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Standing tall: Stratford Hall women residents a half century ago (left to right): Nancy Clark, Dorothy Dodge, Jacqueline Mabry, Marlene Todd, Mary Ellen McClean, Elizabeth Fleenor, Joyce Halberstadt, unknown, Vernagene Patterson, and Dot Ely. Labor of love What do an Oregon preacher, two 101-year-old women, and a teenager in Iran have in common? They’re all avid readers of contemporary romance novelist Barbara Nash McMahon ‘67. Now celebrating her 20th year of purveying passionate prose, McMahon has received nearly every accolade awarded by the genre and is rapidly approaching her 50th title. The blonde blue-eyed mother and grandmother has done more than flirt with success. She’s seduced it. It’s a long way from South Carolina’s tiny Limestone College, where McMahon spent her first college year, to Berkeley in the mid-’60s. “My relatives would watch the news and have a hissy fit,” says McMahon, who grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and still retains a hint of her southern lilt. “I told them I wasn’t involved in the protests. I just had to pass through them on the way to class.” For the southern belle who describes her upbringing as “very white-bread,” Berkeley provided a culture shock, in the best sense of the word. “At Cal, I made friends and acquaintances from quite different walks of life and different countries,” says McMahon. “I just loved being there.” After graduation, McMahon worked for a year as a flight attendant and then started a family. In 1974, she took a job at an Emeryville-based software developer. At the same time, she began to write. “I always liked reading romance novels,” says McMahon, who counts Jayne Ann Krentz among her favorites. “I thought to myself: ‘I can do this.’”
In 1982 McMahon sold her first book, < I>Come into the Sun, to London-based Harlequin Mills & Boon, the world’s largest romance publisher. “My editor told me in order to make it, I’d need to write two to three books a year for two to three years,” she remembers. Although the genre has been commonly criticized for presenting an outdated view of women’s roles, McMahon and others contend that romances provide both empowerment and escape. Berkeley sociology professor Ann Swidler compares contemporary romance heroines to their classic 19th-century counterparts. “Like Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the protagonists of modern romances are strong-willed, spirited, and intelligent,” she says. Today, the words of the former flight attendant have been read around the world--McMahon’s books have sold more than 6.5 million copies in 35 different countries and in 19 different languages. McMahon and her own beau, husband Michael Oldt, enjoy the peace, tranquility, and endless open space of the tiny Gold Country town of Pioneer, where they’ve lived for nine years. The bucolic Sierra setting is clearly conducive to creativity. In 2003, McMahon will release three books: The Sheikh’s Proposal and The Tycoon Prince (Harlequin Romance) and She’s Pregnant! (Silhouette Special Edition). “Writing romances is an enjoyable way to make a living,” says McMahon. “In this day and age, especially, we need escapism and to know there will be a satisfying, happy ending.” --Allison Block '92
People behind the news At a time when Americans have been warned to leave the Ivory Coast, Somini Sengupta ‘88 has set up shop there--most likely for the next three years. A member of the New York Times staff since 1995, in January she became the West Africa bureau chief, based in Abidjan. The 20 countries she is responsible for reporting on are rife with civil war, political instability, corruption, poverty, and AIDS, but her articles--which often appear on page one--are often told from the perspective of those most affected. “If you’re writing about war, it’s not about who fired at whom, it’s about what’s left behind, and who has to move from one side of hell to another,” Sengupta said in a recent phone interview. Born in Calcutta, India, Sengupta was 8 years old when her family immigrated to the United States. She grew up in southern California and began college at Pomona, before transferring to Berkeley, where she majored in English and Development Studies. Sengupta loved Cal for the diversity of its student body, something she did not find at Pomona. “Berkeley was big, and there were all kinds of people there,” she said. After graduation, she worked for a public affairs radio show and as a cocktail waitress, and then spent several years as a union organizer. Almost on a whim, one day she applied for an apprenticeship at the Los Angeles Times. “They had no business giving me a job,” she said, noting that she had no examples of her work to show, “but they did.” She took to journalism immediately. “I was like a fish in water. For people with stunted attention spans like mine, this is one of the only things that we can do and get paid for.” After two years, she moved to the East Coast to work at Newsday, and then joined the metro staff of the Times, where she covered poverty and immigrant issues. In 2000, she was sent to Florida to cover the post-election fiasco. After September 11, 2001, she was assigned to special projects, reporting from theTurkey bureau and then the India-Pakistan border. The Ivory Coast is her first semi-permanent post abroad; she took a five-day “Hostile Environment Training” course in Great Britain before assuming her new position. Sengupta faces a few additional obstacles as a female journalist in a country where women often do not speak for themselves. When she travels with a male photographer or interpreter, for example, she finds that her subjects will usually address the man. “One thing I bring as a woman reporter is that I am very vigilant about finding women’s voices about everything--not just when a woman loses a child.” One gets the sense that Sengupta feels it’s an honor to be able to make her subjects’ stories relevant to those reading their morning papers thousands of miles away. Recently, she wrote about Liberian refugees whose lives were devastated by civil war. “Never in a million years would I be given the opportunity to talk to these people and tell their story, to travel on this bumpy road with them, were it not for this completely ridiculous excuse we have to be nosy and poke our nose into someone else’s business,” she said. She also wrote about a ferry that sunk off the coast of Senegal, killing over 1,000 people. “Most of my readers don’t know about Senegal,” she said. “But they can imagine what it’s like to be a father losing his daughter, or a son who puts his mother on the boat to get medical treatment” only to lose her. Her experience thus far has also had lighter moments. She relayed a story about a recent trip to Kaduna, a northern Nigerian city, where Sharia, the Islamic penal code, is in effect. She was there to write about how the city has been affected by a series of ethnic and religious riots. After spending the day hearing tales of horrible brutality, she wandered into a nightclub, which seemed left over from the Colonial era. Couples were dancing under giant ceiling fans, while a band played songs by...Ray Charles. “Could I have ever predicted that? That’s why I love doing what I do--because of 40-year-old Nigerians dancing to Ray Charles.” --Alexandra J. Wall |
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