Cspan elsa walsh, why did you write divided lives . Guest i wrote this book because i thought that women werent telling the truth about their lives, that they were presenting particularly prominent women were presenting a very idealized version of what it was like to be a woman in the 80s and the 90s, and that was a picture that didnt at all reflect what i heard other women talking about. My friends talking about, women i had interviewed as a journalist. I knew it was a lot tougher out there than the little blips in the road that you saw that women talked about in public sort of presentations. Cspan is this your first book . Guest its my very first book. We also call it my first baby. Cspan was it hard . Guest it was hard. Writing a book is much harder than i anticipated. Its something that you really have to be committed to doing. But it was also fun, gave me a good life during the period i took off. I was a reporter at the Washington Post. Im still there and im on leave. And it gave me an opportunity to realize that, in fact, you could have both a work life and a day life, which i didnt really have at the Washington Post. Cspan could you give us a real brief synopsis of the three women, and well go back and go over it in detail. Guest ok. I write about three women in my book, all of whom are very accomplished. The first woman is a woman named Meredith Vieira, who is a television correspondent. Her story is the story of a woman who was offered the very top job in her field, 60 minutes, just as she gave birth to her very first baby, a child that she had desperately wanted to have but put off having because she wanted to build her career, also had had a few miscarriages before that. Her story is really one of a career woman who was really struggling to be the very best at her job but at the same time really wanted to be a very good mother. And the conflict was sort of neverending for her. She eventually left 60 minutes, and its the story of her trying to sort out how to be both a good mom and a good journalist. The next woman is a woman named rachael warby, Classical Music conductor, very talented, who performed all over the world, met a man in her early 40s that happened to be the governor of West Virginia, fell in love, married him. And her story is really the story of a woman who is searching for an identity within a marriage, one that a lot of women, i think, can relate to. And the third story is about a woman named Alison Estabrook, whos a breast surgeon, who really had to fight a kind of a classic Old Boys Network to become the chief of breast surgery at Columbia Hospital in new york city, one of the biggest hospitals in the country and one of the best. Cspan how many women did you think about writing about . Guest i interviewed dozens of women around the country. I had the luxury of time to write this book. As i said, i took a leave of absence, and initially, i thought i was going to cover the whole spectrum of womens lives demographic, geographic, age, socioeconomic. And what i quickly discovered was, in fact, that that wasnt going to work. That was too many women, and to travel deep, you couldnt travel broad, and so it quickly narrowed to about a dozen women and then, after about a year, narrowed to seven, then five, and at the very end, my last draft, narrowed it down to three women primarily because they were women who were really committed to telling the truth. They were very honest, but also, because they would let me use their real names and the other women really didnt want their names to be used. And i recognized at the end of my book that one of the real powers of it was its honesty, and that i couldnt write a book with a couple of names being used and then a couple of names not being used because that would undermine the whole sort of message. Cspan the reason that we first noticed this book, a network like this was rachael warby because shes married to the governor of West Virginia. Guest right. Cspan what was the first controversy that arose around that story . Guest well, the first controversy that arose was rachael warby held a press conference and released my book before it was out, and journalists who went to that immediately wrote about her personal revelations, particularly about her sexual life and the fact that she really didnt like being first lady very much. I wasnt surprised in some ways that the press picked up on the sex revelations, but i was a little disappointed that they were presented as this sort of very steamy, graphic descriptions, which they arent at all. Theyre in fact very sad, very poignant. Theyre really the sort of stories about a woman who was quite beautiful, who is quite beautiful, very vivacious, flirtatious, who, in fact, in reality, is very uncomfortable with her body, which is a story that a lot of women can relate to. She describes getting into bed wearing a sweatshirt with a hood and underwear and socks because she was embarrassed about her body, and her husband sort of flipping on the light switch and saying, you cant do this. I love you and i love your body, and you have to be comfortable with me. And i thought that was a story that really explained a lot about rachael and about sort of really the inferiority in some ways or lack of security that she felt even though she presented as all these three women do a very strong public image and the personal interior story was much, much different from the public facade. Cspan why did she call a News Conference and release it before they were ready . Guest i dont know. I dont really understand that. Cspan did she call you, tell you . Guest no, she didnt call me and tell me. I had heard that morning, in fact, that she was going to do that, and i was surprised because i thought that she was getting bad political advice, because i thought that that would one, if you call a News Conference, as you know, and you invite only certain numbers of reporters and you invite reporters who are typically seen as being nice to you, that, in fact, one, makes other reporters mad; and two, it also doesnt give people very much time to read the book in context. And i think what she wanted to do, as she explained during the press conference, was to have people look at the book in context to sort of see that, in fact, it was a painful journey for her, but that, in fact, it might help other women to learn the difficulties of trying to blend these two different lives cspan when did she actually call that News Conference . What month . Guest it was in july, the end of july. Cspan where was he politically . Guest at that stage . Gaston caperton, her husband who is the governor of West Virginia, is in his second term as governor. He cant run