Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor tells LI kids about her new book

We met Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was in Manhattan to talk about her new book, “Turning Pages: My Life Story” (Philomel Books). We were nervous and excited to meet her, but she greeted us with a handshake, hug and smile and we were relaxed almost immediately.

Did anyone ever inspire you to become a lawyer?

Yes, a TV lawyer, Perry Mason. “Perry Mason” was the first television show about being a lawyer. The neighborhood that I grew up in was a poor neighborhood, and it was a housing project in the Bronx. There weren’t any lawyers in my family and no lawyers in the neighborhood where I lived. And so I didn’t know what lawyers were, until my first exposure to being a lawyer was a TV lawyer. And what I thought he did in helping people made me want to be a lawyer, too.

What inspired you to write books?

What inspired me to write books was the belief that if people who had difficulties in their life, problems in their life, sadness in their life, that if they read my story, they might have hope. They might have hope that even if you come from a tough background, you can still succeed. So, am I going to write more books? Yes. I have one that I think is coming out next September. The working title is “Just Ask.”  It’s about kids like me, who grow up with special conditions like diabetes  . . . And how we manage our differences, and how we live full lives even though we might have some differences. The book is about people like me with diabetes, or who are blind, or who are deaf, or who are in wheelchairs. Some of them have conditions like autism and attention deficit. They can’t read well, or write well. So it’s about kids with differences, and how they make us stronger in so many different ways.

Did you struggle in school?

I didn’t until I got to college. In my first paper I did really, really badly. And I went to a professor and asked, what did I do wrong? And she said to me, you don’t really know how to write English well. I think that I had gotten away with getting good grades  in grammar school and middle school and high school because I have a really strong memory. I know a lot of facts, and I think my teachers were really impressed with that. Most of my tests were multiple choice, and that was easy. If you have a good memory, you can do a lot of multiple choice. I could tell them everything about anything. What they wanted in college was not for me to tell them the facts, but to explain them. And I hadn’t really figured out a way to do that. So, who helped me? A professor, a teacher. One lesson I’ve learned, if you need help, you’ve got to ask for it. And if you don’t understand something in school, you just have to ask your teacher to explain better. And most of them will. And for the occasional teacher who won’t, you go to the library and you say, I need another book in that subject because I’m not understanding this book my teacher gave me. Or you go to your best friend who’s in the class and who seems to understand what’s going on, and you ask that friend, would you help me, please? It’s what I did when I was in school when I didn’t know how to study. I asked the smartest girl in the class. That’s how I started to get the good grades.

If you did not become a lawyer, what would you be doing now?

I’d still be a lawyer. I imagined being a detective from Nancy Drew, because I love Nancy Drew. But when I was diagnosed with diabetes, they told me back then — it’s not true today — that I couldn’t be a detective, I couldn’t be a police officer. But after that, once I found being a lawyer, I didn’t want to be anything else. I think I would have done everything like I did to become a lawyer.

What kind of advice would you give students who are struggling and want to give up?

That’s not a choice. That’s not a choice worth making. If you give up, you don’t have a chance of ever having the experience of succeeding. Have you ever really tried hard to do something? And when you do it, don’t you feel great? You have to try and try really hard until you can do something. And then that feeling is what lets you keep going to try again. Now when things are hard — sometimes what I call you’ve hit a brick wall — you can’t do it. And that feels really bad. So what do you do? You try a different way. So, if you’re having trouble reading? Try comic books for a while. They’re short. They’re fast. And then try smaller picture books. But there’s always a way to try again.

"No me importa si trabajan lavando baños. Lo importante es hacerlo bien." [It doesn’t matter to me if they work cleaning bathrooms. The important thing is to do it well.]

My mother says that, too. What is one of your favorite quotes or models? 

 My mother used to say that because what she meant was, every job is an important job. As long as you like it and you do it well, people will notice that you’re a good worker and you’ll get ahead. So what’s my favorite quote? It was given to me by [former] Vice President [Joe] Biden, and he says his mother gave it to him. “You measure the character of a person not by how many times he was knocked down, but by how many times he got up.” It’s a little bit of an answer to what you said before. You tell how good and valuable and strong a person is not by how many times they fail or they got knocked down by something, but by how often do they keep getting up and trying again. That’s my favorite quote.

How do you feel about being the first Latina justice on the Supreme Court?

That’s always a hard question for me to answer. Because I don’t think of myself as a Latina justice. I think of myself as a justice, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, who happens to be Latina. And so I don’t think I feel special because I’m Latina, I’m special to some people because I’m a justice. But I do think that when people look at something like the court, and they see people there who are different, from different backgrounds, that they feel a certain amount of hope. That if I could do it, they could do it, too. So I think that that feeling of hope is what people have when they see people like me, a Latina. Or my colleague, Clarence Thomas, who’s black. Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, who are women. When they see those differences, they have hope that from wherever you come, whatever your background, you can not only become a Supreme Court justice, but the law will treat you the same.

Julie Corwin’s fifth-grade class, Drexel Avenue School, Westbury