Aging Offers Women 'Enormous Possibilities For Growth,' Says Author

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Mary Pipher has written a new book about women in their 60s and early 70s who, like her, are transitioning from middle age to old age. Pipher is 71. She writes that chronological age is not as important as health. In the 21st century, women often consider themselves middle-aged well into their 60s until they suffer a major health crisis or the loss of someone they love. Her new book is about finding new strategies for a new stage of life in which your body is changing; you may no longer be doing the things you built your identity on, like pursuing your career or raising children; and you may be losing people you love.

Twenty-five years ago when Pipher's daughter was a teenager, she wrote the bestseller "Reviving Ophelia" about the stresses and anxieties faced by teenage girls. When Pipher was taking care of her aging and sick mother, she wrote the book "Another Country" about the issues faced by adult children caring for parents. When Pipher was a therapist, she worked primarily with women. At the University of Nebraska, she taught psychology of women and sex roles and gender. Her new book is called "Women Rowing North."

Mary Pipher, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You know, we've spoken three times. The first time was for "Reviving Ophelia," your book about teenagers and teenage girls and the stresses that they go through. The second time was a book about people who are aging and the younger people who care for them. So it's like the second book was about dealing with parents or grandparents who are aging and needing help.

MARY PIPHER: "Another Country." Yeah.

GROSS: "Another Country," it was called. This book is about aging yourself and the issues that other aging women like yourself deal with. And I'm just interested in the shift in perspective from the second book that we spoke about - about helping people who are aging, like your parents - to this book where you're writing about your own cohort and yourself.

PIPHER: Well, of course, I see things a lot differently now than when I was younger and sometimes frustrated by my aging mother. My father died before he had a chance to age, but my mother did age and had many of the problems of aging people. She fell. She had very bad osteoporosis. She had some brain damage. She was ill and in a hospital a long time. And she was of a generation where the main way of coping was stoicism, and there was very little attempt to discuss pain in any way. It was also a generation that was very unassertive in their relationship to authority.

So there's two different things. One is, I'm now 71. I'm the age my mother was when she was in her rapid decline in health. And so I have much more empathy with her in terms of things like being afraid to break a bone, walking very carefully on the ice, becoming a much more cautious person, having some memory issues.

And then the other thing, of course, is I was writing about my mother's generation in comparison to my baby boomer generation. Now, the baby boomer generation has come to this life stage, and we're very different than our parents' generation. We're much more assertive. We have higher expectations for ourselves. We certainly anticipate a longer lifespan. I mean, one of the issues that was very interesting to me as I wrote this book is I have great many friends who are retiring at 65 or around 65, and some of them expect to live 30 more years. Well, 30 years is a third of a lifetime. And so the old traditional models we have about what people do after they retire don't look very fulfilling or interesting. I mean, nobody really wants to sit around and play bridge for 30 years.

GROSS: I think as you get older, you feel less resilient because your body is aging, and it's not as resilient as it was. But I think you're trying to say you have to become more emotionally resilient as you get older to deal with the stresses of aging and with the physical diminishment that eventually you're going to face.

PIPHER: Well, first of all, a lot of women, by the time they're my age, have some sort of disability. In my case, it's my hands. But one of the things that I realized since I wrote this book about my mother is that we aren't in either or categories. At that time, I believed you're pretty much in young old age until you lose your health, and then you're in old, old age. But now that I'm actually here, I see that we all start losing our health one way or another and that, in fact, what most of us are able to do is find workarounds.

So for example, in my case, I can't write the way I used to. My hands are just too broken for that. But what I have figured out are all kinds of other ways to write, and part of it is rationing the amount of time of day I write. Part of it is hiring assistants to come in and sit at the typewriter by me. So there's a lot of ways that we work around these issues of aging.

On the other hand, what happens is we may have more challenges in this life stage. But we also have seven decades, in many cases, of acquiring coping skills and resilience skills. And one of the interesting facts about women my age is we're the happiest demographic in America. In general, people tend to get happier as they age and stay happier right up until the very end. But women tend to be happier than men as they age. We also have learned by our age...

GROSS: Wait. I'm going to stop you right there...

PIPHER: Please.

GROSS: ...Because I want to ask you about the happiness issue.

PIPHER: Absolutely.

GROSS: Why do you think older women are happier when they're older than they were when they were younger? Is that what you're saying?

