i'm going to be fascinated to read through the entire book because again, i'm a big believer that hillary clinton's campaign in 2008 was every bit as transformative as the president obama's. but without further ado, gail collins. [applause] >> thank you. it's great to be here. this is so exciting. thank you, joe. this is really my first time out with this book. i'm very excited to talk about how it came to be your i'm starting to think about it myself for the first time. this really all began in 1999 when the millennium was approaching. and i was working at "the new york times," which was preparing its millennium coverage here to those of you who read the times a lot know that when the times decide it's really going to cover something, there is no stone unturned.

you really go at it all the way. so we had stuff prepared on diseases over the last thousand years, and wars over the last thousand years, religion over the last thousand years, dogs over the last thousand years, trees and everything. book called the millennium bug and i was a woman so i was really way up in front for the nominees for writing the introduction to the millennia women's issue and it turned out though it was strange land although i had written a book about the millennium i have not written much about women in it. it with a very weird when i thought about looking back. i was obsessed with whether or not they have forks in the year 1,000 family did a lot of lists of best and worst of the last

thousand years and looking back at the looking back the other day, and our worst wedding of the last thousand years since we are talking about weddings was in the 12th century in belgium when the bride, the blessed oda protested hurt loss of virginity by cutting off her nose in the middle of the ceremony. so a lot worse than being at the leftover table. [laughter] anyhow, i had not thought about women. i thought about blessed oda but not the trajectory of women. as i wrote this as a for this big humongous takeout we were doing, i really focused for the first time on the fact that the historic attitude toward women, towards the difference between the gender, that women were less intelligent, women were weaker,

women belonged in the home and men had control of the public sphere, the business and religion and politics and everything else. but all of that stuff had been with us since the beginning of western civilization just ingrained in the core of our societies and that that enormous claw long progression of century after century after century and did in my lifetime that all this stuff was shattered while i was a life of all those billions of women who traveled through the world and it's just not me. today when i think about it it cheers me up through almost anything. so i thought that was the thing i really wanted to write about in some way, and after the millennium, after we had all recovered, i started working on a book that was quick to be the story of what happened to american women from the 1600's to the present and it was called

"america's win in." and i had the best time writing this. there was so much i had no idea about. once i found this recipe for a victorian kitchen for how to make a basic cake and it was like to take the sugar, egg, the butter and beat for three-quarters of an hour, it told me everything i wanted to know about victorian housewives for ever and there was so much like that i wanted to tell in the book in terms of the big stuff happening, the historic moments, the colonial period, the immigration, susan b. anthony suffrage, the whole thing. but also have on the bottom the story of how regular when in lived and how their lives changed as all of these things happened. i'm a very big believer when i see a picture of the signing of the magna car or the first

thanksgiving or joan of arc in the field or whatever. i always want to know where the people went to the bathroom and what kind of shoes they had and were they comfortable. those things about interest me. what happened with this book, it was a wonderful book to write. i was so happy to do it, but i know you've all had the experience of taking history courses, a survey or what ever and get a great information but by the time you get to world war ii there's no more time. it's the end of the year. i went through all of my education and never found out how world war ii got started, just never got to it. and that's sort of what happened with this book. by the time i got to build or to i was out of time and out of pages and out of energy. so as the great moment appeared

i just wound up and said everything changed, it wasn't that great and that's the end of the story. and i loved the book so much but i knew i was calling to have to do a second book and actually pick up and talk about how that thing happened that everything changed that we had known for all those centuries. so that's this book. and it starts in 1960 in manhattan with a secretary named lois rabinowitz who is expelled from traffic court downtown for attempting to pay traffic ticket while wearing slacks. and we have a picture of her in the book. she is the tiniest best groomed person wearing slacks in the history of the world but the judge was overwhelmed with horror the idea a woman would go into public and to his court wearing pants that he just went

