A Fighting Chance

Late in the school year, Harvard offered me a tenured job, but there wasn’t a place for Bruce. I wasn’t interested in living in two cities again, so I said no thanks. On the last day of classes, my students gave me a golden retriever puppy. They named her Good Faith and asked me to come back.

Two days after we took Faith home, Trover died of sudden liver failure. I called Daddy, crying so hard that he couldn’t make out what I was saying. So he went through this list: Are you hurt? Is it Alex? Amelia? Bruce? When he named Trover, I managed to choke out a yes, and he started to cry, too. What can I say? Dogs are part of our family. Twenty years later, Bruce still has Trover’s picture on his desk.

After Bruce and I went back to Penn, the Harvard dean would call every now and then. They were keeping the offer open. Perhaps I’d like to reconsider?

No, not really. We had a good life in Philadelphia. Amelia was nearby, Aunt Bee and Bonnie were back from Oklahoma and living upstairs, and Alex was still in school. After so many moves over the past dozen years, it felt good to know that we were finally settled in.





Harvard Again

But maybe I wasn’t so settled after all. Bruce’s question—“What are you going to do about it?”—kept tugging at me. I began working longer hours. I expanded my research. I wrote more articles, worked on my next book, and made plans for the one after that. I gave speeches, trying to tell anyone who would listen to me about the importance of bankruptcy protection and the families who needed it.

A year or so after we moved back to Philadelphia, Bruce and I were driving somewhere one spring day when an interview with a bank spokesman came on the radio. The guy was railing about deadbeats who took advantage of everyone else by filing for bankruptcy. I was furious. After the interview ended, I railed right back, rebutting everything the spokesman had said. The farther we drove, the more I argued into the empty air.

I was glaring out the window when Bruce glanced over from his driving. His voice was firm. “Take the Harvard job.”

Bruce doesn’t catch me by surprise very often. I’m usually the one with the wild schemes, and he’s usually the voice of reason, calmly explaining why it isn’t a great idea to paint the ceiling dark purple or rip all those unknown vines out of the overgrown flower bed by hand. (The purple ceiling worked out great, but I paid dearly for the gardening mistake—the vines were poison ivy and I found out that I’m wildly allergic.)

But Bruce usually thought very carefully about things before he said them, and he had been thinking about the Harvard offer for a while. Penn was a terrific school, but Bruce argued that if I wanted people to listen to my ideas, I might as well shout from the highest mountain I could find. He thought working at Harvard might improve my chances of making a difference.

By now, our lives had changed again. I wasn’t a Working Mother anymore; I was a forty-five-year-old professor, and our kids had grown up. Alex was in college, and Amelia was getting her MBA. At ninety-three, Aunt Bee didn’t get out much, and she was lonesome with no one at home all day. She said she didn’t want to hurt our feelings, but she and Bonnie the cocker spaniel wanted to go back to Oklahoma City, so we started working to set her up in a tidy little apartment in the middle of the sprawling Baptist Retirement Center. Now that we were pretty much on our own, Bruce declared that he and I and Faith could manage a two-city life. And a move to Massachusetts would mean that we would see a lot more of Bruce’s parents, his brother and sister, his niece and nephew. We would be close to family again.

Meanwhile, those bankruptcy numbers kept climbing, in good times and bad. More than eight hundred thousand families—husbands, wives, children—were going bankrupt every year. Across the country, another person declared bankruptcy every twenty-six seconds—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The numbers were staggering.

Something was terribly wrong in America, and it seemed to be getting worse. I was worried—worried, angry, and ready to fight for every one of these families. I didn’t have an organized plan, but I knew that fighting meant throwing everything I had into the battle. I was going to take the best shot I could.

So I called the Harvard dean and said I was coming.





2 | The Bankruptcy Wars

FAIR WARNING: THIS story doesn’t have a happy ending. It’s a David versus Goliath story, but this time David gets his slingshot shoved down his throat—sideways. It’s also the story of my long and painful baptism into national politics.

How I got into this fight takes a little explanation. It started when I said no.