PIPHER: Absolutely. I'm saying that it gets also - statistical fact - I'm not...

GROSS: Right.

PIPHER: ...Just hypothesizing.

GROSS: But what accounts for that - 'cause, you know, it seems counterintuitive.

PIPHER: Well, first of all, I think it's - it really starts with, what do you think the nature of happiness is? And I think happiness is a choice and a set of skills. And I don't say this as a person who was born naturally sunny, and I certainly don't say it as somebody who's happy all the time. But I have learned by several decades of life...

GROSS: Parentheses here - like, in your family tree, you say there's depression, psychosis, suicide, alcoholism. So yeah. You're not from, like, a sunny...

PIPHER: No.

GROSS: ...Sunny, happy, happy family tree.

PIPHER: By no means - and I certainly am not arguing now, Terry, that, oh, I'm one of the happiest persons on earth. Listen to me.

GROSS: Right.

PIPHER: What I'm saying is I really feel like after all these years of being a therapist and watching my friends grow and develop and seeing the directions they take and then doing this book where I interviewed so many older women that I have a pretty strong sense for what makes people happy. The first part of it is making a choice to be happy - just deciding that that's a life goal, that I'm going to be happy. I'm going to do everything I can to make my life as good as I can.

And then it's a set of skills. And one set of skills, for example, is humor and just figuring out how to laugh about things. Another skill is figuring out ways to have meaning and purpose in one's life. Another skill is the ability to have friends, hopefully of all generations. But many women have women friends - close women friends. And I call close women friends my mental health insurance policy because they're so important. Another very important happiness skill is simply having reasonable expectations. My aunt Grace said, I get what I want, but I know what to want.

GROSS: I think from having read your book, the part of what keeps you feeling happier now is redefining happiness more as contentment than as, like, joy - you know, than as, like, wow; that was really fabulous. I'm so happy.

PIPHER: Well, yes and no. I actually would say that at this point in my life, not only myself - I'm never speaking quite for myself when I'm talking about this. I'm speaking for a lot of people that I know...

GROSS: Right, 'cause you've done a lot of interviews for the book.

PIPHER: Right. But actually...

GROSS: And you're a therapist.

PIPHER: ...Women my age, for the most part, experience more joy and bliss than younger women. And I could give you a couple examples of that. One of them is I had a friend who was dying of cancer, and she came over to my house for one last walk. She knew she wouldn't be around very long, and she was getting together with her family for a weekend at a state park. But she wanted to see me, and she was in a really good patch.

So she came over to my house. She had a lot of trouble to walking. But I live on a lake, and we walked down to this lake. It was in October. And as we sat on a bench down there, the sun was going down, and the tall grasses were illuminated by the sun. And if you've ever seen tall, big bluestem and the beautiful natural grasses - prairie grasses we have in Nebraska illuminated by the sun, they just glow golden and silver. And my friend said, isn't this a perfect moment? And she started to cry. And she said, it's so beautiful.

Well, that is a capacity that we're much more likely to have at 70 than we are at 40. Part of it's a matter of time. When I was 40 and a young mother and a full-time job, I just barely could make it to the bathroom. And I didn't have much time to sit around and experience the light of grasses at sunset. Or my current custom is I get up and drink a cup of coffee for half an hour in the morning and just look out at the dawn and think and enjoy the gorgeous moment I'm in.

Well, I didn't have that kind of time. But part of it is also a sense that the runway is short and that what - with what time we have left, we want to deeply savor every experience we have.

GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Mary Pipher. She's a clinical psychologist, the author of the bestseller "Reviving Ophelia," about teenage girls and the stresses that they experience. Then she wrote a book about people taking care of their aging parents or grandparents, and that was called "Another Country."

Her new book, now that she's in her early 70s, is about the transition into aging and into old age. And it's based on her experiences and on the experiences of many women who she's interviewed, as well as friends. That book is called "Women Rowing North: Navigating Life's Currents And Flourishing As We Age." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE MOUNTAIN GOATS' "PEACOCKS")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist who also taught for many years at the University of Nebraska, focusing on issues related to girls and women. Her new book is kind of part of a trilogy of books, starting with "Reviving Ophelia," about the stresses teenage girls experience, and then "Another Country," about the stresses people experience when they're taking care of their elders, like their aging parents. But this new book, "Women Rowing North," is about the transition into old age, and she writes from her own experiences and from the experiences of the many women she's interviewed and of friends.