again, and his term is up in 1996. Cspan i just underlined one thing here in the early part of the story about rachael warby besides, she viewed politicians with a suspicion just short of contempt. Guest yes, when she first met him. And when rachael warby first met Gaston Caperton, she was married to somebody else, an agentfilm producer who was living in los angeles. She had been the assistant philharmonic conductor and, at the same time, was the wheeling, West Virginia, conductor and used to commute back and forth. Her marriage was bad. Her husband had asked her for a divorce. She didnt want one, and when she met gaston, he began to pursue her. And she really resisted him for many months because, one she was married; two also because she didnt have any experience with the political world and did see politicians as false, and completely living a life that was different from the life of the artist, which for her was, you know, you always have to be true to who you are. Cspan theres a whole lot of references to her attitude about West Virginia. By the way, have you talked to her since she had the News Conference . Guest no, i have not. Ive talked to her publicist and ive talked to some of her aides. Cspan is she mad about this . Guest i gave rachael the book way back in late winter, early spring. I gave it to all the women. And at that time she called me and she said, one, it was very painful for tome to read, but its very honest. And i gave the book to my husband and said to him, this is who i am. This is who im always going to be. Im always going rachaels a very sort of liberal person who, theres a story in my book about her not wanting to spend a lot of money on christmas cards, in fact wanting to give a donation to pediatric aids and just send out a little card saying, weve done this in your name, and his advisers had said, no, no, no. You cant do that. People down here dont care about that much and people like to keep these as mementoes. And so she said, im always going to be a person who wants to give our money to pediatric aids rather than spend it on christmas cards. I hope i learn something from this process, but im not going to change. She also wrote me a note about a week after that saying, thank you for treating my life so sensitively. But i think that because the coverage down in West Virginia in particular has been very intense, a lot of it critical, that in fact its been very painful for her, according to people who are close to her. And i think its sort of sign that if youre a woman in this country and you tell the truth about your life, you get penalized for it. People say, oops, back in the box. Cspan what were your ground rules with all three of these women . Guest i didnt really have any. I said, i want to come into your life. I want to come into it very deeply. I want to talk about the rawest emotions, and i want to tell your story, and that was about the only ground rule i had with those particular women. Some other women that i had interviewed had initially said, i dont want you to use my name, and at that point, i hadnt thought it out carefully enough and i said, ok. And as i said to you that when i got then to the end of the process, many of the women who id interviewed for a couple of years i realized that that was sort of contradictory to what i was trying to do. Cspan a couple weeks ago, you open up new yorker magazine and there you are, at the very early part of the magazine, in a confrontation with Charlie Peters, who runs Washington Monthly magazine who people here have seen a lot over the years. What was that controversy about . Guest well, Charlie Peters got an early copy of my manuscript. Publishers often send copies of manuscripts around for serialization rights very early on in the process, even before the book was in galley form. And i had heard that he had gotten a copy. I was sort of surprised that hed gotten a copy because it didnt seem to me a place where my book would be excerpted anyway. And so my husband, in fact, mentioned to me that he had run into Charlie Peters, who had said something about my book. So i called him and i said, you know, i hope, charlie, you know that my book is embargoed. He was from West Virginia and i didnt want him to send it to anyone down there because one, i didnt want my book coming out before my book was coming out. And he said, well, im not going to do that, but im going to have to write him a letter charlie has a very strong accent and tell him that i think that this is really dangerous for him. And i said, well, you know, ive already sent it to both rachael warby and Gaston Caperton, and theyve both seen it. And you dont really need to do that. And he said, well, this is just a bullet to his heart. Hes going to have to divorce her. And i said, well, thats totally a ridiculous thing to say. Its absurd and its not true and its outrageous. And he said, well, im just going to have to send them a letter and tell them these things. And i didnt really think he would because it just seemed, on the face of it, stupid to me, particularly given his position both as the editor of the magazine and the position he takes all the time in his magazine, which is that the journalistic establishment cozies up too close to politicians. And he advocates a lot of candor in government. So in many ways you would think that my book would be the kind of book that he would applaud, which is, oh, the real story, the real truth. And, in fact, i got a copy of the letter that he did send to them, and in the letter he said, you know, i think this book is going to be dangerous for you, and i think you should get elsa walsh to try to change the end of her book. And when i saw that i was pretty shocked because he was essentially saying, this is too much truth, that the only thing thats important is the political animal, that rachael warbys own struggle was unimportant, and it annoyed me. Cspan you mentioned your husband. Has that figured into this story . I mean, do people either not want to talk to you or talk to you because of who youre married to . Guest oh, you mean me as a journalist interviewing other people . Cspan i mean for the audience who doesnt know who your husband is. Guest ok. My husband is bob woodward. Hes an author of many books, very successful books, a journalist also at the Washington Post. Cspan and in the back i mean, the only reason i bring this up anybody following journalism would know these names and those who dont follow journalism would know these names. You thank Carl Bernstein in the back. What role did he play in the book . Guest i gave him an early copy of a couple of chapters of my book, particularly my introduction, and i asked him to take a look at