The path to success is paved with... siblings?
NYT journalist, Susan Dominus, believes our parents' influence is less important than that of our siblings. The Family Dynamic, her new book, maps out why.
When she was in high school, Susan Dominus’ brother Andrew “bullied” her—her choice of verb—into starting a school newspaper. Today she is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times. In her spare time, she teaches journalism at Yale. You know, no biggie. She also has the distinction of wildly succeeding where I once failed: for an entire year, in 2021, I tried, in vain, to pitch both the New York Times and The Atlantic on a story about how women in menopause were not being served well, if at all, by the then current anti-estrogen standard of care, which was based on a misreading of the important (and now threatened but, wait!, maybe not?) data from the Women’s Health Initiative. I became so frustrated by this lack of interest in the story, I ended up giving up on traditional media and starting this publication.
Two years later, Dominus won a National Magazine Award for her brilliant takedown of menopause care in the New York Times Magazine.
In typical, give-credit-to-others fashion, Dominus, in response to an email I sent to congratulate her for being my hero for finally getting that story out there, wrote back, “No YOU are my hero” and praised my work on the subject herein. Then she gave credit to her editor Jake Silverstein, “for just recognizing that by using the platform of the Magazine for this, he gave it importance and credibility…The guy's a true feminist and visionary.”
Okay, sure, Susan, Jake might have said yes, and maybe he is a true feminist (thanks, Jake!), but it was your story, your words, your dogged pursuit of the truth that was not only brilliantly written and well researched and executed, it changed both medicine and older women’s lives. Doctors, who might have previously been hesitant to prescribe estrogen because a) no one in med school taught them about its importance in menopause care; and b) they were swayed by incorrect interpretations of its dangers, were finally forced to concede, thanks to Dominus’ front page story in a major magazine read by millions, that maybe, just maybe, everything they thought they knew about estrogen and menopause was wrong. And that this was a disservice to the bodies, health, and quality of life of women.
What gave Dominus this self-effacing grit and willingness to push up against accepted dogma and the male gatekeepers of traditional media? According to her, her success in journalism started with that bullying challenge from her older brother to start a high school newspaper. In fact, always far more curious about people’s families of origin and childhoods than of their adult accolades, she started asking herself an increasingly pressing question: what role do our siblings play in determining our life’s path?
Her answer to that question turned into years and years of research, which then became the The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success.
I started reading The Family Dynamic because, for one, I’ve always admired Dominus as a writer and journalist and will read anything she writes, but also because I am the eldest of four sisters, all of whom graduated from Harvard; all of whom have found some measure of professional fulfillment and success in somewhat non-traditional careers for women; and none of whom listened to my late father’s advice to go law school. Hence my curiosity about the nature of our influence on one another.
How might we have affected each other’s choices of careers? Did my choice to become a war photographer influence my sister Jen to pursue another difficult-to-get-a-(literal)-foot-in-the-door career as a choreographer? Now in her mid-fifties, Jen has worked on multiple Broadway shows and recently smashed every record for attendance and revenue with her direction and choreographing of an award-winning performance of Fiddler on the Roof. My sister Laura became a pediatric orthopedic surgeon back when being a woman in orthopedics was still painfully challenging and rife with sexism. My sister Julie is a top-notch Marketing Director at Johnson & Johnson who has collectively raised, along with her identical twin Laura, over $400,000 for research into pancreatic cancer—the kind that took our father when he was 67—and she has also raised nearly that same amount on her own for breast cancer.
According to Dominus and the research she uncovered, the fact that the Sisters Copaken grew up in a home with no brothers might have played a much more significant role in our choice of careers than anything our parents might have done or not done. And she has now interviewed enough families of successful siblings that a pattern definitely started to emerge with regard to siblings and their interconnectedness.
Added bonus? While reading The Family Dynamic, I was delighted to discover that I actually know two of her sibling subjects therein. Multiple award-winning novelist Lauren Groff and I were once feted together by our shared publisher, Hyperion/Voice (RIP), with a media lunch honoring the launch our then brand new novels, Arcadia and The Red Book. Turns out—I did not know this—that Groff’s siblings are equally amazing, one of whom, Sarah True, was an Olympic triathlete, and Groff herself swam competitively, too, which influenced her little sister to try to be the fastest Groff. Another of Dominus’ subjects, Diane Paulus, was my classmate at college, where she was already making her mark as a brilliant director and innovator in the world of theater. I don’t know either of these two woman well, but I did know Paulus well enough in school to have had the pleasure of running into her during the time she and her husband were living with her parents, to save on rent, while launching their groundbreaking The Donkey Show, and I was fascinated reading Dominus’ reporting on that chapter of Paulus’ life, never mind the amazing story of how her parents met then re-met. Moreover, as I explain in my interview with Dominus below, seeing Paulus’ version of Hair in Central Park—and dancing wildly on stage during the finale with the rest of the audience and cast—was incredibly meaningful and moving both to me and to my choreographer sister Jen, with whom I saw it the night after our dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
All this to say, I gobbled up The Family Dynamic in two days and plan to offer each of my three sisters a copy at my daughter’s wedding next week, where her two siblings will be serenading her as she walks down the aisle. You and your siblings—should you be lucky enough to have had them or still have them—might find the book fascinating as well. If nothing else, if you have kids, and you messed up parenting them as all of us do, you’ll feel much less guilty about all those mistakes you might have made. Turns out? They probably learned far more about how to survive and thrive in this crazy world from their siblings anyway.
