How to fail

Nadine Burke Harris grew up surrounded by privilege in Palo Alto California,
the daughter of educated, professional Jamaican immigrants who had moved
the family from Kingston to silicon valley when Burke Harris was four.As a girl
, she often felt like an outsider,one of the only black students at her Palo Alto
high school, where the kids were mostly white and well-off, and where the girls cried in the cafeteria if they didn't get the right kind of car for their sixteenth birthday.Elizabeth Dozier grew up just outside Chicago in far more modest circumstances, the product of unlikely and illicit romance between her father an imatee at the State Prison in joliet, Illinois and her mother and nun who had assisted to visit prisoners start of religious Duty and who wound up fell in love. After the author was born her mother raised her alone eating at local Catholic School and working summer as motel need to supplement her meager income.