Reams have been written and thousands of hands wrung about the plight of the family and the crisis in values today, but it took Mary Pipher to hit a nerve.
Pipher, a modest psychologist and author from the heart of Nebraska, dispenses a plain-spoken blend of nostalgia, homey intelligence and down-to-earth advice that is light-years away from that purveyed by most popular psychology, which seems to have turned the term “dysfunctional family” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Her book “Reviving Ophelia,” which analyzes how a hyper-sexualized, media-saturated, “girl poisoning” culture harms adolescent girls, drew on Pipher’s clinical experience counseling teenagers in Lincoln, Neb., her hometown for more than 20 years. Struggling for self-esteem as they moved toward adulthood, a wave of young clients fell prey to eating disorders, depression and addictions.
Although Putnam published the book in hardcover in 1994 without advance publicity, word-of-mouth catapulted the paperback edition (Ballantine) to the top spot on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list by November 1995. It has been on the Times list ever since.
Pipher expanded on her ideas in another best seller, “The Shelter of Each Other” (also Ballantine), arguing that families are being fractured in the avalanche of technology and the “junk values” of a consumerist culture. She examines the loss of old-fashioned communities and the rise of an electronic community, a consumer mentality and the influence of popular psychology.
For years, most human problems have been blamed on poor parenting. Pipher thinks otherwise, and that’s part of her appeal.
“The problems of any given family are not just the result of cultural forces or just the result of family dynamics,” she writes. “Both the family and the culture influence the development of children. When one factor is examined exclusively, the picture is incomplete.”
The success of these books has thrust Pipher, somewhat reluctantly, into the media spotlight. But unlike many people who achieve sudden celebrity, Pipher really isn’t capitalizing on it — outside of a few TV appearances and lots of interviews with publications, her preferred medium.
She declines most of the invitations to speak that pour in each week, although she does try to answer her huge volume of mail from readers. She says no when television producers, who apparently miss the irony, offer to buy the rights to “Reviving Ophelia.”
And needless to say, Pipher also declines requests for product endorsements.
“I don’t see myself as a guru,” Pipher said during a recent visit to Chicago. “I see myself as pretty ordinary. I’m not at all comfortable in the role of some sort of moral leader or social leader. I’m actually kind of a shy person as many writers are. I’m not at all interested in being recognized. I don’t particularly like being interviewed. I see it as something I sort of need to do, but I’d much rather go back home and have my books be what’s influential as opposed to myself.”
Perseverance pays off
Pipher didn’t begin writing until she was in her mid-30s. Her first book, “Hunger Pains,” about the way that culture affects women’s body image, was rejected by publishers, so Pipher published it herself. “Ophelia” was rejected 13 times before Putnam accepted it.
When it was about to be published, Pipher’s writer friends warned her not to expect too much. Even her editor predicted it would be a “small book,” selling perhaps 5,000 copies.
So Pipher says she was prepared to watch her book “languish and drop into oblivion.”
Of course, it didn’t. But Pipher certainly is not the first person to decry the harmful effects of modern culture. It happened in the 1950s and 1960s, too, while she was growing up. What’s different now?
“I think one of the reasons the books are doing so well is that they’re hitting when we’ve reached some kind of critical mass in terms of the information avalanche into households,” she said. “So all of a sudden it’s something average people are concerned about.
“Even 15 years ago, if you talked about rock ‘n’ roll music and values and so on, you were likely to be considered a religious nut, or it was something mainstream people weren’t worried about.
“Liberal people now are worried about the kinds of information children are receiving. I think there’s a kind of out-of-control feeling as parents are realizing that the values their children have, the belief system their children have, the information their children have, isn’t under their control.”
Both former Vice President Dan Quayle and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton have written books urging a return to family values, but Pipher isn’t tainted by politics or ideology and her voice isn’t an angry one.
“I’m middle-aged and Midwestern,” said the unpretentious Pipher, who has let her curly, brown hair go naturally gray and dresses casually. “I’ve lived in the same town forever in a real ordinary neighborhood. I made a lot of decisions when I was writing `Shelter’ about tone. The angrier you are, the fewer people listen to you. I also didn’t want to polarize. I didn’t want to lose Republicans. I didn’t want to lose liberals. I didn’t want to lose Christians. I didn’t want to lose atheists.
“There is this enormous common ground about 90 percent of us share in terms of children and families . . . and the places where we’re going to be able to solve problems is right in the middle.”
All things to all people
Liberals usually think Pipher is a liberal, and conservatives tend to think she’s a conservative. But she doesn’t comment on her politics in her lectures, books or interviews.
Pipher, 49, grew up in a town of 400 in Nebraska where her mother was a physician in general practice and her father sold seed corn and raised hogs.
While growing up, Pipher says she didn’t watch much television or read many of the magazines aimed at teens. Instead, she raised animals, rode her bike, went swimming, read books and played the piano. She thought about becoming a teacher or librarian.
Even as she cherishes her upbringing and the simple, honest values it instilled in her, Pipher readily admits that like many young people in the 1960s, she left her hometown as soon as she could. She went to the University of Nebraska at first and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in cultural anthropology.
“When you think about anthropology as it is in the last half of this century, it’s really what happens to people when they’re colonized,” Pipher said. “It’s a metaphor for all of our experience. We’ve all been colonized, although nobody could articulate it that way in the late ’60s. There was a sense that the world was changing not just for people in Indonesia and Micronesia, but for people from Nebraska like myself.”
After graduation, Pipher lived in Europe for a while and then got a full scholarship for a doctorate in psychology at the University of Nebraska.
She met her husband, Jim, a psychologist and musician, while in graduate school, and they settled down in Lincoln. Pipher worked part time as a therapist while raising their two children.
A changing world
Her studies of cultural anthropology inform all that Pipher does. “I’m really interested in how the culture affects mental health,” she said. “Now that’s an anthropology question, not a psychology question. And I’m also really interested in how the world has changed.
“A lot of my relatives were farm families, and that has just disappeared in my lifetime. Most writers won’t give in to the question of how the world has changed because it’s way too complicated. Whatever you say about it, somebody can argue with you. You can be accused of being nostalgic and this and that, but the fact of the matter is: If you’re brave enough to talk about it, (you find) that everybody is interested in this question.”
Pipher argues that while life in the 1930s was hardly idyllic, families like that of her grandparents knew what the enemy was — tornadoes, droughts, locusts and blizzards. In contrast, today’s families are more prosperous but more stressed out; sometimes they blame each other for what’s going wrong.
The influence of pop psychology is so pervasive that Pipher says clients sometimes tell her they come from “a dysfunctional family” or worry that they’re “co-dependent.”
She’s critical of her own field for its emphasis on pathology, encouragement of narcissism and failure to promote basic morality and accountability.
Consequently, as a therapist, Pipher eschews negative labels and diagnoses. She may not even talk about the past, preferring to identify areas in which a family is strong and to help find solutions to problems.
She often gives suggestions to teenagers and families aimed at restoring family rituals and reconnecting with nature, such as watching a sunset, taking a camping trip together and turning off the television and computer for a few nights a week.
“It is really important to make conscious choices about what you consume from the broader culture,” she said. “If you just let this culture happen to you, you end up broke, fat, addicted and stressed.”