nuts. started spewing every possible metaphor pants in the family, pedestal, different thing and it summarize everything about 1960 which was a time and pretty much keeping with the year 1,000 when it came to the way people lived and the way they regarded women. and i do find going back that both women who were there in 1960 and especially women who were not are particularly and locked out the couldn't get credit name and age the times which are a great source of information on this stuff i must say found one woman that had to go to a mental hospital to get her husband to cosign the lease on their apartment because they could just trust the woman to do it and there was a great story about this poor woman who later became governor of vermont,

madeleine keen in, who came to new york wanting to be a journalist, i think it was 1960. she had gone to the "washington post." they said no we are not going to hire a woman this year. she went to the province. they said no, we had a woman here once and she was raped in the parking lot. so then she went to "the new york times," mike deaver and said i would like to be a copy editor, i went to school and so on and they said well, we don't have an job like that but we of an opening in the cafeteria. when she came the guards in the front walk to re and said hello, governor hauer you because they were sure the guard was the

governor and she was the wife. on wanted to write a book about the great triumph on the great defeat and the women at the bottom so we interviewed might researchers went out and with me we interviewed about 130 average women who hadn't been part of any great movement and talked about what their lives were like. and what the new. so on the top we had the e.r.a. and we revisited the women's liberation movement and which was so much fun to go back to. i remember the great glory moments and hideous moments but there were so many semi silly moments i have forgotten. one woman told me she was at antioch and wanted to go to the women's meeting so she walked in, she was a little freshman and they gave her a mirror and told her to take off her pants

and examine her vagina and her neighbors that china to learn more about productive systems and get comfortable with one's body and that was going all over the place for a short period that was written it makes you look back nostalgic at the days the women got together for lunch in the afternoon and it was all about bridge, you know. [laughter] but no more. so, we went through and i had such a good time talking to women, especially the women who filed suits who went to court and these amazing working women who were trying to support their families and were told they couldn't have a promotion because women couldn't have jobs where you had to move anything that we've 30 pounds or more. course they are carrying around there to babies all afternoon or whatever. but meanwhile, we had these women coming in from the bottom and i have to say they just made the story for me. i just loved talking to them so

much. we asked what they thought of the big things that were happening over the years and we also asked them about whether they used barbie dolls. everyone had a barbie doll as it turned out and virtually everyone who had a barbie doll had a barbie doll having sex with can. they were under a washcloth having sex. i thought it was about fashion but it wasn't about fashion with barbie as it turned out. kafta mirko and there was an african-american woman we interviewed who had wanted a barbie desperately, and at that point they only had white berbice, so her grandmother finally bought her a barbie and painted it plaque but it turns out if you paint a barbie black sheep will start to appeal almost instantly so she called it passan tannin farby and kept her for the longest time. and some of the stories were great moments in women's history we found that are about very

small things when women got the bicycle it was stupendously liberating because they had never been able to move around before because they had so many clothes on. when the twist was invented, it was the first time in the history that women could dance by yourself without having to hang on to a guy. that wasn't good to be as good a dancer as you any way. and win pantyhose came along, it was a huge liberation for women who had these girls and my lawns encumbering them. and one of the women who talked about that said that her mother was so horrified at the idea that this new invention, the pantyhose that if you got one of rollin and one leg you that for the whole thing out so she required her if she got a phone to cut off the offending lake and keep the rest and when she got enough of a collection she was required to put on pantyhose with one leg that was good and pantyhose with the other leg and i see somebody over their

nodding. apparently this happen to lot and who knew until now. [laughter] so we took the book all the way through after the great defeat of the e.r.a. and the very strange social issues we went through the last 30 years. we were talking about date rape and he's a celebrity trials. when i went back and looked at that i hadn't realized it, but the sort of center of the rape consciousness began with general hospital. i had not thought of general hospital a soap opera for 100 years and there it was. this story of luke and laura at general hospital was one of the transfer of moments in the 1980's. everyone was watching it. everyone was fascinated. all the students would watch in the dormitory and so on. and i hadn't realized until i went back -- by the way i was at

