to puerto rico. your folks came for a reason. they came for work. they came for opportunity. for the same reason that migrants from across the united states move from place to place. it s not just why people move throughout the country but also why people come from outside the country. one of the things that is reflected in your book is the experience of being an outsider and we re in this period where the other is very prevalent in our discourse. how do you take that in? not as a justice but as a citizen? one of the prizes of having written my memoir is that i had so many people who i have known as friends, virtually my entire adult life who shared with me
how did that impact on you? well, it was interesting, more directly than anything, it was the impetus for my mother to motivate me to go to college. her line to me always was sonia, you need always to be able to support yourself. you cannot depend on anyone else to support you because things happen. i didn t expect your dad to die. and you can t expect, even if you fall in love and marry, that that person can or will be with you your entire life. you also wrote and this is really what the subject of turning pages is that one of the ways that you sought refuge in your grief and trying to sort this out was to start reading and reading voraciously. can i show you the picture in
was asking me whether i was receiving favoritism that they weren t. it took me a long time to give her the response in my head that i should have given her at the time, which was, well, i m the head of a lot of student activity here. i also work saturday and sunday to help my mom with her finances. i m a award winning debater in my school activities. i do things they don t do. so maybe that s the reason, and not the one that you re insinuating. you ended up excelling at princeton, and sue ma cum laude, and phi beta kappa. you won the top prize and went to yale law school, excelled there as well and got the same kinds of questions, all circling
not even think about talking back to a stranger, all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. and i wanted to ask you as i was reading that, did you get the talk, did your brother get the talk? my brother did. i didn t because at least in my community at the time, i wasn t let out without having an adult with me. and whether it was my mother, my grandmother, one of my aunts, one of my male cousins, all of the young girls in my family were escorted. and so it was something you were taught by the deference that everyone showed to law enforcement. it was just accepted that this is something you had to do. but my brother, my mother moved us from the projects to co-op city in the bronx in order to escape the dangers and the temptations that my mother thought were inherent in the projects. you re unique on the court
one, turning pages, my life story. by the way, it s in spanish, too. why did you decide to write these books derivative of the original? well, the third book in this trilogy before us is the beloved world of sonia sotomayor and this is the middle school book, and this is an abridgment of the memoir. turning pages is a story about my life but through the influence of reading in my life. and of books. yeah. all three books in essence have one major purpose, to show people that no matter how difficult your life circumstances, you should never give up hope. let s talk a little bit about that. your folks came from puerto rico. i see the little frog, an homage