Joan Walsh for acting as our on-call team of farsighted, trenchant readers. And many thanks to

“Dr. Ed” Mechem for his nonjudgmental technical expertise and good cheer.

Camille wishes to express her deepest gratitude to Dr. Hope Rugo and Dr. Laura Esserman, and a thumbs-up to Karen Bayuk for making sure she had a life to go back to. Heartfelt thanks also to Teri, Bob, Don, and Sue Peri, and to Louise Rubacky, Cheryl
374

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Nardi, Margaret Weir, and Ruth Henrich for giving so much of themselves to help Camille get well.

Kate wishes to thank those friends, old and new, who so generously outfitted her for her quest to find Demos, supplying everything from encouragement and safe harbors to Pimm’s cups and chocolate on pillows: Tracy Brain, Sohair Hosny, Joanna Lincoln, Ruth Lopez, Diane Middlebrook, Laila Moussa, Mrs.

Abdul Razik Sabah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mrs. Zienab Tawfic, and especially Euphrosyne Doxiadis, for whom thanks will never be enough.

Together we’d like to thank the many embedded women on the mothering front who have shored us up over the months of this book’s gestation, with child support, escapist fantasies, baked goods, babies to squeeze, coffee to go, and hilarious, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable stories and ideas about the ebb and flow of motherhood. You have been our backup and our backbone: Tammy Anderson, Za Berven, Marni Corbett, Jodi Douglass, Tacy Gaede, Charo Gonzalez, Season Jensen, Beth Kephart, Connie Matthiessen, Chris Myers, Rachida Orr, Sylvia Ortiz, Susan Straight, Fufkin Vollmayer, Ayelet Waldman, Joan Walsh, and Katherine Whitney.

Finally, we’d like to thank our contributors and all the mothers we’ve met on the journey from
Mothers Who Think
to
Because I Said So
, women who helped us know that whatever else we’re doing wrong, we did this right.

About the Author

Camille Peri
was a founding editor of the Mothers Who Think website at Salon.com and coeditor, with Kate Moses, of the American Book Award–winning anthology
Mothers Who Think:
Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.

Kate Moses
is a former contributing writer for Salon.com and one of the founding editors of Salon’s Mothers Who Think. She is also the author of
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, as well as coeditor, with Camille Peri, of
Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood
. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.

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