a gym the other day, amazingly enough, and i saw general hospital on the tv. luke is still there, he's 150-years-old and still in this place. [laughter] anyway, the way that luke and laura got to get there is that look raped more on the floor of a disco. you can go and look this up. that was the great consciousness of this period but i was so happy to go back and revisit a general hospital. so any way we took it through to the nd and followed all of these little women and their triumphs and tragedies as we went on. one of my favorites was a doctor, who we picked up on just because a woman in minneapolis working for me and i asked if she could find someone that went to medical school to talk about medical school stories, but it turned out this woman was for personal relationships, a textbook, personal relationships through the last 50 years and she had been married and decided late in life, her husband owned

garage, that she was going to go to medical school and struggled to get through because she had three sons at home and finally she got through and at the end they had the graduation and it was quiet and dignified and when she got up to get her diploma being down by this point, her oldest son balk op and screamed "way to go mom" and a was the great transformative moment but of course she divorced her husband instantly after this. [laughter] in the period everyone was starting to shack up, cohabiting, she lived with another guy and they were, you know, buying a house together but then she came home from presidency one night after 16 hours and he was sitting with his feet up reading the paper and he said what's for dinner. that was the end. and then she took up with a woman who she lived with for quite some time and they finally parted right about the point where the book in did.

and her last comment to our researcher was i want a new partner. i don't care if it's a man or a woman, but just not a republican. [laughter] support, you know, following these women has been such a delight for me. it paid me back every moment i had working on this book and i must say, just as we were going to press lagat a note from their research work saying judith calder and and she's engaged and its agassi and he's a democrat. [laughter] so everything ended happily. as i hope the book did and i'm so happy and i hope this ends happily, too. i'm happy to be with all of you today. thank so much for having me. [applause] >> next we have pete dexter, he is of course national book award

winner and he has written "spooner," about one man's exhaust inexhaustible patience with his stepson that he just doesn't understand. pete. [applause] >> the first note i got here is thanks to the booksellers. my publisher gave that to me. [laughter] i didn't know this was for booksellers on till she said that. [laughter] you know i don't want to thank

you that much. we have six novels now and you sold 11 copies. but thanks. [laughter] i've been thinking, you know, somebody was reading to me the day after "spooner" comes out, who was that guy that wrote -- this guy can't write a line but the dingy code. [laughter] dan brown, he's coming out after i am and he's thinking if you have some extra covers. [laughter] i don't think -- put them in bibles. you know, not bible's somebody's going to take home and read the kind everybody puts and hotel rooms or swears on. i mean, you could stick

"spooner" in there and nobody would know. [laughter] i would be so happy. [laughter] but what we have got here today is one of these situations. [laughter] i live my life with to contrary conflicting fears, one of which is that everybody else is going to do their homework, which is what happened today. [laughter] the overwhelming fear is that i'm actually going to do the homework and that day we are going to go in and the teacher is going to say you know, just as a special present, you guys don't have to turn in your home work. [laughter] now when that happens, i'm ready. [laughter] i was listening to richard and

gail. it's a pleasure, i've never met richard before. but back when i won the national book award, there was about, i think it was about a week and a half people were paying attention to what i said. [laughter] and i got asked a lot, and i had never passed up the chance to say, you know, you've got -- richard hasn't won the pulitzer and i said, you know, you've got to read this guy's novels about new york because they are just -- "the new york times" asked me a year ago or something for my best book the last 25 years and i said "st mant." that's not -- the guy at "new york times" laughed and i said no, i'm serious. to me the first thing an awful should do is to entertain.