it and tell me what he thought. And he did. He was down visiting us for the weekend, which he often does, and hes a smart man, has his pulse oftentimes on the finger of whats going on in the country and also a good pulse on women has got good relationships with a lot of women. And so i wanted to know what he thought. Cspan are you surprised how much controversy the rachael warby thing has been . Guest yeah. I really am because of the fact. I think that the thing that disappoints me is that shes been criticized for being indiscreet about her personal life, and i think that thats disappointing and i think that misses sort of the impact of what shes trying to do and what shes saying. I think she was very brave and very gutsy. He husband was asked after her press conference, arent you embarrassed by this . You know, this is not, certainly, something that a first lady should do. And he looked and said, you know, you guys in the media are always criticizing us politicians for masking our lives. I dont know anyone whos been as honest as rachael is, and i respect her for it and i love her for it, and i think shes gutsy. And when i read that, i thought, good for him. He understands. Cspan theres a fellow you quote a lot in here by the name of l. T. Anderson. Why did you quote him . Guest well, he was a columnist for one of the charleston newspapers, a very prominent one, who was probably rachael warbys most vocal critic down in West Virginia and one that really got under her skin consistently. And so i wanted to show the kinds of things that he was saying, but i also wanted people to also sort of see and feel what it must be like. Not all of what he said was wrong at times. I mean, i think they were kind of mean and barbed, but he was reflecting a point of view in West Virginia that was shared by many other people. Cspan as a matter of fact, theres a quote i underlined. Its so now we know ms. Warby isnt bored only by Cocktail Party dullards, shes bored by an entire state. Guest well, rachael is this, you know, shes from manhattan, very culturally sophisticated, a conductor, as ive said, so very welleducated and is a person who reads a lot and punctuates a lot of her conversation with very sophisticated, literary references, and that didnt go off so well down in West Virginia. It also didnt go over so well when she was first married to the governor and became first lady, did a couple of interviews and was asked, do you ever read the papers in West Virginia . What do you think . And she said, oh, i dont everi dont ever read them. I only read the new york times. Now she later corrected herself in another interview, but sort of amplified it by saying, i dont read the local newspapers because i never like to read the papers where i conduct because im too sensitive to criticism. Plus, i do read the papers, because you have to get something here, because you cant get the new york times. So she had a little bit of difficulty sometimes of not knowing when to stop. Cspan the relationship between Gaston Caperton and his wife and the rockefellers senator and mrs. Jay rockefeller . Because you have ive got a quote here that says, jay is welcome in our house but not in our hearts. Guest right. When the governor was running for reelection in early 1991, jay rockefeller, who was the former governor whos now the us senator from West Virginia, was approached to get behind Gaston Caperton and also to hold a fundraiser for him. At that time, gastons poll ratings were very, very low because he had made somewhat of a promise in his First Campaign not to raise taxes. In fact, he had raised taxes when he got in there and discovered that, in fact, the states finances were much worse than anyone had predicted. And when they went to the rockefellers to ask to give a fundraiser, he was rebuffed. And gaston is a politician and so understands how these things work, but rachael was very hurt by that and so said, you know, that theyre welcome in our homes but not in our hearts, and i thought that that was a pretty honest reaction to what a lot of people in politics must feel but never say. Cspan what about the following quote . What will this do to either their relationship or just the image of a political situation . Exasperated and exhausted, she told her assistant what Sharon Rockefeller had said, that when she had been the states first lady she had attended only highprofile events with guaranteed Media Coverage. Guest i heard Sharon Rockefeller say that and i think its probably smart because when youre a political spouse and theres a lot of demand on your time and Sharon Rockefeller also wanted to lead her own life and that she realized that there were only certain things you could do, and you could sort of nickel and dime yourself to death if you didnt. I think that, you know, subsequent to that, i focus in my book on the Reelection Campaign primarily. Rockefeller did give a fundraiser for Gaston Caperton near the end of campaign and that there was a little bit of fencemending going on there. But i think that theres probably a its a tense relationship. Cspan what did you learn about in the Meredith Vieira profile . First of all, where is she now . Guest Meredith Vieira is now at abc. She is on a show called turning point, which is a magazine show, onehour documentary which for a while was playing every week. Now its turned to specials periodic specials. Theyre going to do about 20 a year. And after meredith left 60 minutes, she initially went to do the earlymorning anchor show at cbs and found that to be disastrous because that required getting up at 3 30 in the morning. And whereas 60 minutes sort of disrupted her own life because she traveled a lot you have to travel about 100 days a year at 60 minutes the earlymorning anchor show, which meant going to bed at 7 30, disrupted everyones life. Her husband has kind of a degenerative nerve disease and cant get overly exhausted. And i think the whole household was completely turned upside down by that. But what i learned from the meredith story is, one, that there is a lot of sacrifice involved in having a child, that you do need to learn to make compromises. Meredith herself would say that taking 60 minutes at that time was a bad decision because that show really does demand that you, in fact, turn over your entire life to it. I mean, its probably the one reason why its been the most successful show in television history. Its not a show for people who want to have families. Cspan did i read it right that Robert Barnett is both your agent and her agent . Guest thats correct. Cspan how did that happen . Was that just a happenstance . Guest thats a happenstance i dont know how he became her. Hes not her agent