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NEW YORK -- Karenna Gore Schiff, the eldest child of Al and Tipper Gore, has a confession to make about her book, Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America (Miramax, $25.95).
Writing it was "a bit of a coping mechanism," as well as "self-indulgent," she says.
First, the coping part. The 528-page book grew out of her father's defeat in the 2000 presidential election, which was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.
"I wanted to turn all that frustration and sadness into something positive," she says.
She found an "antidote to the pervasive cynicism about politics, especially among young people," in stories of women, most of them unheralded, who persevered, often despite fierce criticism. Most of her subjects were called communists and tracked by the FBI.
"They remind us that progress is often slow and that unpopular views are often prescient."
The biography "is my attempt to make politics more accessible and uplifting."
As for self-indulgence, she says, her research was mostly fun, a chance to continue her education. She majored in history and literature at Harvard but had never heard of several of the women she eventually profiled, such as Septima Clark, who put up with the male chauvinism of the civil rights movement and taught generations of activists, including a young Rosa Parks.
At 32, Schiff is a former corporate lawyer and mother of a son, 6, and daughter, 4. She married into a wealthy New York family. Her husband, Andrew Schiff, is a former doctor who manages a biotechnology investment fund; she quotes him as saying he has "gone over to dark side."
They live in a spacious Manhattan duplex with a living room with 20-foot ceilings, stained-glass windows and children's toys occupying the corners.
She says she is often asked, and not just by reporters, whether she'll follow her father and her late grandfather, both of them former U.S. senators from Tennessee, into politics. She responds that "there are so many other ways to serve and make a difference."
Not one of the nine women in her book was elected to office.
She says she loved campaigning for her father, but to campaign for herself?
"I don't know. Not at this point in my life. I like part-time work." But then, she adds, "I'd be honored to serve in the government."
She laments the personal attacks in politics and what she calls "the celebritization of democracy" in which personality trumps policy.
But she doesn't consider herself a celebrity, despite a six-page spread in the February issue of Vanity Fair, headlined "Karenna's World." The article devotes one paragraph to her book.
"I'm just glad they liked the book." The article praised its "serious, fascinatingly footnoted, yet warm personal style."
Schiff is disappointed that her publisher is sending her to only 12 cities on her book tour, which begins tonight in New York, although that's a lot of stops for most first-time authors. She would have liked to visit Birmingham, Ala., the hometown of one of her favorite subjects, Virginia Durr, a Southern belle raised on white supremacy who became a passionate opponent of segregation and poll taxes.
"Maybe for the paperback," she says, ever the campaigner and the optimist.
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