Nancy Steinbeck is the co-author of the dual memoir The Other Side of Eden which includes the posthumous autobiography of John Steinbeck IV

John Steinbeck IV

John Steinbeck IV , was an American journalist and author. He was the second child of the Nobel Prize-winning author, John Steinbeck. In 1965, he was drafted into the United States Army and served in Vietnam...

, son of the beloved American author. Writer Magazine named the it among the top ten books for 2001.

She was a musical child prodigy, but decided to pursue careers in writing and social work. After attending the prestigious Lowell High School

Lowell High School (San Francisco)

Lowell High School is a public magnet school in San Francisco, California. The school opened in 1856 as the Union Grammar School and attained its current name in 1896. Lowell moved to its current location in the Merced Manor neighborhood in 1962....

 in San Francisco, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 during the Free Speech Movement

Free Speech Movement

The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and...

. She shares a unique history with a small group of San Francisco teenagers as being one of the original Haight-Ashbury hippies.

Nancy spent a decade traveling around the world and living abroad, in Kathmandu, on a commune in British Columbia, and in a tiny mountain village in Mexico. She has worked as a therapist with hard core delinquents at the San Francisco Juvenile Hall and drug addicts at Scripps McDonald Center in La Jolla, California, as well as in private practice. She was formerly married to John after they met in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975, where they studied Tibetan Buddhism

Tibetan Buddhism

Tibetan Buddhism is the body of Buddhist religious doctrine and institutions characteristic of Tibet and certain regions of the Himalayas, including northern Nepal, Bhutan, and India . It is the state religion of Bhutan...

 at Naropa University

Naropa University

Naropa University is a private American liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Oxford University scholar Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda.Naropa describes itself as...

 with Chogyam Trungpa

Chögyam Trungpa

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a Buddhist meditation master and holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, the eleventh Trungpa tülku, a tertön, supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries, scholar, teacher, poet, artist, and originator of a radical re-presentation of Shambhala vision.Recognized...

, the notorious renegade lama.

Upon John's untimely death in 1991, due to complications from back surgery, Nancy moved to a remote area of the Ozark Mountains, where she lives on a 350 acres (1.4 km²) ranch with her present husband. She continues to write and speak at colleges and universities, as well as rural schools, about the craft of memoir writing and dysfunctional family

Dysfunctional family

A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...

systems.

External links

• John Steinbeck IV and Nancy Steinbeck's website Permission to reprint given by copyright holder, Nancy Steinbeck