THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410140790
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
Like for so many newcomers to America, Jill Ker Conway's first vision of the United States was New York City. She saw her new world through torrential rain holding the city captive - the victim of an old-fashioned East Coast hurricane. It's a fitting backdrop for her major life transition.
Conway's latest memoir, True North, picks up where The Road To Coorain, her best-selling girlhood tale, left off. Her earlier book told of growing up on a sheep station in the Australian outback. Now, we renew acquaintance with a 25-year-old Conway as she arrives in America to begin her studies at Harvard.
Conway, who served as president of Smith College for 10 years, is a visiting scholar and professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society. She has written or edited six other books.
Her writing in True North is electric. Conway brings the evolution of women's struggles alive because she lived the experience. She rekindles the magic of college life and learning for any who've forgotten the recipe. Always, she lives for flashes of understanding.
Conway, a woman of great depth, confronts the issues that matter. A historian, she contemplates human relationships in the age of the disposable everything and questions how the past shapes the future.
Clearly she came into her own while studying in Cambridge.
``Here, I was part of a community where everyone was awake, as intent as I was on mastering knowledge,'' she writes.
At Harvard, she met five friends whom she would keep for years. Together, they ponder the role of women. They question why the bias against women is so strong in academics.
Along the way, Conway falls in love with John Conway - a Harvard professor 18 years her senior. She wrestles with the problems associated with being true to her love of history while also following her heart.
``I didn't want to become the typical Cambridge-style wife - superbly educated, someone else's muse - much admired for her conversation and her excellent, crusty, homemade bread,'' she writes.
We are drawn to Conway's writing by her refreshing honesty. She doesn't hold back; she doesn't sugarcoat. She tells us about the black nights she knew in Australia while caring for her sick mother. She admits researching the amount of Nembutal needed to take her own life and counting out that number of capsules for her bedside table.
With great clarity, she tells us of her husband's bouts with depression: ``I thought of his temperament as having the qualities of a medieval stained-glass window, rich in its range of colors, complex in texture, mediating great beauty. But just as the colors of a stained-glass window vanish when the sun disappears behind a cloud, so John's beautiful personality could be suddenly, temporarily, extinguished, replaced by swift-moving moods of anger, suspicion and despair.''
John remains her compass point - her ``true north,'' although she knows she sometimes must navigate without him.
In 1973, Conway accepted a job at the University of Toronto, becoming its first female vice president. That position led in 1975 to her presidency of Smith College.
Conway leaves us intrigued and aching to know more about her days at Smith and her life afterward. And she leaves us with a renewed zest for life and learning. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MICHELE MCDONALD
In ``True North,'' Jill Ker Conway picks up where she left off in
her memoir of girlhood, ``The Road to Coorain.''
by CNB