any longer and he became my agent, one, because hes good and. Cspan married to rita braver. Guest rita braver, whos at cbs. Cspan now what role does an agent play for you in all this . Guest for. Cspan hows that work . Guest he gets me a book contract. Cspan how does it work . Where does he live . Guest bob barnett lives here in washington. He, at one time, actually, was even the clintons lawyer before his wife rita became the White House Correspondent its all a little intertwined here in washington at times and he was also my husbands attorney and agent. And that was probably the primary reason why i went to bob, in addition to him being such a good agent, good attorney. Cspan how long have you been married to bob woodward . Guest ive been married to bob since 1989. We started living together in 1982. I met him when i was a baby. I was 23 years old, he was 37. So weve been together for 13 years. Cspan what influence has he had on this style of journalism here that youve used . Guest a remarkable influence. I mean, he would probably say, oh, you know, not as much as you think. But, in fact, what bob has really taught me as a journalist and as a thinker is that people tend not to tell the truth initially when you first interview them and its not because theyre always purposely not telling you the truth, but oftentimes, they dont really know what the truth is and that you do need to go back and back and back and back, and peel back those layers. And what was really sort of interesting to me in the process of doing this book i interviewed the women very intensely for two years, but really covered them over about a threeandahalfyear period was that oftentimes, things that they didnt even know they believed sort of came to the surface. For example, rachael warby, the conductor and first lady, she had insisted to me for almost a year that she was never going to have a child, that after she and the governor got married, she was so insistent on this that encouraged him and he agreed to have a vasectomy. She knew that as a conductor you really, you travel all the time you have to be willing to get up and go wherever there is a performance. And plus, she said, its so hard for me to get up on stage as it is so hard as a woman there are only really five women, five or six woman conductors in this country who have their own orchestras, so i could not imagine getting up there being pregnant. I just feel so uncomfortable already. But we were sitting having coffee one day. It was snowing outside, and she said, you know, i have something i want to tell you. And i said, well, what is it . And i was sort of looking at something and not paying as much attention as i should have been and she said, well, gaston and i are thinking of adopting a baby. And i almost fell off my chair because this is something that had come up we had done about a dozen interviews by that point and it had come up almost in every single one. She said, i dont like the idea of the nuclear family. I dont have time. My women friends who are musicians who have had children, theyve really, essentially, not progressed in their careers. I dont need to do this. And so i said well, rachael, whats happened . And she said, well, talking to you has made me listen to myself and made me realize that the answers ive been giving you are the same answers ive been giving myself and other people for the past 10 years. And i can continue to lie to you and tell you i dont want to have a child, but i cant continue to lie to myself. Ive always been a person whos told myself that i would reevaluate my thinking. And having to articulate what my beliefs are to you over and over again made me listen to them. Cspan where are you from . Guest im from california, from the bay area, come from a large Irish Catholic family. My parents are irish immigrants my dads a civil engineer. And when my mom was pregnant with me, my dad decided, lets go to San Francisco for a year, get a job, and my mother. Cspan right from ireland. Guest straight from ireland, from county cork. It used to sound very romantic to me. Now it sounds really impulsive. My mom had one child at that point, so they went for what was going to be a year and they ended up staying there. Theyre still there. My mom fell in love with california and. Cspan how many kids in the family . Guest six five girls, one boy. Cspan and then where did you go to college . Guest i went to college at berkeley, which is across the bay from where i was raised. My stepdaughters is there now cspan studied what . Guest i studied rhetoric and economics. I started out being an economics major because i thought i wanted to go to law school, discovered, in fact, that i really loved the study of rhetoric, which is one of the the most ancient faculties, and decided to just do both. Cspan and how did you get to the Washington Post . Guest well, my senior year at berkeley i did an internship at Newsweek Magazine in their San Francisco bureau. And it was, as a lot of peoples experience in journalism, you discover that youre right there smack in the middle of some pretty exciting things. That was the year that the mayor of San Francisco was assassinated, moscone, and also, the jonestown massacre. And most of the people who had been killed or committed suicide down in jonestown were from the San Francisco area. It was a church. The people from there had started out as a church in San Francisco. So here i was, this sort of young person sort of thrust into this really to me, it seemed like, wow. This is like the front seat of america. And so i came to washington shortly after graduation. I didnt have a job. I had a friend who had also been an intern at newsweek who came and said, oh, lets go and have an adventure. I started doing some interviews, and the Washington Post at that time was hiring very young people for their weekly edition, which is its own section of the newspaper that came out once a week, and i luckily got a job. Cspan going to go back to the post . Guest i think so. I have a job. Thats the wonderful thing about a place like the Washington Post. They really sort of understand kind of peoples needs every once in a while to go off and do something different, and stretch your brain. And you have a lot of impact when you work at a place like the post. Cspan what did you learn about i know you learned a lot about Meredith Vieira, but what did you learn about 60 minutes, which is probably the most Popular Television show in history . Guest well, it was a very sort of eyeopening experience for me. When i was young, my mom and i used to watch 60 minutes all the time, and she used to watch shana alexander, who was on point counterpoint. And i remember her giving