So one of the things you're dealing with in your early 70s is chronic pain. You referred earlier to your hands having issues. And you were surprised to get the diagnosis that you'd always be in pain, and you'd always have trouble using your hands in the way that you were used to using them. You have trouble writing now, for example, and you're a writer - I mean, physically writing.

So you have workarounds to help you with the fact that you can't use your hands to write. But what about dealing with chronic pain? It's easy to obsess on that. It's easy for pain to crowd out other thoughts. And chronic pain is something a lot of older people have to learn to live with. People don't want to get addicted to opioids, for obvious reasons. Even things like over-the-counter anti-inflammatories, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, it's not great to take those over long periods of time. So talk about chronic pain and learning not to let it preoccupy you.

PIPHER: Well, you know, my last visit with my hand surgeon - after we'd done all we could, at the point my hands were really shot - I said, am I always going to have pain? And he said, you know, Mary, he said, I always have pain. He said, I've been doing these delicate hand surgeries for years, and I'm a pianist. I play for the symphony in Omaha. And he said, my hands hurt every day. And he said, the pain isn't going to be unbearable, and if you can figure out a way to deal with it, you're going to enjoy the rest of your life.

And one of the ways to deal with chronic pain is simply focus on other things. And I love the phrase subject change. And at a certain point, many of us are skillful enough that when we're thinking about a certain subject, we can just go subject change and move to another subject. So I don't focus on it very much.

In fact, when I think about my hands, I try to remember some advice that my friends have given me, which is to be extraordinarily grateful for the enormous amount of hard work they've done to me and to thank my hands for their many years of service and to reassure them that I will do everything I can to take care of them.

Now, I want to say I'm not in terrible chronic pain, and there's people have worse pain than me. But between a certain kind of attitude toward pain and towards also real good planning around pain management, more pain is bearable. And more people experience pain that never actually speak of it than you would imagine.

GROSS: Is your problem arthritis or something else?

PIPHER: It's a multiple set of problems. I've had my thumb joints rebuilt. I have carpal tunnel. I have arthritis. It's just everything. The main thing is I've just worked very, very hard all my life. I started doing heavy work in high school. I was a A&W carhop, and I was carrying great, big heavy trays down a long runway and putting them on cars. And later, I was a fry cook, and I cooked through college and was a waitress. I wrote through a Ph.D. I was a real chronic studier. And then all those years I was a therapist, I took notes. And then by the time I've written 10 books, in my case, what that means is I've written 100 books and thrown away all but 90 of them.

GROSS: (Laughter) Yeah, yeah.

PIPHER: So I've just worn out my hands, and that sometimes happens. They just wear out from overwork - not enough ligament left to support hands and so on.

GROSS: People are living to longer ages now than their parents did because of new breakthroughs in medical technology. So retirement is longer. People who stay married are married longer than previous generations because their life expectancy is longer, their lifespan is typically longer. And so couples often live together for many years as retirees and spend many more hours together than they ever did before as a married couple.

And especially, like, if you're raising children, it's kind of, like, tag-team sometimes. (Laughter) Like, you're not spending much time together as a couple during those really active child-rearing years. So have you seen a lot of marriages change in surprising ways during the years of retirement?

PIPHER: Well, first of all, one thing that's really interesting is a lot of people get divorced because at the point their children are raised, at the point they quit their job, they realize, you know, this isn't really the person I want to spend 25 more years with. And they're at a point where they're young enough to consider they could build a new life. And they're old enough that they don't want to waste time. So the divorce rate is, actually, pretty high in my life stage given previous divorce rates for older couples. Then, of course, there's couples who somehow stay together, even though they aren't very happy together. And I don't know too many couples like that, I'm happy to say.

But I'll tell you what I have noticed about couples who stay together is there often is a sweetness that comes into those relationships that was never there before. And part of it comes from simply taking better care of each other and realizing this person has meant a lot to me over my lifetime. And I want to be good to them, and I want to take care of them. And I know that our fates are intertwined. And the better I am to this person, the better the relationship will be and the better my own quality of life will be.

GROSS: What frightens you most about aging?

PIPHER: You know, what frightens me by far the most about aging is losing people I love. That's always been a tremendously difficult issue for me. We had a brother-in-law of mine die of brain cancer in his - he was a soccer player. He was 28 and a soccer player. And he died of brain cancer. And that knocked me out for about a year. And last year, my daughter moved with her family, my two young grandchildren, up to Canada. And it was tremendously difficult for me. I have not yet lost a sibling. I can't imagine losing a sibling. I haven't lost a close woman friend. I can't imagine that.

So that is really very difficult for me to think, how will I cope with this continuing string of losses? And the implications of that for me are I need to have my life, which will include a great deal of loss - I mean, at this point in my life, one way or another, I'm going to say goodbye to everybody I know. So the antidote for that, the balancer for that is to have a life as filled with gratitude, fun, appreciation, joy, meaningful work as I can possibly have.

GROSS: Well, Mary Pipher, it's been a pleasure to talk with you again. Thank you so much.

PIPHER: I thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Mary Pipher's new book is called "Women Rowing North." After we take a short break, we'll hear from Jennifer Stockburger, who runs the test track for Consumer Reports, where they test out new cars. The magazine just published its annual car issue, ranking cars and car companies. Also, Maureen Corrigan will review a new novel about migrant children at the southwestern border. I'm Terry Gross. And this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MARIAN MCPARTLAND'S "HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN")
TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Buying a new car is becoming more and more confusing. There's not just lots of brands. You can now choose between hybrid, plug-in hybrid, electric, SUV, compact SUV, pickup truck. And once you know what you want, there's the ordeal of negotiating the price. Our next guest is here to help alleviate some of that anxiety and confusion. Jennifer Stockburger runs the test track for Consumer Reports. It's the largest independent consumer auto testing center in the world. And it's where the magazine tests out hundreds of cars, trucks and SUVs. Last week, Consumer Reports put out its annual car issue, which ranks cars and car companies. The Japanese automaker Subaru was rated the top brand. Jennifer Stockburger spoke with guest contributor Sonari Glinton.

SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Jennifer Stockburger, welcome to FRESH AIR.

JENNIFER STOCKBURGER: Thanks for having me.

GLINTON: What are some features that are standard now that, if I'm 10 years out of a brand new car, that would surprise me?

STOCKBURGER: Electronic stability control was required on all new cars as of the 2012 model year.

GLINTON: Well, what is that?

STOCKBURGER: The car has the ability to individually brake certain wheels one at a time. So if you find yourself in an out of control, in a skid, in poor weather, the electronic stability control can individually brake a wheel to kind of pivot you back on your intended path - super effective safety feature. We've talked about it at Consumer Reports as one of the best things since the seatbelt. It's on all new cars now.

But now we're jumping to this new group, automatic emergency braking being a key element of that. This is a set of either radar, camera systems. They're doing some seeing. The car's seeing what you may not. And if you're not reacting to an imminent crash situation, the car will automatically apply the brakes to either avoid the crash entirely or, at the very least, wear off some speed to make it a less severe crash. So the data's showing it's super effective.

We, certainly, are advocating that it should be standard, like electronic stability control, on all new cars. And we give points in our overall score. And like I say, it can't even be a top pick for us this year unless you have it standard. And many of them already have that. About 30 percent of the newest models already have a pedestrian detection function as part of their automatic emergency braking, which simply says they won't just stop for a car. They'll stop for somebody in front of the car as well.

GLINTON: So Consumer Reports has released its annual car issue and - where you rank the cars and the car makers. So let's start with the brands. In first place, there's Subaru, then Genesis, Porsche, Audi, Lexus, Mazda, Lincoln, Toyota and Hyundai.

STOCKBURGER: Correct.

GLINTON: So when you're ranking a brand - I'm thinking I'm going to like driving a Porsche more than I like driving a Ford Fiesta. So how do you compare apples to oranges or Ford Fiestas to Porsches? (Laughter).

STOCKBURGER: Right. Right. So you've hit on one aspect. So the brand score is an average of the overall scores for the models in that brand, quite simply. So one piece of it - when you say, I like driving a Porsche better than, you know, a Subaru, that's the owner satisfaction piece. But it's also those other three components; reliability - I would guess the Porsche's probably not as reliable as the Subaru - and the road test score and the safety features and safety crash test performance. So when you culminate all of that together, that's where the Subaru comes up to the top because it has a number of models that are - not only perform well in our tests, our members like them. And they have really stellar reliability overall.

