Mothers and daughters

Upon my college roommate Marianne's recommendation, I read psychotherapist Nancy Friday's My Mother My Self. Originally published in 1977, this was the first work to explore the mother-daughter interaction. It addresses how mothers serve as a role model for daughters' self-esteem, attitudes words men, and attitudes towards sexuality.

While I found this book somewhat dated (for instance, in its casting of the mother as the homemaker with frustrated ambitions) and somewhat unscientific in some its wishful "just-so" descriptions (Friday makes a weak connection between repressed anger and cancer), it helped me to examine and to better understand 1) my relationship with my mother and 2) how I derived some of my views on life.

In particular, Friday makes the following thought-provoking points:

• Mothers often start out (and often continue) to see daughters as narcissistic extensions of themselves. Friday says this explains the degree to which mothers fuss over their daughters' appearance, reputation, etc. and why mothers are often so critical of thier daughters.
• Society* tells women they are not complete without a man, without their children, etc. As a result, mothers often cling to their husbands and to their children, especially to their daughters. As a result, daughters are not "let go" in the same way that sons are. For this reason, many women have symbiotic relationships with their mothers. (Friday points out that it is not necessarily bad to have these symbiotic relationships, but it is important to recognize them for what they are.)
• Often as a result of not being "let go" by their mothers, many women go from having a symbiotic relationship with their mother to having a symbiotic relationship with their husbands. Friday points out that it is good for women to live on their own and have independent lives after separating from their mothers; this helps them realize that they can be on their own and not die.
  
• It is not usually acceptible to acknowledge the competition (general and sexual) that almost always exists between mothers and their adolescent daughters. This competition often causes many problems between mother and daughter; it helps to understand the competition as the root of the problem.
• Women often (consciously or subconsciously) adopt their mothers as a model for how they behave domestically. Many women will have fabulous and independent single lives in their 20's and then become quite similar to their (homemaking*) mothers after they marry. Friday's explanation for this is that these women can invent their own models of how to live while they are single, but they default to patterns they learned from their mothers once those apply. Recognizing this is step towards breaking out of the patterns.
  
• Our attitudes about our bodies and towards sexuality have to do with our mothers' attitudes and things she taught us when we were very young. It is helpful and h to reflect on our mother's attitudes.

My Mother My Self was helpful to me because it provided another world-view in which to frame issues I often think about regarding mother-daughter relationships, gender roles, etc. I would recommend reading this book with a healthy level of skepticism. (I have found the phenomena that Friday describes to be true; I am more suspicious of the reasons she provides for their occurence.) If nothing else, it is interesting.

* This is one of the places where (I hope) the book does not age well.

The Genius Fallacy

During our department's PhD Open House this past spring, a student asked what I thought made a PhD student successful. I realized that my answer now is different than it would have been a few years ago.

My friend Seth tells me I need to build more suspense in my writing*, so let me first tell my life story.

The whole time I was growing up, I was slightly disappointed that I wasn't some kind of prodigy. It seemed that my parents were telling me every day about so-and-so's toddler son who was playing Beethoven concertos from memory, so-and-so's daughter who, as an infant, had already completed a course on special relativity. In order to give me the same opportunities to demonstrate my genius, my parents spent all their money on piano lessons, gymnastic classes, writing camps, art camps, tennis camps, and extracurricular math classes. Unfortunately, nobody ever said, "This is the best kid I have ever seen. I must take her away from her family to train her for greatness."

"Child prodigies have hard lives," my father would tell me, probably trying hiding his disappointment. "It can be difficult for them to make friends because others can't relate to how gifted they are."

"Just work hard, be a nice person, and try to be happy," my mother would tell me. "You didn't know how to cry when you were born. I'm glad you're able to talk in full sentences."

Despite the comforting words from my parents, there was always a part of me that held out hope of discovering a secret prodigious talent. But the angst of not being a prodigy was small compared to the existential angst of being newly alive and so I mostly tried to work hard, to be a nice person, and to be happy. This got me all the way to college, where I thought I could leave all this prodigy nonsense behind me.

In college, I discovered that the pressure to be immediately and wildly gifted came in another form. In my first two years of school, I attended many talks and panels by professors telling us what we should do with our lives. I attended a research panel in the economics department, where one of the professors kept repeating the word "star."

"You have to be a super star to succeed in a department like ours," he said about what it meant to be on the tenure track in the economics department. "I want undergraduate researchers who are stars."

