Q&A: CCA speaker Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt spoke at Hillsdale College this week for the Center for Constructive Alternatives lecture series on the 1960s, where she spoke on “Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution.” A senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute and graduate of Cornell University, Eberstadt is an American essayist and novelist whose pieces have appeared in magazines including TIME, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, First Things, and The Weekly Standard. Eberstadt also served as a speech writer to Secretary of State George Shultz during the Reagan administration. She is also the author of a few nonfiction books, including “Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution.”

What is the significance of writing in your life? Have you always loved writing?

My main vocation honestly is being a wife and mother, but I have been writing since I could hold a pencil. I always hope that somewhere down there it serves the greater good and tells truths. I regard myself as a counter-cultural writer in the sense that a lot of what I do is against the mainstream grain, and that’s not because I want to be contrarian, it’s just that a lot of what is happening in the mainstream is wrong and bad for people. What I try to do is tell stories, whether in fiction or nonfiction, that tell truths and to do so respectfully. I also try to engage the other side, and that’s the hardest thing about writing: the other side doesn’t want to talk back…