“At 5’ 1”, Gish was a person any jock could pick up with one hand,” she relays. “So she spent a lot of time upside down.”

‘Something With Words’

With talents in a variety of fields, Jen never settled on a career in writing while at Harvard. By the time she graduated, she had not taken any fiction classes or written any short stories.

“I didn’t actively think of myself as a writer in college,” she says.

Upon graduation, Fitzgerald found her a job with DoubleDay Publishing.

After missing her House graduation ceremony for national crew heats, Jen went to New York to follow Fitzgerald’s suggestion that she “do something with words.”

During her year in the city, Jen formed a literary society of sorts with friends Louise R. Radin ’76 and Jonathan D. Weiner ’76. They attended poetry readings and made frequent trips to Gotham Bookmart, while Jen took writing classes at the New School.

Radin describes their time in New York as “remarkably optimistic, energetic, and heady,” but says she saw in Jen a “large struggle against parental expectations.”

Her three brothers would embark on careers in business, and her sister, who graduated in 1979, was set to become a doctor.

“Out of a need to do something practical,” and with law and medicine ruled out, Jen entered business school at Stanford.

“That’s where I had my first fiction class. Really, all I went to were my fiction classes, not the rest of them,” she chuckles. “I basically did everything wrong.”

Jen says she got by with the help of her classmate and husband-to-be, David O’Connor, who “would sit me down before my exams and tell me, ‘these are the three things you need to know. And I would pass.’”

Her struggle with her parents’ expectations, and their opposition to her writing, ended when she finally decided to drop out of business school at the beginning of her second year.

“I realized my life was my own, that I was making the decision to listen to my parents,” Jen says. “It sounds morbid, but I realized that I would die, and that the moment before, I would reflect on myself and think, was I happy?”