I didn't know what a star was and I didn't presume to be one, but I liked the professor's research, so I emailed him my resume and said I would like to work with him.

He never wrote back.

I resigned myself to not being a star. I took hard classes with people who had medaled in math, informatics, and science olympiads, wondering how it would feel to do the problem sets if I had such a gifted, well-trained mind. I also became concerned about my future. What was my place in a world that worshipped instatalent?

It all began to change when I began to talk more with the professors in the Computer Science department. Despite my lack of apparent star quality, my professors seemed to like answering the questions I asked them. They pitched me projects I could do, and before I knew it I was applying to PhD programs and preparing to spend the next few years doing academic research. As I was graduating, I spoke with my one professor to get advice about my future in research.

"Research isn't just about smarts," my professor told me. At the time, I thought this was a white lie that professors told to their students who weren't prodigies.

Then she told me something that turned my worldview upside down. "My biggest concern for you, Jean, is that you need to start finishing projects," she told me. "You need to focus."

It was then that I began to realize that maybe the myth of the instagenius was but a myth. I had gone from interest to interest, from project to project, waiting to find It, that easy fit, that continuous honeymoon. With some projects I had It for a while, long enough to demonstrate to myself and others that I could finish. Then I moved on, waiting to fall in love with a problem, waiting for a problem to choose me. What I had failed to see was that this relationship with a problem didn't just happen: I had to do my share of the work.

Still, I clung to the dream of the easy problem. At Google, employees get to have a 20% project: a side project they spend the equivalent of one day a week working on that may or may not make its way into production eventually. In graduate school, my 20% project was looking for an easier project--a project with which I had more chemistry, a project with fewer days lost to dead ends and angst. One of my hobbies involved interviewing for internships in completely different research areas. Another one of my hobbies was fantasizing about becoming a classics PhD student, despite knowing no ancient languages. (I once took an upper-level literature seminar on Aristotle with the leading world scholar on Homeric poetry and I thought he had a pretty good life.)

But because I like to finish what I started, the PhD became a process of learning to persevere. Instead of indulging the temptation to switch projects, advisors, or even schools, I kept going. I endured something like five rounds of rejections on the first paper towards my PhD thesis, and multiple years of people telling me that maybe I should find another topic, because I didn't seem in love. Eventually, I learned that every problem that looks like it might be easy has hard parts, every problem that looks like it might be fun has boring parts, and all problems worth solving are full of dead ends. I finally learned, in the words of my friend Seth, that "the grass is brown everywhere."

And this shattering of my belief in instagenius has shaped my conception of what makes a student a star. There was a time when I, like many people, thought that the superstars were the ones who sounded the most impressive when they spoke, or who had the most raw brainpower. If you asked me what I thought made a good researcher, I may have said some other traits like creativity and good taste in problems. And while all these certainly help with being a good researcher, there are plenty of people with these traits who do not end up being successful.

What I have learned is that discipline and the ability to persevere are equally, if not more, important to success than being able to look like a smart person in meetings. All of the superstars I've known have worked harder--and often faced more obstacles, in part due to the high volume of work--than other people, despite how much it might look like they are flying from one brilliant result to another from the outside. Because of this, I now want students who accept that life is hard and that they are going to fail. I want students who accept that sometimes work is going to feel like it's going to nowhere, to the point that they wish they were catastrophically failing instead because then at least something would be happening. While confidence might signal resilience and a formidable intellect might decrease the number of obstacles, the main differentiator between a star and simply a smart person is the ability to keep showing up when things do not go well.

It has become especially important for me to fight the idolization of the lone genius because it is not just distracting, but also harmful. Currently, people who "look smart" (which often translates into looking white, male, and/or socioeconomically privileged) have a significant advantage for two main reasons. The first reason has to do with self-perception. Committing to hard work and overcoming obstacles is easier if you think it will pay off. If someone already does not feel like they belong, it is easier for them to stop trying and self-select out of a pursuit when they hit a snag. The second reason has to do with perception by others. Research suggests that in fields that value innate talent, women and other minorities are often stereotyped to have less of it, leading to unfair treatment.

And so I've written this post not just to reveal my longstanding delusions of grandeur, but also to start a discussion how the myth of instagenius holds us back, as individual researchers and as a community. Would love to hear your thoughts about how we can move past the genius fallacy.

Related writing:

• The Structured Procrastination Trap
• The Angst Overhead
• Five Things More Important About a Research Project than Being in Love
• On Quora: How common is it for PhD students to do work in projects that they are not passionate in?

