Sonia Sotomayor is out with her memoirs, which paint a frank picture of her life up to becoming the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. It details her lifelong struggle with diabetes, her failed marriage and other challenges she faced.
She told USA Today that with “her strikingly candid memoir, My Beloved World, the 58-year-old associate justice hopes to inspire those facing disease, discrimination, drugs and alcoholism, divorce and the dire poverty she faced growing up.” The book is available in both English and Spanish.
“I think you can extrapolate from my experience and apply it to almost any diagnosis that scares a child and scares a parent,” Sotomayor told the newspaper. From early childhood, when she learned to give herself insulin shots, she says, diabetes has been “an important motivation for how I’ve lived my life.”
President Obama appointed Sotomayor to the court. She has had a fast-rising legal career. She was a a federal District Court judge before age 40, then to the Court of Appeals at 44 and the Supreme Court at 55.
Latino children and adults should “come away with a renewed sense of pride in the richness of our culture, despite what others may paint as disadvantages or negatives,” she said in the interview. Sotomayor received $1.2 million advance to write her book.
One thing people won’t gain from reading her memoirs, said Sotomayor, 58, is a sense of how she will rule on upcoming court cases. The article said, “If anything, she goes out of her way to paint herself as a pragmatist and political independent who keeps an open mind — and who asks her law clerks to “argue the other side for me as forcefully as you can.’”
