Opinion | The Parallel Memoirs of Ruth Simmons and Drew Gilpin Faust

Crucially, both women were born in an era when nobody would have imagined their careers to be possible. Simmons calls this turnabout “the unpredictability of opportunity.” In her book, “Up Home: One Girl’s Journey,” she recalls a colleague telling her “there would be no place for me in the profession I was so keen to pursue.” Faust talks in her book, “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury,” about unexpected “doors that open.” As Faust told me, “If someone had said to me when I was young, ‘One day you’ll be the president of Harvard,’ I’d have said, ‘Don’t be crazy.’” When Simmons was offered a post as president of Smith in 1995, she initially figured it had been a mistake.

In certain respects, Simmons’s and Faust’s pasts mirror each other: Born just two years apart in the postwar 1940s and raised in the segregated South, they both had mothers who suffered from long-term illnesses. Simmons was close to her mother, and Faust clashed with hers, but neither wanted anything resembling her mother’s life. Both studied foreign languages, lived abroad for the first time during school, studied the humanities at Ivy League grad schools and entered academia.

But there were also big differences. Simmons, the youngest of 12 children born to Black sharecroppers in rural Texas, spent her early years in a two-bedroom shack with her parents sleeping in the common room. There was no running water. College was a pipe dream — and one she’d have to pay for on her own. Honest, intimate and deeply affecting, her book recalls Anne Moody’s classic memoir, “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” not just in the obvious biographical parallels but also in terms of its potential impact. This is a book you’ll want to pass on to all the young people in your life, no matter their background, just so they can have a little of Simmons’s wise voice in their heads. I’d urge every educator to assign “Up Home” to high school students or incoming college freshmen. It’s that good.

“So many people hear coming-of-age or bootstrap stories and think they get it,” Simmons told me. “But owing to the layers of issues I faced — deep in segregation, this sharecropping existence — people were doubly perplexed.” Students especially kept asking how Simmons made her way to an elite institution. Simmons wrote the book, she said, for those students who believe “there’s no way for them to become a part of the world that they’re looking at through store windows.”

For years — in fact, until a 1995 profile in The New York Times — Simmons kept her personal story private. “Somewhere I was embarrassed about my background,” she told me. “That’s what poverty will do, especially when you’re in the mix. How do you talk about living in a rat- and roach-infested dwelling when you’re in a friend’s luxurious home? It’s awkward at best.”