me her book, i think, probably myend of my High School Years or beginning of my College Years and sayingoh, she said, wouldnt it be great to be on this show . and i never really had any real ambition to be on television, but i always thought that if i was going to be on tv, the place id like to be is 60 minutes. What i discovered was that it was an intensely hardworking place. I didnt realize that, in fact, each correspondent has about five or six producers and they do a lot of the reporting work because, in fact, the reporters are always going from place to place to place, and most of the ground work has already been done. So on an emotional level, i realized it was something i probably even though i never wanted to be on tv, its a place i probably couldnt ever really work because, in fact, you cant really have a life when you work there. Cspan why not . Guest because youre on the road all the time. Morley safer, who is one of the correspondents there, his hobby is painting watercolors of hotel rooms. Theyre. Cspan that he stays in. Guest theyre good. Theyre good. And when meredith left 60 minutes after her two seasons there and didnt really know what she was going to do, felt that her whole career was unraveling in front of her, morley safer came up to her she said in the hall and said, meredith, what are you going to do now . And she said, oh, i dont know. And he said, you made the right decision. He said, my wife and my daughter say they never saw me in the last 20 years, and she said that really touched her. Cspan now did i read it right that Meredith Vieira was halftime . Guest she traveled parttime, she worked fulltime i mean, its kind of been people who follow television, and theres probably not a lot of people who follow it as closely as people in washington, think that Meredith Vieira worked parttime. Actually, she got a contract for a lot of money, 450,000, but which is about half the salary of most of the correspondents there, who make about a million dollars, with the agreement that she would only produce half the number of stories that the other correspondents did, which meant that she should be on the road only half the time. The truth was that, in fact, she was on the road a lot. She worked almost every day. She worked every day and she worked a full day every day, longer than most. And working parttime at 60 minutes is like working doubletime at almost any other place. Cspan married to Richard Cohen, as you said who was a cbs producer. Whats he doing now . Guest he is producing a show on cable for one of merediths former colleagues, jane wallace on fox. Cspan fx channel. Guest fx channel. One of the really interesting things that happened after my book came out is that don hewitt called me. Hes the executive producer of the show, the genius, the creator, and he said one, your book is fabulous. It reads like a movie. Then he told me who he wanted to play him in the movie. He said, but more importantly, i never knew meredith was in such pain. I had no idea it was so hard for her and i feel really badly about that. And ive learned a lot and whats her home phone number . I want to call her. And i thought, good for him. Cspan where did you see pain . Guest with meredith . Cspan yes. Guest pain every day, and on every page of my book, meredith describes never being able to leave the house without crying. She says, i know that was a little extreme. She said at one point when she was getting on the plane, the shuttle to washington, her husband said to her, meredith, i could understand if it was ethiopia, but it is only washington. Here was a woman who had had three very difficult miscarriages before she conceived this child. As anyone who knows, anyone whos ever gone through a miscarriage knows, it so intensifies the child experience once you actually have the child because you think, ive gone through so much to have this. I really i cant just pass this child off to a nanny. But ill tell you a story. When meredith first took the job, she set up a bunch of these limits for herself, one, including that she would never be away from home for more than two nights at a time. She thought shed be a little pollyanna and, you know, could do only two away, and then she would work from a computer at home at different times. Well, she broke that rule a lot and the very first time she broke that rule was shortly after the romanian coup. And there were lots of stories coming out about orphans in romania who were being treated very badly. And meredith, who is a very compassionate person, who never was a person who really did celebrity interviews, always wanted to do sort social justice type stories, thought to herself, oh, i could really save some of these babies. I could really do something, because if you have a show on 60 minutes, it can change things overnight. I mean, its an enormously powerful institution. And she said, well, maybe ill take ben which is her son with me. And her producer said, you cant do that. You know, what if the baby gets sick and you cant do your work . So she said, ok. Im going i will go. Im going to break my rule this one time. But she was still breastfeeding. She was still breastfeeding because she felt that was, like, the one connection she had with her son. And she brought a portable breast pump with her so she could continue to breastfeed when she got back because if youre breastfeeding and you stop for a week, its very difficult to continue unless you know, keep the process going. And she described to me getting over to romania with this portable breast pump that didnt work. And so each night in this really kind of dingy, dirty hotel, she would have to express the milk from her breasts, and to do that she had to actually sort of manually do it, like milking a cow. And she said it was really hard, very painful. And on the one night she fell asleep without having done it she woke up breasts just pulsing with pain, like concrete. And it was that sort of thing that happened to her a lot, that she just said that here she was over in romania trying to save babies, she had a baby at home that she missed desperately and she was in physical pain over, and she called her husband and said, make sure you bring ben to the airport when you pick me up. So when she got back to the airport, ben, who was not yet really a year then, must have turned away from her. And she just dissolved and said, so this is my worst nightmare. My child is turning away from me because i havent been there. And her husband said, meredith, hes only a baby. Hes not thinking about it that way. This is just a momentary reaction. But for her it was really sort of an epiphany ok. Im a bad mother. Cspan one of the things when you