WashPost: My mom had a brilliant life. I couldn’t write about it until her death.
"My mother’s name was Ruth B. McDowell, and she was an internationally known artist and pioneer in contemporary quilting. Her career spanned nearly 50 years. As a child, I was embarrassed by her propensity to announce, “I’m world famous, you know,” when she felt dismissed or underestimated, which was frequently. ... My mom was a visionary who held everyone in her orbit to unforgiving standards but only because she held herself to them first. She was one of a handful of women in her graduating class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967, and she would be annoyed if I shared that without also sharing that she hated every second of it and only went there to please her father."