According to my Mom, “The world hard boils us and then expects us to hatch.” In keeping with this, the typical biography is an egg salad sandwich — full of savory, hardboiled facts that have little to do with who-the-person-is and mostly to do with how the world shapes, defines, and validates people. I want this biography to be different. I want it to be more about the chicken and less about the egg; more about our shared animating spirit and less about the static, inanimate facts that pertain only to me.

I am certain that no matter how hardboiled we are, our inner chicken is alive and well and ready to grow. Often this process of growing is a crapshoot. People are born into wonderful families with every privilege in the world and they wither, while other people are born into terrible situations with no privileges, and they thrive. I’d be an idiot to think I could de-mystify this process of growing. But I am passionately committed to making it less of a crapshoot.