Maggie's Farm

I took his course at Harvard. Not earth-shaking academically-- but a great reading list. His personal emphasis on resilience, and on personal choices making the difference in life had a good effect in my life at a time when I was (then) alienated from the institutional church (the creepy, not-yet-outed, socially climbing Peter Gomes was the University chaplain then).

Frankly, the reason I liked Vaillant was that he was writing about people more like the people in my family than most psychological studies, so his results were more relevant to my friends and I. The studies his book "Adaptations to Life" were based on were of the same Harvard men over decades. So he was looking at people of at least reasonable intelligence and competence and ambition....And it was eerily fascinating to see how people turned out.

Of course, I joked that I felt that my family was a bit like the Brewsters in "Arsenic and Old Lace" so I needed cheering up and exhorting. Better to read that one could choose constructive behaviors and defences than to merely pray that one was adopted.