* Seth also tells me the main idea of this blog post is the same as Angela Duckworth's book Grit. I guess I should tell you that you could read that instead of this. On the subject of the lack of originality of my ideas, you should also read what Cal Newport has to say about the "passion trap."

Why I'm Not Taking a Vacation from Facebook

The internet does not seem to like Facebook these days. Studies are coming out (for instance, this PLOS ONE study) suggesting that Facebook decreases happiness in young adults. In solidarity with the teenagers, Kayak founder Paul English is taking a vacation from it the month of October.

This is too bad. I don't hate social media. Like any of you I also like going into the mountains, throwing my phone into a lake, and bonding over shared processing of primal angst. But I wouldn't be the most happy doing only that. I thrive on being connected to hundreds of people at once. And you might, too.

I have always loved the internet for making this possible. As a kid with diverse interests and not that many people to talk to about them, the internet was a way for me to have the conversations I wanted to have. I have had an e-mail account since 1995. I may have read every page on the internet about the USA women's gymnastics team during the 1996 Olympics. I got a lot of flak for running my own GeoCities website about tamagotchis--complete with pop-ups and frames--in middle school. During my teenage years, when I became only slightly cooler, my social life consisted mostly, to my mother's chagrin, of spending my evenings with at least five AOL Instant Messenger chat windows open while "doing my homework." I talked to friends from my school, friends from other schools, friends I met at summer camp, and friends of friends who were interesting to talk to. If only there were a way for me to do this more efficiently...

When Facebook first came out, I was excited that everyone else could join me in having an active online life. As part of the first Harvard class ('08) to have Facebook accounts before arriving on campus, we all spent the later parts of our summers stalking our soon-to-be classmates. By the first week of freshman year, it was rare to come across someone who had not already established, through judging self-manufactured personas on Facebook, who was hot, who was not, and who was planning to take way too many classes. And sure, at times it was a bit overwhelming to be able to browse just how much smarter, better-looking, and popular other people seemed to be. But that's college. Insecurity is inevitable, especially on a campus where it seems like every other person is jumping to tell you how early they got up, how many miles they ran, or how smart their boyfriend was. And you learn to calibrate for the "Facebook gap:" people are probably adding a couple of inches to their height, taking a few pounds of their weight, and lying about their age... oh wait, that's online dating.

Even in the beginning, Facebook was useful for facilitating deeper connections. In late August before our freshman year, one of the Harvard websites had a glitch that allowed us to see our room assignments, which normally would not be available until we arrived on campus. News of this glitch spread through the mailing list for the incoming class (another useful virtual community) and many of us posted our room assignments to Facebook. This is how four of my five freshman roommates and I found each other and began corresponding. By the time we had gotten to school, we already knew where the others were from, what our backgrounds and habits were like, and what our hopes and dreams were for our freshman year. This helped us establish a rapport--as well as real memories we still refer back to--before we were able to meet in person. It may not be a coincidence that despite being quite different on the surface, the four of the five of us continued living together for the rest of college.

Social media, by supporting the broadcast-and-see-what-comes-back method of social interaction, has enriched my life in many ways over the years. When I was younger and less busy, I would announce on Facebook whenever I was going to be in a different city so I could meet up with whichever friends happened to be there at the time. One time, Facebook helped me reconnect with a Korean-American friend I had not seen since we met at art camp in high school who was randomly teaching English in my Chinese hometown. Another time, my Facebook-location-announcement scheme facilitated a San Francisco hang-out with a childhood friend who introduced me to a friend who introduced me to a friend--via Facebook--who ended up showing my friend and me a fun evening in Barcelona. By giving me a forum for announcing my intentions to the world, Facebook has made it easy for the world to help me achieve what I want, whether it is having a discussion about some topic or acquiring some physical object. Facebook has given me all sorts of things: product and app recommendations (I learned about InstaPaper through Facebook), link suggestions, and even roommate invitations.

Because of how easy it makes it to access interesting information, social media has come to dominate my media consumption. For the media diary we were supposed to keep for a class last semester on the news ecosystem, I discovered that I spent 78.6 hours in conversations and it was my primary form of media consumption. (I had a pretty insane spreadsheet for tracking this...) Of my conversations, 27.6% occurred on social media. One could wonder whether I am spending my time gossiping when I could be reading the news, by let me convince you that this is not the case. On Facebook and Twitter, I like to follow people (for instance, Arianna Huffington) and organizations (for instance, Forbes Tech News) who post informative pieces. I also actively unfollow people who flood my stream with posts I don't care about. I have recently also begun following Facebook pages that provide a steady stream of positive quotes, for instance Positivity. Social media has made it much easier to do two of my favorite things: read about the world and have conversations about what I read.

