Reported by Nancy Finken, Nebraska Public Radio
At a Lincoln strip mall recently Lee Booksellers sold a lot of books written by psychologist Mary Pipher. People who came to meet the author in person stayed to buy her latest effort titled "Another Country."
Is Blair in Burt County?
Her last book, "Reviving Ophelia" touched thousands of parents and daughters with insights about the difficulties faced by teenage girls growing up in a modern world.
The information that's in her books is just pertinent to everyday life and --
Timeless.
Yeah.
"Ophelia" remained on the "New York Times" Best Seller List for three years. Mary Pipher's new book also found a place on that list. This unassuming psychologist in private practice in Lincoln has become something of a popular icon. With that fame has come unexpected pressure.
[Mary Pipher] The pressure I feel the most is there aren't very many ordinary- looking middle age Nebraska women who have a voice in this culture, and because I'm lucky enough to have a voice, I feel very honored by that but I also feel responsible. I feel like it puts a burden on me to speak for a lot of people who don't have voices.
Thank you all very much for coming. You are now sufficiently warmed up. Here is my wife, Mary Pipher.
In her new book, Pipher takes on what she considers to be the other great challenge of society and relationships, how we treat our aging relatives.
[Pipher] Old people are ashamed of the word old. A lot of people are embarrassed to tell their age.
The title, "Another Country," acknowledges the boundaries, the stages of life that separate each generation.
[Pipher] What it actually refers to in the book is the fact that older people tend to live in a very different culture than the rest of us. They're segregated. The things they enjoy doing with their time, the cultural products they consume are very different. Also they have lived in a very different country than the rest of us. The two main differences I got interested in were they lived in a communal country, a country of communities where everyone knew each other well and where children were educated to be cooperative more than independent.
The book's message resonates with the mature audience that gathered for the book signing.
[Pipher] Older people are not big emoters. They aren't necessarily comfortable processing their experience, having a lot of open emotional discussion about how they're feeling and so on. Our generation has been raised to believe that healthy people emote, process their pain, work through their issues, et cetera. Our parents' generation really has been taught that healthy people mentally put on their dancing shoes and go dancing, laugh it off, don't talk about their troubles, don't rain on other people's parade and so on. I woke thinking of my father, Frank, who would have been 80 years old today. It had been 30 years since he'd had his first stroke, 21 years since he died. I thought about how sad his life was, how short and filled with his father's insanity, his childhood poverty, his family's shame, the war, his dislocation from his beloved Ozarks.
In the book, Pipher combines stories of her family with interviews of her clients. Her passion for understanding the needs for seniors of seniors grew from her own deepening relationship with her aging parents and the death of her mother in particular.
[Pipher] I wrote about a situation where my mother was dying in another state three or four hours away and I had teenagers and I had full-time work. And during that entire year that she was hospitalized and died, I never felt like I was in the right place. I mean, wherever I was, I felt guilty I wasn't somewhere else. I was aware of the work that was not getting done. I felt guilty I wasn't a good daughter when my mother was ill and alone. If I was with my mother, I was aware I wasn't getting time with my teenagers who needed supervision and so on. One thing I think is very important is be realistic, that you can't like clone yourself into two or three people, be different places at once. Another thing I think is very important is to have a real good sense of priorities and what's most important, what isn't most important.
If there's an understanding of the perspectives from which each age group comes, there's greater chance at reducing hard feelings and sharing affection.
[Pipher] For example one thing I feel proud of with the baby boomers is we taught our parents to hug and to say I love you. We are comfortable doing that. And a lot of older people learn those things from their kids. So that's something for baby boomers to feel good about. On the other hand, another way to show love for somebody is to bake them a real good apple pie. Sometimes we aren't as good at seeing that as a loving gesture and a statement about relationship as we should be. So I try to help those kinds of ways of showing love be made clearer in the room.
Pipher says in writing her book, she figured out there are really two stages of aging.
[Pipher] There's young old age in which case people are driving around in their Winnebagos, they're going to elder hostels, they're playing golf in Phoenix and whatever. And there's old old age. One of the problems is the arrangements that people like for young old age oftentimes aren't very good for old old age. Old old age people tend to need to be near their children. They're sick. They have some vulnerabilities. They may need somebody to drive them around, to help them with doctors appointments and bank accounts and so on. I have really tried to alert the readers of this book, this phase may be coming and it's real important to plan for it so you have some kind of ideas at least about where an aging, frail parent might live, who is going to be helping them with things and so on.
In the young old age as retirees travel, enjoy their new freedom from work and family demands, they're laying a foundation for future relationships that may affect their old old age.
[Pipher] I talk in the book about prodigal parents who basically sort of abandon their grandchildren and their children and go off and mambo into the sunset in Florida or something like that. Then when they get sick and have some needs show up and want good care and a loving relationship with a family they hardly know. So that's one of the real, I hope, arguments in the book, Nancy is people need relationships. People need long term, close, caring, connected relationships with family. In a sense it's almost -- you could think about it as a social emotional life insurance policy. That means making payments all through the years.
If book sales are a measure, once again Pipher has struck a chord. She and her husband maintain their private counseling business but fame has brought changes.
[Pipher] That's one reason I quit doing therapy to be honest. I like just being an ordinary therapist. I don't like people having too much respect for my advice. I don't like them seeing me as any different than my peers. I'm not any different. I'm honestly not a better therapist than probably half of the therapists here in Lincoln. I have the same training most of the therapists did. I'm a pretty ordinary therapist. Now that I'm a successful writer, I tend to get more people who come in because of my books and I don't enjoy that. I'd much prefer to be just an ordinary anonymous therapist.
Since the middle of March, Mary Pipher's world has been a blur of interviews from the "Today" show to the "New York Times" to the public radio program, "Fresh Air."
Hi, this is Terri Gross, how are you?
She laughs about the contrasts between this trip and her first major tour when promoting "Reviving Ophelia" saying that now she gets good hotel rooms.
[Pipher] At first I think my publishing company hoped they could like sort of shape me up to being an ordinary national media figure. And I mean really funny things happened like my publishing company sent me a silk suit and sometimes people would show up for photo shoots with red blazers they'd rented at Talbots or bought at Talbots for me to wear and makeup people and stuff like that. There was a sort of pressure to have what I call the Liddy Dole look. But now they've just given up on me. I'm not that type of person. Everybody in America knows I'm not that type of person. Because I've been able to be successful staying fairly relaxed and ordinary, they've kind of let me alone. For example, no clothes have arrived in the mail for this book tour for which I'm really grateful.
Would you tell us some of the things that you think are different than they've ever been before.
With the national attention also comes the additional responsibility that her opinions and advice, once shared in therapy sessions in Lincoln, are now carried to an international audience.
[Pipher] I need to have very carefully thought through what is it I want to say so that what I say isn't fluff, it isn't useless, it isn't bad advice and so on. That's what I think about the most is given that I have been given this incredible gift, I want to use it responsibly, I want to use it for the benefit of other people as much as I can.
The message she shares in "Another Country" is clear. Pipher says that we have a certain kind of sickness in our culture that comes from segregating age groups. She hopes readers will find a potential cure by reading her book.
One of my fondest hopes is this book encourages people to remix the generations and make sure 3-year-olds and 14-year-olds are spending a lot of time with 70 and 80-year-olds.

Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska .