My advice to graduates: Be you, partner well, and put down ya damn phone

(From my Hollins University commencement speech yesterday)

Thank you, President Hinton, families, friends, faculty, and the spring graduating class of 2025. As an alum and a former instructor and just an all-around huge fan of Hollins University—which has done so much for me—I appreciate the honor of speaking to you on such an auspicious occasion.

Almost four decades ago, I was in your seat. Probably I was daydreaming, deconstructing the commencement speaker’s tie or maybe the wave of her hair. Probably I was thinking, how the hell am I going to fit everything I own into my 20-year-old VW Beetle — and will it actually make the two-and-a-half hour drive from my college apartment to Columbus, Ohio, the home of my first “real job,” without breaking down?

My Mom and me at my own Hollins graduation in 1993.

I had roughly 24 hours to prepare for the job, an internship at a city magazine that paid $200 a week ‑ before taxes. A bore of a position for someone with aspirations to be a big-city investigative journalist, my main task was to update the magazine’s annual dining guide, which meant sitting at a desk and calling 600 restaurants to ask whether they still served mahi mahi and took American Express. Every day, for three months.

I was excited. I was terrified. As the first person in my family to have gone to college—like some of you sitting here today—I had no financial cushion to fall back on. No wealthy uncle, no more than a hundred bucks in my checking account. I was the daughter of a widow who made $8,000 a year test-driving cars for a Honda subcontractor. The only thing holding my car battery in place under the backseat of my rusty VW was a broken cutting board my boyfriend helped jam between the rusty metal frame and the seat.

I speak to you now, almost-graduates, from the other side of that fear-filled precipice. I tell you this as someone who turns 61 later this month and who wishes she could go back in time to counsel that scared, 22-year-old Real Writer wannabe. To blanket her with giant beams of confidence and attagirls. I would push back the not-yet-gray hair from her face and tuck it behind her not-yet-faltering ear. And I would tell her this:

Remember the lilacs. That’s my way of telling you to spend your time doing what taps into the essence of you, whatever that essence may be.

I was the last child of four — the middle-aged surprise — born to parents who struggled with generations of trauma, financial hardship, and addiction. I was, practically speaking, raised as an only child — a loner who liked hiding inside the giant grove of lilac trees at the end of my block and eavesdropping on people who walked past. It was my humble sanctuary, a fortress of intoxicating scent and cozy, hidden paths. Safe and unseen, I spent hours there bearing witness to the beautiful and the strange, the just and unjust. Sitting off to the side of the action, watching people or watching birds, preferably under a tin roof in the rain—that’s pretty much still my happy place.

In the fourth grade, a teacher introduced me to the book, “Harriet the Spy,” which I inhaled. I was stunned to find a version of myself on novelist Louise Fitzhugh’s pages. Harriet was a young aspiring author who put stories and facts together in new ways. She was nosy and sometimes, even, a bit mean. But through alternating bouts of hilarity and mortification, she persevered and found the confidence to forge her own way of looking at the world. By putting forth her own fierce ideas, she discovered a voice that was distinctly her own. She told uncomfortable truths.

In the decades that followed that awful restaurant guide job, I sought my own inner Harriet. I didn’t set out to focus my journalism on outsiders and underdogs, but lo and behold, after a decade of writing about them, it finally dawned on me that those articles were always the ones I wrote best: The Liberian refugee who squealed the first time she heard a Diet Coke clunking down a soda machine chute and shouted, “There is a person inside that machine!”

The gritty Virginia furniture maker who took on China in a court of international trade to keep his factory going — because those [expletive!] Chinese Communists were not gonna tell him how to make furniture!

The nurse practitioner and harm-reduction worker, Tim Nolan, who meets his addicted patients in McDonald’s parking lots next to Dumpsters or in their homes to start them on lifesaving addiction medicines—because they don’t have cars to get to him, and all the other systems meant to treat them have abandoned them because of old and punitive War on Drugs thinking, which was racist by design. Not to mention: It doesn’t work

Tim Nolan offers low-barrier buprenorphine, Hepatitis C treatments, and other connections to care in people’s homes in rural North Carolina. Photo by Josh Meltzer.

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When I was following Nolan a few years back, for my last book, Raising Lazarus, a follow-up to Dopesick, my editor reminded me that I do my best work when I write about the people I most admire. The heroes. These turn out to be people who tend to look a little sideways at what’s going on. Who don’t care what their peers are doing, or even in some cases what the laws say they can and can’t do. They’re governed by the higher power of their conscience.

Writing about outsiders and underdogs will probably not be your job; but I hope you leave here today with a renewed calling to nurture your own unique slant, whatever that may be. Every time you feel the hair sticking up on the back of your neck, pay fierce attention. Follow what moves you. Follow the people who make you feel — there is no better word than this for it — the fierceness of love.

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The second thing I want to say to the little girl in the lilacs is this: Ditch the awful partner, the sooner the better. I kissed some seriously nasty frogs before I met a guy comfortable enough with his manhood to marvel at a sunset, and goofy enough to dance the robot backwards across the kitchen floor when I’m least expecting it — just to make me laugh.

Sorry to get into Mom mode here. But let me tell you why I believe that choosing who to partner with is the single-most important decision you’ll make: For a variety of complicated reasons dating back millennia, women now comprise well over half the college student population but still only 20 percent of the country’s leadership positions. This, despite the fact that companies employing women in large numbers outperform their competitors on every measure of profitability.

