It is five-fifty on a sunny afternoon in March and Jenny McPhee and her shadow appear to be the only moving things in the whole world as she walks through an empty courtyard to meet her students at the dining hall. The corridor is long, her steps are short and suddenly it is conspicuous that she is smaller than everything; the trees, the walls, the columns are all disproportionately large and for a split second, McPhee is like Alice in a gothic Wonderland. She had taken the train from New York a day earlier than usual, to participate in take-your-professor-to-dinner-night before teaching Introduction to Fiction the following day to a group of twelve Princeton students. Over dinner, which is a plate of chicken and two french fries, her students ask her about her career and life, and how she knew she wanted to be a writer. She shrugs and looks them in the eye and says, “You just know,” and keeps looking them in the eye.

McPhee presents as rather unassuming–both in her physique and her voice. She sports a lob, that is, a long-bob of curly gray hair that she parts on the side and hikes away from her face with a studded bobby pin. She religiously sports shoes with at least a two-inch heel and possesses a voice that is sometimes spritely and sometimes whispery and to describe it how adults describe things like wine, it is sweet and dry with an unexpected brassiness. As she walks, her large blue eyes trace the ground as if she were peering into some world underneath. She’s been here before, not only as a professor. 

McPhee grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, attending Princeton High School and serving food at the Cap and Gown club, one of Princeton’s many social clubs (“eating clubs”). She was well acquainted with it all; her father is a “pretty well-known writer” and former professor at Princeton, and her mother owned a photography studio in town. One of her sisters, Laura McPhee, went to Princeton University. McPhee pointedly didn’t. “I graduated early from high school, because I couldn’t wait to get out of Princeton,” she says with a laugh. 

And yet forty-five years later, she’s returned. Every Friday she leads a fiction class (though she mostly teaches translation) that meets for an hour and fifty minutes in a classroom with floor to ceiling windows. She enters the classroom looking at no one in particular–there is no pre-salutation for the class pets–and often says very little. Within minutes, without raising her voice or telling her students to stop chatting, class just starts. McPhee, with her coiffed hair and high heeled shoes enters the classroom like she entered the courtyard, unassuming yet somehow assertive, inexplicably commanding a room with little more than her presence. 

McPhee has tended to wild creatures her whole life. She grew up imagining the lives of Whooditz, Geeditz, Sally, Kack, and Dane. Whooditz and Geeditz were the twins who rode their pink and blue elephants to Firestone Library, Katz was a goat, Dane was a shapeshifter, and “Sally was, you know, 164 years old.” McPhee is the middle child of five girls, all of whom are published authors, but she was the storyteller in the most demand: “They’d ask ‘Where are they going tonight?! Just tell us another one!’” 

Born in 1962 to two writers, McPhee knew she wanted to be a writer since she was young. Her father, who has published forty-one books, would often scream “Don’t ever be a writer! It’s the worst profession ever!” McPhee notes that her father–who enjoyed reporting significantly more than writing–came to love the craft only in his nineties. Yet the deterrent from writing naturally was not John McPhee’s warning so much as his own success. 

Her mother, Pryde Brown, had wanted to be a writer, but switched to photography after marrying John McPhee. “There is a shadow of Dad that I’m sure she felt. She probably pivoted to photography because it was hard to compete with that,” McPhee says. Yet Brown never stopped writing and working on novels, even winning a grant from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. 

McPhee knows that shadow well. Her own aptitude for writing often garnered praise in high school, yet she doubted the genuinity of the comments and in doing so ultimately doubted her own abilities. She did not write creatively all throughout college. Yet somewhere, she remembered and chased the feeling her mother gave her when McPhee was just five years old, when Brown read one of her stories and reacted with pure joy. Under this encouragement swam a current of Brown’s own ambitions, McPhee says, though much more casually, “You know how relationships are between mothers and daughters and kind of unrealized ambitions and stuff like that. I think my mother probably had an even greater influence on me than my father.” 