read, especially about the surgeon and about Meredith Vieira, you realize theyre both making about a halfmillion dollars. And in the Meredith Vieira case, it seems like shes upset most of the time in this chapter about something. What would you say to somebody in the audience watching this thats slugging down two jobs a day, making maybe 35,000 a year, having a bunch of kids and all that and reading this . Whats the explanation of how. Guest well, its. Cspan . How could it be that hard . Guest its been really interesting for me, i mean, because i knew that would be a criticism of my book, but i specifically chose these women because they had so much privilege, they had so much opportunity, they had good educations, parity with their husbands. Two of the women made more money than their husbands a lot more money than their husbands. And i thought that if women who had the best chance at happiness werent happy, that that then said a lot about the struggle that other women were going through. And, in fact, when i was out on my book tour i did an interview with a woman at a local npr station who said, you know, i picked up this book. What am i going to learn from this book . I make 22,000 a year. Im a single mom. Her child has cerebral palsy. And she said, i saw myself on every page. And the conflict the internal conflicts that women feel are the same, whether youre making 1 2 million a year or youre making 20,000 a year. There are a lot of women like meredith who really feel that they really want to be at home taking care of that baby, but they really feel theyve got to do their job. With Alison Estabrook, the breast surgeon, she told me that since the book has come out shes had a number of people in the hospital, people who are Clerical Workers and secretaries, come up and say, makes me feel so good to know that you have the same problems that i have. I had to fight to become an executive secretary. So i think that theres a real bonding process that goes on for a lot of women when they read my book. Nora ephron, whos a writer, wrote me a letter a couple of weeks ago and said, you know, i think your book is a real rorschachs test for people so i found myself, which im sure other women will, filtering my own life and my own reactions through these womens stories. And i think theres a lot of comfort that women get in discovering that, in fact, women who they think socalled have it all dont really have it alall at all. I mean, we as women tend to sort of think, you know, we believe in cinderella and things like that. You know, if only the right man comes along, if only the perfect job, if only we have a beautiful baby that everything is going to be ok. And, in fact, the message in my book is that its not one thing thats going to make your life perfect. And perfect is the enemy of the good; that what you really need to learn to do in your life is to have balance. Cspan two hundred and eightyfour pages. How long has this book been out now . Guest its been officially published on august 7th or 8th, but it was in the bookstores a couple of weeks before that. Cspan what has surprised you about the experience of the book tour, writing the book that you didnt expect . Guest the emotional reaction of women who have read the book has been sort of startling to me. I think sometimes when you finish a book, you tend to put it to bed and you tend to see it more distantly. And particularly as a journalist, you know, this was your work. And i knew that my book was one that i wanted to strike a raw nerve. I didnt realize it would strike a raw nerve with people in their own lives. One woman came up to me the other day and said, you know, i spent the whole afternoon after reading your book asking myself, am i happy . its a question i ask in the conclusion of my book. I said that one of the things when i first started my book, my husband and i were having breakfast or something and we were talking about what i wanted to do, and he said to me who are the women you know who are happy . And i had frozen at that moment and was being sort of a smartass and said, oh, you know, happy is not a good word. Its sort of. What does happy mean . And i prefer satisfied. And what i was really doing at that stage was stalling, kind of going through the list of women in my mind that i knew. I have a lot of really good women friends, all really interesting women who live very rich lives, who i love very dearly, but as i went through my list, every single one of them was struggling with something. And i think that thats something that most women are doing. And so when somebody comes up to me and says, i spent the whole afternoon Walking Around saying, am i happy . that had a profound sort of effect on me. Cspan what about the Media Coverage of. You mean youve been in the media all these years. Guest yes. Cspan are you happy with the way the medias treated your book . Guest yes, for the most part. I mean, ive had a lot of coverage, a lot more coverage than i anticipated. That was a big surprise to me. I wish the stories would focus a little bit more on the other women than just on rachael warby or the initial stories. A columnist for the chicago suntimes wrote a column a couple of days ago and she said its too bad in some ways that that story has overshadowed the other two stories because these are also compelling statements on the sort of state of american women, particularly the story about the breast surgeon who really did fight a lot of sexism, which you would not have expected at an ivy league institution. Cspan now the breast surgeon, Alison Estabrook has a couple of other connections i wanted to ask you about. One of them is her one of her best friends, jennifer patterson. Guest right. Cspan . Whose husband is . Guest Howard Stringer, who used to be the former head of cbs, who is now heading up some new kind of Cable Television thing thats a little bit up in the air because of mike ovitz, who arranged it, has left to go to disney. Cspan and also, annie liebovitz. Guest yes, very good friend of hers. They traveled when they were 16 or 17 to a kibbutz together in israel, although alisons not jewish, she wanted to spend some time on a kibbutz. Cspan and how did you find her . Guest i met alison by happenstance at at a dinner party, and she had this story to tell. One of the things i did when i was first starting out doing my book is i would ask everybody i knew, who are the interesting women you know, women who are working out some dilemmas and things of that sort . And she happened to be at a party where i was at a party, and so as a working journalist, especially when youre starting out on a book, youre always working. Cspan how come the publisher didnt put pictures in this book . Guest we talked about that because i initially wanted them to put pictures in there, and i think they thought that. I never got really a real answer. They just said, no, we think its better without pictures. But i think that in retrospect what they wanted people to do and its what you my book is written almost novelistically. Its a narrative, and when you read a narrative, oftentimes you like to just be able to imagine what somebody looks like. So i suspect maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe also suspect its more expensive. I dont know. Cspan did you tape record your interviews with them . Guest i tape recorded a lot of my interviews. Not all of them, but many of them. Cspan what are you doing with the tapes . Guest i have them. I always ke. Cspan i asked your husband the same question and he says that theyre. Guest i always keep my tapes. Cspan what are you going to do with them . Guest oh, im a pack rat. I keep everything. I kept all my notes from stories ive done, or most of my notes of important stories that ive ever done. Cspan let me back in as a way of you telling this story, because its got my attention that when Howard Stringer was the ceo of cbs at one point he becomes a part of this story because his wife puts him on the telephone with. Guest right. Cspan . Alison estabrook. Guest right. Howard stringers wife, jennifer patterson, was a dermatologist, who was a very good friend of alisons. They had met when they were residents together. And alison had called because she was very upset because she discovered that, first let me go back just a little bit there had been a history that when alison first had been hired at columbia she discovered accidentally about a year later that she was being paid 60,000 a year, while her two male colleagues with exactly the same credentials, started the same time were being paid 100,000 a year. Jennifer had been aware of that because that had been a very unsettling discovery to alison. And when alison had confronted her superiors about that, they said, oh, dont worry about it its water under the bridge. And being someone who loved her job, she said, ok. Its water under the bridge. A couple of years later, alison had been promised that she would be named the head of breast surgery at columbia when the two older chief breastthe chief breast surgeon and his top astop assistant left. When they left, though, she discovered, in fact, that they decided to go outside the hospital and look for another malean older male, someone with more experience. And alison was really upset because it was essentially a job she had been promised. She hadshe was the de facto head. She had been running the clmost of the clinic, had made major changes and she didnt know what to do about it. So she was a person who had a lot of again, good women friends who were sort of her sounding board. So she called one of her friends, who is a psychiatrist, who said, you know, call the new york times, call abc. This is outrageous. And then she called jennifer patterson, the dermatologist, Howard Stringers wife, and she got very upset because she, in fact, had also left academic medicine because her own experience had been that in academic medicine, unless youre a single woman with a that there is this sort of sense that you dont need any money. And in her case, she felt that she had been denied raises because she was the wife of a wealthy, prominent husband. So she realized she was getting really upset and she wasnt helping alison with this, so she put Howard Stringer on the phone and howard gave her the name of a good labor lawyer. And the labor lawyer said to her when she called her she said you have a very good case. There were other people in the hospital who were urging alison to sue, including the head of general surgery, which is quite unique, that somebody in that high a position would say to a colleague, you should sue the hospital because youre being mistreated here. And the labor lawyer said, you have a good case. Youre being paid 60 percent or 40 percent, i guess the other guys were being paid 60 percent more youre the only woman in general surgery at the hospital. You were promised this job. Youre being passed over for men who have less experience than you. But let me warn you, if you sue, your life is going to be hell, youre probably going to have to leave, and if you stay, youll have no friends. And i think that this is sort of the next stage of the workplace battles that the woman lawyer that lawyer was probably giving her pretty good advice because, in fact, what weve seen i covered the courts for a very long time at the post, and i have rarely seen somebody come out of a lawsuit whole because theres always an effort to destroy the other side. Cspan what did you learn about men that you didnt know already . Guest in this book . Cspan yes. Guest from all the stories . Cspan and i think basically what im asking about is men in the workplace. Guest one, i think that they dont really understand all the dilemmas that a woman brings to her job. I mean, i think when don hewitt, the 60 minutes producer, called me and said, i had no idea it was so hard for meredith and ive learned a lot, i think that thats pretty reflective of men in high positions in general. We talk a lot in this country about whether there is or isnt a level Playing Field in the workplace, particularly now that theres this debate about affirmative action. And the truth is that even when some external obstacles have been dismantled and many have, but many still exist, as you see in my book that its not a level Playing Field for women because women bring their entire lives to their jobs, men dont. Men tend to be able to compartmentalize their lives in a way that women cannot. They deal with conflict a lot better. Meredith vieiras husband said to me, one of the problems i think meredith has and i think a lot of the women professionals i know have is that she has no dimmer switch. She doesnt know how to deal with the conflict. I can modify my reaction to something thats bothering me according to sort of the level that i need to be able to continue to do what i want to do. With meredith and a lot of women, theres the sense that ive got to give one thing up in order to do the other thing, that its an eitheror situation. And i think that thats pretty typical. In rachael warbys case, when she discovered her husband was going to be challenged in the primary for reelection, it really just flummoxed her and sort of really threw her. And she said to me, i know im going to be stuck in a rut in this. Im like a bad needle in a record going around and around. Im stuck in a rut because i know this is going to really