and that's mostly and entertaining book ever written as far as i'm concerned. [applause] it can still bring tears to my eyes. and if strangely enough life find myself of here with gail collins. now there's another columnist for the times named maureen dowd. i've got that right, right? okay. maureen dowd you know, when she started a column i was still doing a little of that myself. i was up in this island where we lived writing a syndicated column and i didn't have very many papers but among them was one of the seattle papers so i heard about maureen dowd and

then forgot her name and picked up the paper and read a column by gail collins and then wrote my column that week and said maureen dowd is the best columnist in the country. [laughter] and then i can't remember the name but the p.i., what does that stand for? post intelligence, yeah. well, they fired me that weekend picked up maureen dowd. [laughter] there is a complement in there for you somewhere. [laughter] okay. thank the booksellers. [laughter] you know, here's where this once

led. sophomore year of high school i had this science class. we were supposed to have a project, you know, a whole quarter's project. the night before i went outside and dug up a state of dirt, got 11 earthworms and put them in a little scrap book and scotch tape and i called it nature's string beans. [laughter] you want to get real technical and said you know, besides torturing these poor animals to death, you know, nature already has indians. [laughter] so i'm sitting here listening to these people who did their homework talking about their books, and i was thinking well,

what's my book about and i can't tell you what eighth novel is about. but i thought quickly as it came to me i could tell you some of the things in it alphabetically. [laughter] we have to asthmatics one of which is the protagonist mother and the other is a bulldog and they are violently allergic to each other and they meet at a party in south dakota, the meeting of the great books club and kill each other. we have to burials at sea that don't go well. [laughter] there's a cattle prod -- this is and mrs. baxter's. this isn't to be confused with anything mrs. baxter might have to move mr. dexter along. [laughter]

that's what my book is. my book is the study of innocence and evil. maybe not. okay, i've got dogs in this novel, 546 blogs, depressed dogs, a def dog, mostly the store dog of the book is a recreational either eater who ends up eating a little piece of, i will get to this in the end but i have a neighbor i don't like and he is tattooed which will be might he is and when the dog regurgitates this thing he sees about three-fourths of u.s. marine corps tattoo on the guy's leg and mistakes it for the usda would do you call that, it

doesn't make the me to any better. [laughter] i've got some editors and editors are strange. you know, of course they are evil but -- [laughter] -- strangely enough, the higher you go, the nicer they tend to be, or the more kind of -- it's absolutely the opposite of any other business i have ever been in, which is the boss is the guys that get to the top are usually guys that have got the most -- cost the most throats but in my experience the guy is on top have always saved me from the throat curse or else i would be doing something else. i've got a fence. [laughter] it's a good offense, but it doesn't make good neighbors. [laughter]

i kind of cheated a little bit. i got a guy that went to the zoo and was petting a polar bear. h is just sitting here by itself. i, i have a lot of i's, intercourse. [laughter] and one specific instance of intercourse mrs. dexter takes this opportunity just before the over one starts, just before the yodeling goes, she takes the opportunity to inform me that we are going to be parents. now i don't know if she picked that moment to tell me because, to sort of demonstrate cause and effect.

there was a redbook magazine lying around the apartment with ten things to whisper in bed that will drive him crazy or something like that. [laughter] j as a jaguar if anybody has ever owned one will tell you it is a piece of shit. k, there's a kindergarten teacher. a kid got out of college who wanted to teach kindergartners because she thought for-year-olds and 5-year-olds were cuter than the second and third graders. the more innocent. and she catches the protagonist of this novel at a very early stage in his career. she doesn't understand a kid that is 4-years-old or 5-years-old can in fact get erections, and the cade keeps putting blue and finger paint in

his hair so she will have to give him shampoos. i'm getting a little excited [laughter] any way, something like that gets in your head when you're 4-years-old and it just never goes away. my wife gives the best shampoos in the desert. [laughter] l, lawyers. obviously i don't have to tell you where they stand on this scale. i have to mobs. one of them was in a room like this a long time ago. the first time i was never invited to speak at one of these things, it was a philadelphia inquirer literary luncheon. the room was this size but it was completely full of people mostly to hear margaret truman. margaret shows up, doesn't say