McPhee is now a published author with three kids, none of whom are writers, although the youngest is still in middle school. When asked if she feels relieved about the older two avoiding that fate, she answers the question more as a creative than a parent. “If there’s something in you that’s wanting to spend your life trying to make the words make some kind of sense, and connect to people somehow, you’re just going to do it. The resisting of it takes more energy than the actual doing,” she says.  

McPhee’s winding eighteen-year journey from graduating college to publishing her first novel suggests that this wisdom is hard-earned. After studying comparative literature at Williams College, McPhee left for Europe where she studied semiotics with Julia Kristeva in France. When the program ended, she decided to go to Italy to learn the language and work at a publishing house, a decision that catapulted McPhee into her career in translation, writing, and academia. 

In 1994, the Pope happened. By then, McPhee had returned to the U.S. and was working as a junior editor at Alfred A. Knopf (which is, ironically, the publishing house which rejected her father’s first book, leading to a familial legend where McPhee’s grandmother apparently said “I’m going to Knopf his block off!”). That year, Pope John Paul II had published his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which needed to be translated, edited, and published within a six-month time frame.

Though she doesn’t make a point of it, McPhee often separates her professional career into before and after the Pope. Her time in Italy and understanding of romance languages enabled her to edit translations of high-profile authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gabriel García Márquez. Her background then catapulted her into her first translation job, where, in just six weeks, McPhee had translated the 227 page book with her sister, Martha. “My experience with that was incredibly intense,” McPhee said. “It wasn’t a particularly good book for me, so I thought this can’t be the last experience of me doing translations.” 

Now, as a translator and novelist so prolific that she has a tab named Bazaar on her website, McPhee is selective about the work she translates–she only translates dead female authors. She requires the author to be dead following difficult experiences with inevitably high-maintenance alive authors. She requires the author to be a woman after learning how few women’s work get translated and canonized. 

When McPhee was still young, her mother became one of the founding members of the Princeton chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW). McPhee helped Brown with the research for the organization, which meant that at age nine she was counting the number of times women were presented in stereotypical roles as stay-at-home mothers, or on the sidelines as boys played soccer in children’s literature. 

Perhaps it is no wonder then that fifty years later, she can rattle off current statistics on gender equity in translation. In the U.S., only three percent of published books are in translation–a statistic that McPhee attributes largely to American isolationist tendencies. Ten years ago, only 25% of books in translation were authored by women. “All those statistics came out so I had to decide, alright, now I’m only translating women,” McPhee says.

Yet McPhee is not without contradictions, even in realms where she has expressed her ideals in the clearest of ways. Her work and pointed decisions as a translator reflect her commitment as a feminist. However, McPhee acknowledges the nuances that draw her to translation: “I think it’s kind of gendered, but it’s so much easier for me to champion a book that I didn’t write, even though I feel so totally invested in translation and I feel like I am the co-author.” 

These contradictions are inherent and implicit in a woman, McPhee argues in her debut book, The Center of Things (2001). Her novel centers around Marie, a​​ neurotic, insecure, and frustratingly ambitious tabloid journalist who is enchanted by fictitious star Nora Mars’ “ability to unite apparently contradictory visions of a woman’s role.” Surrounding Marie is the love interest Marco, an unbelievably odd “freelance intellectual” who lurks around the public library. 

McPhee published when she was 39, becoming a published fiction writer. Post-Pope and having joined her husband’s health insurance, she was able to quit her full-time job at Knopf to freelance and write. She went freelance at the urging of Sonny Mehta, the Editor-in-Chief of Knopf at the time, who had advised her to quit completely, which McPhee struggled to do. Writing a novel requires commitment that is at once necessary and terrifying, she explains: “You commit, and you know you’re going to be doing this thing, and you think, of course, it’ll be a failure, and nothing will ever happen, it’ll be a humiliation, you know, all the horror, and while you’re in the writing and in the world, that’s okay. It’s when you come out, that’s the problem. It’s the coming out and going back in, but of course we have to eat and sleep and go to the movies and everything else.” 