disturb my life for nine months i could do, you know, a few months, but not nine months. But she said, i know gaston, once he heard the bad news, it bothered him, but he got up the next morning and just said, ok these are the things ive got to do. cspan you were talking earlier about who youve talked to and who not. And you havent talked to rachael warby about all this the wife of the governor of West Virginia. The other two women you have talked to . Guest yes, i have. Cspan and whats their reaction to you . Guest Alison Estabrook has said that she finds it to be a kind of an amazing bonding process for her because, as i said, a number of patients have come up and said, ive had a similar experience. A number of people in the hospital, same thing. And. Cspan anything she didnt like . Guest pardon . Cspan anything she didnt like . Guest oh, she told me that somebody in the hospital, one of the superiors said, you know, alison my book was excerpted in the Washington Post and this person was complaining that alison, in the excerpt at least, didnt say that things have gotten better. And things have gotten much better for her because, in fact, the whole sort of supervisorial structure there has changed now. Cspan she today then is. Guest shes still the head, but theres a new chairman of the Surgery Department has replaced one who really, in fact, was one of the obstacles in her getting the job. Cspan at columbia presbyterian . Guest at columbia presbyterian. Shes been offered jobs in a lot of different places, places that want a woman as head of their breast Surgery Department. And so she told me this. She said she went and then told shes hired a new female surgeon to help her out and told her about this other persons complaints. And she said, well, alison, you know, when they write the stories of world war ii, they dont put a little asterisk at the end and say, and now were friends with the japanese. and so. I said to meredith once when she was crying are you worried about this talking so honestly and hasnt been hard for you . It was near the end of our process and she said yeah. I would like everyone to think that i have been victorious and successful and most people in the professional world dont want to hear that you are having a hard time but the truth is what good does it do me if i continue to say oh yes everything is fine and great treat people stay the same and people will say oh yes can do it again and i cant. And i think that thats true. Cspan there are a lot of Richard Cohens in this world, and you thank another Richard Cohen from the Washington Post in the back of your book. But back to the. Guest ok. Cspan . The husband of Meredith Vieira, one other small point. You talk about revealing for the first time publicly maybe that Richard Cohen has ms. The producer of jane wallace now. Has that bothered them . Has that bothered his career, that thats been admitted . Guest no, actually, he asked me to put it in there. I had initially just described it as a degenerative neurological disease because meredith had asked me to do that and that seemed to me to be fair. We were talking about her life, not his so much. And after he read the galleys copy, he said, i have a favor to ask you. He said, i want you to put in there that i have ms. He said, when you put in there i have a degenerative neurological disease, it makes it sound like that ive got something that is really awful and makes me sounds like im crippled. And the truth is hes not. I know hes not. And he doesnt really have a lot of symptoms of it, and i think he felt that it had been kind of unmasked already, or, as he said, youve already suggested theres something really wrong with me, so why dont you just really put the whole thing in . How do you how do you feel about doing that . And i said, well, if you want me to do that, thats fine. Id rather. Cspan anything left out of this book that youd just as soon your publisher had left in . Guest i really was able to do most of the cutting myself. I mean, my editor really did stylistic and grammatical change, but no factual. Cspan next book . Guest do you have a good idea . Cspan maybe the outtakes of this one . Guest the cdrom. Cspan are you going to write another book . Guest i hope so. Ive got a couple of different ideas, but i think that one of the problems that you have sometimes after you write a book is you live so much in your own head and you live so much in your own room that you really do need to get back out as im a journalist. Im not a novelist. You really do need to get back out and see what people are talking about, what theyre thinking and whats interesting because whats interesting to you after youve lived in your own head for several years could be pretty boring to other people. Cspan what are the we only have a minute what did you learn about yourself . Guest i learned that i needed to keep my own life in balance and in perspective, and that it was important for me to be honest when something was bothering me; that when you let a problem, when youre silent about a problem it only amplifies with time. Cspan why do you think people want to reveal all this about themselves . Guest i think its therapeutic. I think that when you talk about when you tell the truth about your life, it gives you insight and insight allows you to change something. Cspan do you think that after people read you doing this with these three women that theyll be as open as these were . Guest i would hope so. I. Cspan does it worry you at all that they might not be because they see. Guest to me . Cspan yes. Guest i worry that people would think that because of the reaction to rachael warby that they would say, oh, theres still a penalty for telling the truth. But i would like them to think not. I think that thereve been enough people who have really sort of applauded the courage of these women that, in fact, there is benefit to it. Cspan this is what the cover of the book looks like. The title is divided lives. And our guest has been its author, elsa walsh. Thank you very much. Guest thank you. Thank you so much. I host a program on npr. That is not a news program but with my older incarnation was the News Reporter and correspondent and that will explain why that was relevant but it is my pleasure to be here with these two incredible journalists, nicole kulish is say Award WinningCorrespondent Bureau chief from 2007 through 2013 have long divided his work the first time i have met him in person as somebody who once covered germany to cover with intelligence and grace and humor and a sensitivity over six years in the country. Lee met to in hamburg shortly after the September September 11th attacks and the investigative reporter