You might ask whether this time I am spending on Facebook is taking time away from forming genuine connections. I don't think so. Much of the time I spend on Facebook is time I would otherwise use for working or reading, activities that are not particularly social. If I weren't having a conversation on social media, I would likely not be having a conversation at all--in-person conversations during work breaks take far higher levels of coordination and serendipity than the asynchrony of social media requires. For me, taking a break to go on Facebook or Twitter is like walking down a hallway full of exactly whom I want to see. For some kinds of work, it's also nice to have Facebook providing a warm background buzz. Of course it's good to have one-on-one conversations, but sometimes it's nice to be able to go to a coffee shop or party and experience human interaction secondhand. And just as it's not the best idea to do all of your work in the busiest coffee shop in town, you probably do not want to be constantly connected to all 3000 of your best Facebook friends.

So sure, if you are a misanthrope or agoraphobe it's probably best to stay off, but social media does not have to be bad. It may take some establishment of good practices, but what worthwhile activity doesn't?

Overhead on the MIT Saferide shuttle

I overhead the following conversation conducted in earnest by two (presumably) undergraduate women on the shuttle to Boston the other day:

Woman #1: Sometimes I don't know what the point is of working so hard. I mean, what if I graduate college and then get married right away?
Woman #2: Yeah...
Woman #1: I mean, that's what my mom did.
Woman #2: I think I'm going to work for 5-10 years, then start popping out the babies.
...
Woman ?: I would get so bored. There would be so much Oprah...
Woman ?: Yeah, a lot of talking on the phone...

I will admit my first reaction was one of disbelief: a combination of "can you believe these girls?!" and "what a waste of an MIT education!" I was struck by how resigned these girls were to their fates, and how unreflective they seemed to be about the other life possibilities out there. I was particularly surprised to hear such a conversation on an MIT shuttle: it seems like if you are going to spend all this effort (and tuition) on an undergraduate education in order to stay at home, it is a waste of your own time/money and the institution's time/money that you did not get a liberal arts education.

Though it is easy to blame these girls for not having more agency in deciding their futures, we must take some societal responsibility for these attitudes. Most people do not really know what's out there for them at age 20 and follow models that others have set out for them. While the young man who does not know what he's doing with his life will often find himself enrolling in law school, business school, or some prestigious Ph.D. program, the young woman who does not know what she's doing may have much less career-oriented paths to fall back on*. While I fully believe in the freedom to choose, it is not freedom if the chooser is not aware of what the choices mean. Choosing to go to MIT and work hard seems to be at odds with the "choice" to stay home with Oprah and the phone; I believe that if these women were aware of their life choices, they may choose differently. (Even if they chose to stay at home, they may discover that Oprah and phone are not the only possible activities.)

While on the shuttle, I wanted to tell these girls that they do not have to be like their mothers. Perhaps I will do that if there is a next time.

* This is an instance of the phenomenon where many women default to their mother's template of domesticity, often without reflecting upon why they are doing this. (I discuss this in my post about My Mother My Self.

Expectations of low ability cause deadweight loss

I was talking to my college roommate, Aliza, who is teaching high school English with Teach for America, about how people good at one thing are not expected to be good at other things. She said that her students are often shocked when she demonstrates ability to do things other than English--in particular, they are shocked when she can do math, as she sometimes does when calculating GPA's in her head. We discussed how such expectations are bogus, and it was the expectation of our parents that we would excel in everything that caused us to have more well-rounded abilities. I told her about how when I was very small I could do all kinds of math but couldn't put sentences together, and she told me about how her reading ability was in such contrast to her math ability that her first grade teacher expressed confusion to Aliza's mother. We were both forced to overcome these early challenges, and though we ended up choosing careers (or the beginnings of careers) with what felt more natural, both of us became proficient in the basic skills--I am now able to express myself through writing and she can now do math. For both of us, it had been very important that parents, teachers, etc. expected us to be good at more than one subject.

It is an interesting (and harmful) phenomenon that people are only expected to be good at one thing. (For instance, people who are good at writing are not expected to be as good at math; people who are good athletes are not expected to be good at school.) I propose that it is this self-fulfilling prophecy rather than any sort of truth that causes people to have specialized skills. Few people are so lacking in natural aptitude that they cannot acquire the skills to be proficient in writing, math, or (yes, even) programming. The reason you see so many seemingly smart people who are not proficient in all necessary things is due to a combination of poor teaching and lack of self-motivation (due to expectations from self and others and other psychological barriers).