And now, an exciting announcement and necessary if longish plea: A few days ago, I learned I actually won the Webby for Best Websites and Mobile Sites, Independent Publishers 2025! This is an incredibly meaningful and frankly shocking recognition of what I’m trying to do here in this space, which is to remain independent and publish lots of paywall-free stories like this one while featuring mostly middle-aged and older women and our various under-reported issues, interests, and achievements, whether those are health-related, personal, professional, political, or literary. I actually cried when I found out I won. And I hope to represent my non-digital-native generation with both dignity and menopausal hellfire at the ceremony on May 12th. My five-word acceptance speech is this: “Women’s bodies exist. Study us.” I figured those were the most precise five words I could utter, aside from curse words, given, well [gestures all around], all of this: research dollars being stripped, women’s bodies being denied agency, the horror that is this ongoing descent into misogynist, Christofascist autocracy, etc., etc., etc.
Those of you who’ve read the book that sparked this newsletter, Ladyparts, know I lost my job multiple times as a solo mother, whether through corporate malfeasance, whim, illness, sexual harassment, budget cuts, or just plain old bad luck. So winning this Webby felt like a small but significant vindication of that decade-plus of instability. But I want to get real now about the finances of this Webby-winning operation. As of this precise moment, Ladyparts currently has 13,162 subscribers and 20,839 followers. Of those subscribers and followers, only 1,186 of you actually pay for this newsletter. One of those paid subscribers, like many who are annoyed at having to pay for the small percentage of my paywalled, personal stories, just wrote to me—literally as I was typing this sentence—“I was just read [sic] an article and was halfway thru another, was really enjoying it and couldn't finish until I paid! UGH.”
I hear you, new subscriber. UGH, indeed. I’d rather not pay for any products I use either, but that’s not, unfortunately, how the world works. Someone actually makes the things we enjoy: pants, a painting, a rice cooker, a couch, strawberries, movies, this publication. Making things for others costs time and money, so we who make them ask those who use them to pay a fair price for our products. I’m still only charging $50 for a yearly subscription or $6 per month, with zero ads, and I’d like to keep it that way. That’s less than the cost of one drink at Starbucks per month. With my thousand-plus paid subscribers, this translates into $61,004 a year, give or take—readers are constantly signing up for paid subscriptions then cancelling, so it can vary—in gross income, which, after the expense of running a newsletter by myself (transcripts, photo research, travel, subscriptions to medical journals, solopreneur health insurance, etc.), gets significantly chopped by at least half. In other words, my net income from this publication is not enough to cover my living expenses with a kid still in college, so I’m always taking on extra freelance editing work to fill in the gaps, giving me less time and energy to focus on this suddenly Webby-award-winning publication.
And look, I know many of us are suffering financially right now, what with these absurd tariffs, unnecessary layoffs of vital government employees, a spiraling economy, and inflation. I get it! My health insurance just refused to cover the tiny bottle of antibiotic ear drops I needed after I hit my head into the corner of the refrigerator while standing up way too fast as I was unloading our food into a cooler during my recent move and was suddenly (and weirdly) leaking first blood then cerebrospinal fluid out of the tube in my right ear, a situation which is frustratingly ongoing and has the added fun risk of meningitis, so I’m actually getting a CT scan today. $66 out of pocket for a tiny bottle of eardrops! That’s like $3 a drop. And I don’t even want to think about what that CT scan will cost me.
If you can’t afford a subscription to Ladyparts, I get it. I’m not talking to you specifically except to say if you’re really hurting financially and want to read any paywalled posts gratis, reach out, let me know, and I’ll hook you up! Especially if you’re a single mother or retiree on a strict budget. If, however, you are lucky enough to have a bit of expendable income, and you enjoy these words and this newsletter, and you want a longtime advocate for women’s health to keep chugging along and informing you of research into your bodies, please help keep Ladyparts going by becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks so much.
Congratulations!! A Webby is so so well deserved. Your site has improved Susan’s health, my sister’s health, our friends’ health, and has kept me informed (I’m one of those MDs who was in med school as the world suffered through the time of misreading data about estrogen.)
And a paid subscription has been very useful to me—I can spread the info above and the gospel of weightlifting by sending the articles to my friends & colleagues.
Congrats! You were up against some flashy stuff and when I voted, the site was seldom higher than second, so woohoo!! I often hesitate before some of my Substack subscriptions renew...Do I get $50 worth of joy/use out of it? But this one is a no brainer. You literally changed my life, thank you. (I work in a public library and I put Ladyparts on the Staff Picks shelf every time I check it back in)