Eileen Hultin published her book entitled Embracing the Unexpected: A Memoir with Modern Memoirs in 2021. This Assisted Memoir took one year and one month from the day she first contacted us to the day books arrived on her doorstep. We asked Hultin to reflect on what the publication process was like for her, and what it’s meant to share her book with others.
1. You said that, reflecting back on your decades of accumulated memories, you have much to share with your grandchildren, “who simply cannot imagine what the world looked like when we were small.” What strikes you as the biggest way the world has changed, and what has stayed the same?
Eileen Hultin: Very, very little is the same. Only the basic need for human contact has stayed the same. People still love to celebrate holidays and birthdays together. We are still human beings with the need for human touch, but everything external is different. If someone came back now from 1947 or 1950, they would not recognize the planet. For me, the most significant changes are in communications and travel, which have opened up the world to a vast number of people. There have also been great changes in medicine. With the risks surrounding surgery, disease, and infection, life was much more tenuous when I was a child. Another thing I have never gotten over is appliances! Household chores used to be terrible—you worked so hard. We didn’t have electric mixers, irons, dishwashers, hairdryers, curling irons, vacuum cleaners, floor polishers, leaf blowers. We did everything by hand, so that something that takes ten minutes today would’ve taken two hours back then.
I also see some negative changes, especially here in the West with a decline of our culture that is very worrisome. There was a bigger emphasis on people trying to be their best when I was a child. If you weren’t doing what was expected of you, there was an element of shame, and it seems we’ve lost that. We need to teach the children a little differently—from making sure children are still able to write in cursive to providing strong lessons on history. Without an understanding of history, there is a loss of wisdom. Great leaders have made great mistakes, and if we remember that, it will help us to avoid the same mistakes in the future. I admit I’m not an educator, it’s just a sense I have after 87 years of living.
2. You were born in England, have lived in Mexico and the United States (of which you are now a citizen), and have traveled extensively around the world. What have all of your moves and travels taught you about connection to place?
Eileen Hultin: When we travel, it’s very easy to become what they call an “Ugly American,” to be unconsciously rude. You can’t do that. When I travel to or live in a new place, the first thing I try to do is to stop thinking of myself as British. It’s really important to absorb the culture in which you find yourself. You don’t have to pretend to be Mexican, for example, but I think you’re really missing a wonderful opportunity if you don’t learn to love Mexico. Some people I knew in Mexico never tried to learn to speak the language, but I got a teaching diploma in Spanish so that I could talk with my Mexican friends in their language. I wanted to know about the food, their life, what they believed.
I also think it’s a mistake to continue to think of your birth country as “your” country if you live elsewhere. There’s not any one thing that makes a new country become “your” country, but the first time you hear someone condemn it and you become upset, that is when you realize where your loyalty lies. You’re not going to have your adopted country defamed. I am fiercely loyal to America, embarrassingly so!
3. You said you were raised in a community in which the prevailing belief was that “education was wasted on girls who would marry anyway and stay home raising children.” What role has education played in shaping your life?
Eileen Hultin: Working-class parents couldn’t wait for their teenaged girl to leave school so that she could get a job and earn a living. That’s the way it would’ve been for me had I not gone to high school. Without my uncle, who said, “Let’s make sure she gets an education,” it would not have happened. Then Renee Webster, the headmistress, saw something in me and never let me drop any of the classes I asked to drop. She never gave up hope on me. I was very taken with Renee Webster, and she was a fabulous role model for me. She came from an upper-class family, and her parents traveled extensively with her when she was a little girl. She was elegant, and it seemed like she knew everything. She represented another world to me. She seemed so in control of her life, and that was important to me. I always kept in touch with her afterwards.
It was Renee Webster’s approach to education that propelled me to become a re-entry student at Stanford University, graduating at age forty-eight with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History. That led to an offer to become a docent at the Cantor Museum on the Stanford campus. Graduating from Stanford, a year after my first marriage fell apart, is the one achievement in my entire life of which I am most proud. I have lived a much richer life as a result of the extra years of study.
4. You express your creative self through painting and photography. How do you think that the visual arts influenced you as the writer of your memoir?
Eileen Hultin: Writing is another form of self-expression, and it needs to please the senses. So, every time I was describing a scene, whether it was something horribly dramatic and sad, or something frightening, like the stormy, week-long kayaking trip my second husband, Johan, and I did in Tofino, I tried to bring it to life with sensory detail. That’s very like painting or photography because you want the person who views your composition to sense what you’re painting. When I do a landscape, I want to present it in such a way that the person is there. They can really see that beautiful light on the trees and sparkling on the water. It is the same with writing. When I was writing about Tofino, I thought, “This was the most horrifying experience, thinking I was not going to live through it, that I was going to drown. How can I capture the impact of that moment?” So, instead of hurrying along with the story, I tried to get the reader onto the kayak with me in the rain, to see my swollen hands and feel my shoulders wracked with pain. I know I was successful because of all the readers who’ve told me they can’t put the book down. They talk about the Tofino trip and say, “God, that was a terrifying experience.” And I think, “Good, that worked!”
5. In the conclusion of the book you say, “Having lived this long, eventful, and happy life, I have learned to forever expect the unexpected.” Were you aware of the truths that you wanted to share in your memoir, or did the writing process help reveal them to you?
Eileen Hultin: As I wrote, I realized that finishing the book was supremely important to me. I wanted to inspire others who were struggling with any turn of events that overwhelmed them. I believe the universe works in strange ways, but there are no accidents. Somebody will read this book at the right moment for them, when they think they can’t face reality, and they’ll realize, “Sure I can.” Also, I wanted to point out that one doesn’t have to start out in life with a proverbial silver spoon. You can succeed when the odds are stacked against you. Attitude is very important, and so is gratitude. If we could just learn to be grateful for what we have instead of looking at what we don’t have, I think the world would be a much nicer place, and I think people would be a lot happier. If you can be grateful for what you have, it helps you to have a good attitude going forward. I think the two words go together.