Guest Lillian Rubin

Lillian Rubin grew up on the streets of a teeming immigrant ghetto in the Bronx, a non-English-speaking child who was educated in the New York City school system. She says, "College was not an option for a girl of my class. Instead, I was expected to get a job and hand my pay over to my mother. Which I did until, like so many women of my generation, I escaped into marriage." In 1963, at the age of 39, she entered the University of California at Berkeley as a freshman, and emerged eight years later with a Ph.D. in Sociology, post-doctoral training in Clinical Psychology, and her first published book. My interdisciplinary training and experience has given me a unique place among social scientists, and all my work has sought to explore and illuminate human experience in that intersection where sociology and psychology meet. In the last three-and-a-half decades, Lillian published twelve books, all of them very well received and widely read and translated. My most recent work, 60 ON UP: The Truth About Aging in America (2007), "while written with wit and humor is also an unflinching look at the complex sociological, cultural, and psychological issues of aging in our time." More on her fascinating books here. Today Lilllian lives and paints in San Francisco.