Sarah / Tom

Sarah, Sophomore year.

Sarah with Len, cake cutting in 2022.

Tom, berry picking in Sweden, 1970s.

21st century Tom.

We all have stories we tell, and stories we don’t tell… Be sure to listen to both Parts 1 and 2.

Sarah Crichton has spent five decades helping people shape their stories, and what stories they’ve been—Madeline Albright’s Madame Secretary, Marianne Pearl’s A Mighty Heart, and the story she says is closest to her heart, her first book under the Sarah Crichton Books/FSG imprint, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

In this riveting two-part episode of PasstheMic75, Sarah looks back over her ups and downs in the staid world of publishing that operated like a men’s club when she entered it. “Just about every job I ever had,” she recalls, “I was the first woman. And I loved it. And I did drive people crazy, because I started tearing the place up. It needed to be.”

But after she sat down to tell her own story to Tom Yellin, who reminds her that she was the first person he met freshman year, Sarah asked for a redo to tell the whole story—her encounters with a writing teacher that knocked her off kilter so badly that she nearly flunked out freshman year. 

Looking back at that girl who arrived at Harvard “full of beans,” as her mother used to say, Sarah regrets that this experience from which “I couldn’t fully recover” nearly severed her connection to Harvard—to this day she’s never set foot in Widener, something she vows to rectify with Tom at our 50th reunion.