Nevertheless, she harps on the necessity to commit to this process. As a professor, McPhee’s comments and bits of advice are minimal, with the goal to aid and not interfere with the delicate process of translating one’s imagination to the page. For example, her response to panicked and neurotic emails from teenagers with writer’s block are little more than what she says in class: “Struggle is good,” she will write, between instructing them to submit whatever they have and her signature. “It’s what a writer does all day long. Allowing something you write to be less than you hoped or expected is also part of the learning/writing process.”

Yet in regard to unemployment, she felt at liberty to offer some liberal advice: “I guess my advice for young writers will be, you know what, you can always get a job later. You can always join that thing later. Just really try as hard as you can now, to get those books out, going, and written.” Her point, at least from her own experience, is this: that the money and stability the workforce offers is too convenient an escape from writing. 

This is because McPhee, like her father, will tell you that writing is very hard. The process of writing, “which is basically sitting around procrastinating” is arduous not only technically, but the personal disappointment it hands out. There is a dissonance, she explains, between the imagination and what is translated through language onto the page. To be a writer is not just to grapple with language, but to grapple with the disappointment between one’s imagined world and the tangible world on the page. “There’s a built-in failure all the time,” she says, “but it’s embracing that failure and being happy enough with what you do get to, eventually, which gives you a great amount of satisfaction. When you do get something you can be proud of.”

One of the most engaging elements of The Center of Things is the precision of Marie’s own imagination and voice. It is Marie’s specific insecurities and fantasies–which, by the way, McPhee argues does not make her character less competent than the men in her story–that lets the reader fall in step with the character who is driven and strong and fretting about height and facing the existential threat of being unmarried. Following this precision, McPhee’s claim in an interview in the back of the book that she identifies the most with Marco, the oddball intellectual, feels implausible.  

There is an element of McPhee that is not odd, but very individualistic. McPhee, whose studies in semiotics influenced her to think more critically about language and empowerment, decided that her children would carry her name. Unfortunately, until twenty years ago, it was illegal in Italy for women to give their child their surname, no matter the conditions that led to their conception. 

In 2004, Alessandra Mussolini brought a case forth to the higher courts in petition to keep her last name as Mussolini. The court ruled in her favor, which legalized passing down maternal surnames. Alessandra Mussolini kept her last name, and Jenny McPhee gave her two eldest children McPhee. 

She explains that there are two counteracting forces with a last name: the disempowerment of the legacy a name inherits, and the empowerment of a name in constructing an identity that one can claim as their own. There can be sheer power in a name “like Rockerfeller, or McPhee in its own little way,” she says. In the shadow of that power and inherited greatness is disempowerment, the necessity to live down and live up to randomly placed expectations, admiration, disdain, judgment–something McPhee and her sisters had to do a lot of. Yet there’s the pure power–and this is what McPhee clings to–of a name, any name, like Smith or Jones, that then becomes a part of you, how you’re known, and how you know yourself. And to give that up, well, McPhee views it as inherently disempowering. “It’s a gift, it’s a lovely thing–I would just love it if it went both ways. That it wasn’t gendered.” 

McPhee’s youngest child is her adopted daughter, who initially had to take McPhee’s husband’s first and last name–Passoleva–under Ethiopian law. She also eats red meat whenever she can escape her mother’s environmentalist household and has chosen to keep her last name as Passoleva–she just likes the sound of it better. Perhaps she has inherited her mother’s (and her grandmother’s) “rebel without a cause,” a phrase that McPhee uses to describe her own disbelief at her return to Princeton. 

It is hard to imagine McPhee, with her coiffed lob and gentle eyes, as rebellious. But she returns to Princeton having claimed her father’s name of many years–Professor McPhee–as her own, and in doing so, perhaps she challenges and rebels against the notion of legacy itself. In walking through the courtyard to have dinner with her students, she at once establishes her own presence and stands up to the disempowering factor of a name. Though of course, she still signs her emails “Jenny.” 

“It’s always weird, hearing Professor McPhee. But you know, so much is weird in life. I just go with it. You’ll notice I never sign it that myself.”