I am certain that I would not be as confident or competent a writer — or person — had I not married someone who has treated me his equal on everything from grocery shopping to laundry to kid-schlepping. (If the kids were sick when they were little, they preferred Daddy.)

I’m a first-generation feminist, having grown up in a house where my mom did everything: She worked. She cooked and she cleaned. She hounded my dad on Friday evenings at the VFW bar so he would not drink away his paycheck before the groceries were bought. I’m not judging my mom; she could stretch a dime farther than anyone I know, and she was a product of a very different time. In her 90s, she still couldn’t figure out how I got away with NOT ironing my husband’s shirts.

Mom was widowed and in her 60s before she married the man of her dreams, a retiree who sculpted wooden birds and squirreled away his federal government pension so she’d be well provided for after his death. He bought her jewelry for the first time, with real non-dime-store stones, and during weekly outings to the shopping center, he’d sneak away to leave messages she could listen to later on their home phone answering machine. He’d sing: “I just called. . . To say. … I love you.”

Let me say it again: Life is fleeting. Only people who want the best for you should be on your home team.

My final takeaway for future me and for all you glorious people in green is this: Put down your damn phone, look around, and gaze into the eyes of your fellow human beings. (I say this because I, too, need to hear it.) At the start of the pandemic, I co-wrote and -produced a TV show that came out on Hulu based on my 2018 book about the opioid epidemic. It was called Dopesick, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the worst drug epidemic in the history of our nation came at precisely the same time that people your age — and even high schoolers and middle schoolers — are experiencing higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide than ever before. Of loneliness.

The data on this is absolutely clear: The more time you spend on screens and social media, the more likely you are to be unhappy. Having weak social connections turns out to be the health equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

But when we spend our energy engaged in meaningful work that makes us happy and enriches our larger community—where the time where time flies by, and you don’t even notice it—the rewards, I promise, do follow.

I’ve had to relearn this lesson myself in recent months. Responding to the current political climate, I started a newsletter about how to battle authoritarianism and misinformation, and joined a local group called DoGood Virginia, founded by your J-term teacher Dina Imbriani, another hero of mine whose Hollins course is called Survival for the Modern World. DoGood connects helpers in our community to the people most endangered by the threats of deportation, the gutting of public media, and cuts endangering the most marginalized among us: women and the poor, gay and trans people, folks on Medicaid. People in my family included.

Since President’s Day, we’ve met weekly to rally outside our Congressman Ben Cline’s office, to hold teach-ins with local people on the front lines of helping those impacted by the cuts, and to try to mend our community by gathering people from the disparate corners of our lives. DoGood collects food for pantries; it buys diapers for low-wage moms.

Such acts will not fix what ails our country in this moment, but I’ve seen firsthand that they go a long way toward strengthening our immune systems in the face of nihilism and dread. As the novelist George Saunders puts it: “Kindness is the only non-delusional response to anything.

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Having just written two books that largely took place out of state, I’m reacquainting myself with my beloved Blue Ridge Mountains, and I can’t tell you how much better and safer I feel being in regular, sustained community with well-meaning friends and strangers.

To know there are people out there like Free Mom Hugs, a group of parents of LGBTQ children who show up at pride parades and festivals to extend support to queer people who don’t get that same support from their own families. To sit around tables at Roanoke’s Virginia Harm Reduction Coalition with friends old and new, packing Narcan and lifesaving drug-checking kits on Monday afternoons. To join the work of Huddle Up Moms, a nonprofit started by a young local OGBYN who realized that what marginalized moms most need in our communities wasn’t just diapers—though she also started a diaper and formula bank!—they also need social-emotional support.

To visit with God’s Storehouse, a food pantry and soup kitchen in tiny Galax, Virginia, where I met a police chief who regularly takes meals with people in active addiction; to meet the cook who literally fed a rail-thin meth user who couldn’t feed herself WITH A SPOON, and then to see that former meth user, a year later, turn around and become a do-gooder herself. (My next newsletter will feature the family that runs this incredible place.)

I’d like to leave you with the wisdom of my favorite philosopher, Mister Rogers, who said: When things feel scary, look for the helpers. With your degrees nearly in hand and your hard-won liberal arts educations packed into your expanded brains, and your families as well as your Hollins community solidly behind you, I so appoint you. Y’all are the helpers.

It’s worth remembering, though, that sometimes the helpers need help. I know I have. Already, as a community, you have endured more than most: a global pandemic, a world-shifting election, the loss of one of your own student leaders, the incredible Fishi Ha.

But you’re here today with a much larger and more sophisticated sense of the world than I had four decades ago. You’re not afraid to ask for help, to battle stigma, or even to bust up the status quo. You’re even willing to disrupt the social conventions of the day if it means restoring humanity to our institutions. You have already absorbed, through practice and toil, that the ultimate goal of lifelong learners should be connection, not perfection.

You’ve spent four years or so honing your own distinctive voices, on the lovely tree-dappled campus where I first found mine. You entered this community with promise, and you’re leaving now with purpose.

Just don’t forget to season your own corner of the world — wherever it ends up being — with your own slant, that tilted way of looking at life that you and only you can provide. Find your own stand of lilac trees, be still amid them, look up, and lean on this sacred community you’ve created.

Congratulations on your success! Thank you, everyone, and happy graduation

With Hollins University President Mary Dana Hinton. When I worried about starting the reporting for my memoir two years ago, she gave me the best advice for approaching old friends: “You know how to do this. You simply start with, ‘How’s your Mama?’”

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