I've stated briefly in my post about math kids the reason why people good at one thing should be good at other things: if you have the educational background/natural ability to really excel in one field, you should also have the educational background/aptitude for at least proficiency in everything else. This is why it is not surprising when kids who are good at math are also good writers, musicians, etc. The same goes for good athletes: someone who excels at football likely had good early childhood nutrition and parents who didn't beat him/her, and this is enough background to expect that they had everything required to be proficient in reading, writing, math, art, etc. (The reason you don't see more football players who are also great writers and musicians is because nobody requires them to develop these other abilities.)

So why is it the case that expectations are such? There have existed people living in a better time: think of how many well-rounded scholars, thinkers, and "Renaissance men" have existed in the past. Well-educated people were well-educated and expected to prove mathematical theorems while discovering physics phenomena while painting. Things have come to the way they are today because of too much democracy and laziness. People like the belief that you can only be "really good" at one thing because 1) it makes people feel better about themselves when they see other people who are good at something and 2) people who are good at one thing can become lazy and not try hard at other things.

It is my belief that most people are not such idiots that they cannot become good at things if they tried, as people are generally pretty smart about things they care about (whether it be math, politics, sports, or clothes). For this reason I'm not too patient with people who use the excuse that they are "not good at X" for various things. Try harder?

A Tribute to Scott Krulcik

Yesterday morning, I read a news article that my former student Scott Krulcik had died. Surely they’ve got the wrong guy, I thought.

Scott on an apple-picking trip that he helped organize.

Almost comically wholesome, Scott was what probably every parent dreams their kid will grow up to be. He was the kind of person who remembered not just your birthday but also your dairy allergy and made a dairy-free dessert in celebration. Not only did Scott cook many of his own meals (an impressive feat for a college student!), he also carried around his own silverware to minimize his impact on the environment. Scott’s stories of fertilizing his lawn by hand and fixing things with his toolbox impressed us so much that we came to call him the “Dad” of the research group, despite the fact that two other members of the group were actual fathers.

It’s very confusing when someone who has no business dying dies. And Scott, in particular, should have had absolutely no business with death. This was supposed to be the beginning of everything for Scott. We had celebrated his graduation from Carnegie Mellon just seven months ago. He recently moved into his first post-college apartment in the West Village. He seemed to be excelling at the transition to the working life, spending his spare time running, exploring restaurants, and reading books at the wooden desk he had built for himself the summer after graduation. Days before the news, he sent me a picture of the holiday lights he and his roommate had just put up in their apartment. It was supposed to be the first of many iterations of his holiday decorations.

Scott at a Thanksgiving dinner he helped organize, with
the turkey he made.

The best way to describe Scott is that he was a really, really great person. (The past tense is still a shock here.) I met him because he was enrolled in the security course I was teaching with Matt Fredrikson spring of 2017. As part of the first assignment, Matt and I had asked the students to email us introducing themselves and telling us why they were taking the course. Scott had a particularly memorable self-introduction. He talked about trying to be a good human who wants to help other humans and explained the connection with computer security. In his words, if he’s producing software that helps people in some other way but leaves them vulnerable to identity theft and blackmailing, then the software isn’t really helping people. Here, I thought, was a student who really got it.

Scott presenting his senior thesis project as a poster.

Over the course of the semester, it became clear that Scott was both incredibly committed to doing good and preternaturally adept at seeing connections. The day we taught the class about information flow security, he discovered and reported such a bug in Instagram that leaked people’s private photos. (The other students became more motivated to pay attention after they learned of his success with Facebook’s bug bounty program!) After he emailed the course staff observing similarities between reference monitors in computer security and repair proteins he was learning about in biology, I asked him if he had thought about writing a senior thesis. Scott showed up with admirable requirements: he needed to be able to explain the importance of the project to his mother, who was nontechnical and whose opinion he cared about deeply, and he needed to work on a project that could really help people. After exploring a breathtaking range of topics, ranging from using programs to model history (Scott loved military history) to detecting bugs in Facebook access policies, we finally settled on an idea that Scott came up with himself, combining ideas from my prior research with the work he had been doing at Google as an intern. The project was so compelling that even before it was finished, he was already attracting attention from people in industry.

Scott celebrating success in building the movie screen.

Once I got to know Scott, I discovered that he brought an equivalent level of effort and creativity to make people’s lives better in an immediate way. Scott’s positivity and energy was infectious in our research group and beyond. When our French group member asked about Thanksgiving, Scott insisted that we have a group Thanksgiving dinner complete with a turkey. I told him we could have a turkey if he took the lead on it, fully expecting him to let that requirement drop, but Scott got instructions from his mother and executed beautifully on brining, roasting, and carving the bird. When another group member suggested we host a Lindsay Lohan movie night, Scott took my somewhat joking suggestion that we should build our own movie screen and ran with it, showing up with his “Dad” toolbox and corralling fellow group members to work late into the night to realize his vision. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Parent Trap was one of his favorite movies.) One of my favorite memories of Scott is when he convinced me that, as a faculty judge of the CMU hackathon TartanHacks, I should come push the snack cart with him at midnight, citing how happy tired hackers are to get refreshments at that hour. The reactions across campus when people saw us approaching with clementines and cookies surrounded by a cloud of bluetooth-powered ice cream truck music confirmed that Scott knew just how to make people smile.

With Scott’s passing, the world has lost someone with enormous potential for using their capabilities for good. It is sad enough to lose Scott as a former student and friend. On top of that, I am also sad that the world will lose a rare software engineer who is deeply thoughtful about the process and purpose of software. After Scott graduated, he became a significant source of interesting reading for me: I regularly received notes and articles from him about software engineering or cybersecurity. He was thinking hard about how people should create robust, secure software. He was thinking hard about what it meant to build things that would help people. He was a protector of people’s personal information and was critical of processes and practices that seemed irresponsible with data privacy. And his ideas were spot on: he had an understanding of ecosystems and the implications of different approaches far beyond what I could say of myself at that age. In many respects, I saw Scott more as a peer than as a mentee and would seek his insightful feedback on ideas and drafts.

If life were one of the movies that Scott loved, we would not have lost him so early. This would have been the point in the story when he faced the first obstacle, only to overcome it swimmingly and go on to defeat all the bad guys and save the entire world. The group “Dad” would have gotten the chance to become an actual father. He would have become known for helping people in some big way while maintaining an impressive level of humanity and making the people around him happier. But real life doesn’t play by these rules, and Scott is gone.

Since hearing the news, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite books, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In the book, Clarissa Dalloway’s views are shaped by having watched her sister get killed by a falling tree. From that moment onward, Clarissa no longer believes in any higher order and instead lives her life to make things better in small ways each moment. I found her reaction to senseless tragedy inspiring when I first read the book and even more inspiring now. The least we can do to honor Scott is to remember to leave things better than we found them. Without Scott, it’s on us to carry on the legacy he was just starting to build.

With thanks to Jacob Van Buren for collaboration and Aliza Aufrichtig for edits.

The memoirs of Donna Williams

I recently read about Donna Williams, an Australian woman thought to be deaf and psychotic as a toddler and later diagnosed as autistic. She has written several books about her life, the first of which is the once best-selling Nobody Nowhere. She writes of its accidental publication:

I wrote the first of my four autobiographical works, Nobody Nowhere, on the verge of suicide after a wild half-crazy life with abuse, homelessness and ultimately hope for belonging only to find I was terrified of real closeness. I had a last inkling of hope that I couldn't truly say I'd tried my hardest to cope if I'd never fully disclosed the nature of my own private world. So I wrote out everything that mattered... and decided to give it to one child psychiatrist in the hope they could tell me what kind of mad I was... My intention was to then shred it, burn it and leave this world. Instead it was passed on to his colleague, then from her to her publisher, from him to an agent and from there out into the world it became a number one international bestseller...

In this book about her early life, Williams discusses extensively her "ghosts" Willie and Carol, two different and opposing personalities who help her exist in society. From the website:

Carol plays the mother's doll, intertwined with Willie's violent and defensive outbursts and fierce self protection mechanisms. Between Donna's autistic responses and behaviours, Carol, behaves like people on TV sit-coms, goes to school, even goes through the motions of 'friends', and develops a broad range of mimicked speech, stored phrases and charicatures, saving Donna from a life in an institution and often from the very real threat of death.

As the teenage years approach Carol and Willie fight it out for control of the body with the real Donna on the sidelines as the lot of them drift into homelessness, poverty and domestic prostitution passed from stranger to stranger.

I plan to read this book once I acquire it. Williams also has an extensive website which I recommend reading.