GLINTON: OK. Let's go through the bottom of the list. There's the last five - bottom five on your list - Jeep, Mitsubishi, Jaguar, Land Rover and Fiat. And, I think, maybe Jeep is interesting because they sell, it looks like, more of the cars here in the U.S. I mean, like, I don't ever remember Jeep being in even the top 15 of your choices. So - but this is a really popular car. What's going on here with Jeep?

STOCKBURGER: Right. And you've kind of taken the words out of my mouth with Jeep in that people love them. So they're one of those manufacturers where reliability scores are quite low. And that's what's driving them to the bottom. But some of the owner satisfaction are high. You know, there's always that car that people love. And they're going to love it regardless of whether it performs particularly great or is particularly reliable. And, you know, something like the Jeep Wrangler or the Jeep Unlimited - now, people love those vehicles. It's the reliability for Jeep models that has put it down there in that bottom 10.

GLINTON: Consumer Reports occasionally does this. It takes back its recommendation of cars. The Tesla Model 3 - now, this is the car that Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the CEO SpaceX and a couple other things, has said would be the electric car of the masses. Now, I've talked to engineers who say overall - right? - electric cars should be more reliable. This car is selling like gangbusters. So why no love for the Model 3 from you guys?

STOCKBURGER: Right. And, again, this is from the reliability data. So this most recent round of ratings, including the top picks, happens to include a very recent set of reliability data that was taken over the summer of 2018. So in that data, the Tesla Model 3 had some issues, right down to things like paint and trim. So if you go back, you know, they keep changing the Model 3. You know, Consumer Reports has had some criticism. Oh, you keep changing your mind on the Model 3. Well, not really - the Model 3 keeps changing. So it's reflected in those reliability scores.

You know, they ramped up production on the Model 3. They had some real lag in terms of delivering Model 3s when they were supposed to, so they significantly ramped up production on the Model 3. And I think we're seeing that kind of accelerated production in the reliability scores, perhaps. You know, we own a Model 3 at our test track. And things that came out in reliability, such as glass issues - we have a crack in one of the - the rear windshield of our Model 3. So it's - even though we own one car, we see some of it.

GLINTON: Given your time at Consumer Reports, how would you score the sort of industry overall right now? Is it is a good time to be buying a safe, efficient car or have there been better years?

STOCKBURGER: No, I think there's never been a better time. I think cars overall are more reliable and safer than they have ever been, despite more vehicle miles traveled and fatalities. We talk about fatalities. They've had a little increase over the past couple, you know - in a few previous years. A lot of that is in the pedestrian area. So I think there's some distraction. We've talked about controls. Certainly, cell phones have played a part, both on the part of the driver and the pedestrian. So having systems now like automatic emergency braking to back us up as drivers has become more important. But those features are there.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview guest contributor Sonari Glinton recorded with Jennifer Stockburger, who runs the test track where Consumer Reports tests out new cars. The magazine's annual car issue was published last week. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DR. LONNIE SMITH'S "TALK ABOUT THIS")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR contributor Sonari Glinton recorded with Jennifer Stockburger, who runs the test track for Consumer Reports, where they test out new cars. The magazine just published its annual car issue, ranking cars and car companies.

GLINTON: If I go to the dealership, what are some of the things that I should be doing in a test drive that you guys do that's important?

STOCKBURGER: I think the most important thing is to test drive the car like you use the car. So we certainly have the luxury because we have this fabulous test track of pushing cars to their limits, if you will. We can tromp on the gas pedal and have it, you know, excel as quickly as it can - not something the normal consumer can do out on the open highway in a test drive. We can, you know, do a panic break and see how quickly that car stops. So we look - you know, people should look to - people like Consumer Reports to get that type of information.

But when they're doing their own test drive, take it on the roads that as closely mimic what you drive on. If you have a long highway commute, be sure you make a highway portion part of your test drive. Does it want - accelerate enough that you can merge into moving traffic? Does it grip enough to get you off a curvy exit ramp?

And then conversely if you're a rural driver, make sure you include some rural roads. We even go so far as, say, if you drive frequently at night, go and do a night test drive. How are the headlights? You know, do you get enough visibility from your headlights that you're comfortable driving behind them? And if you have kids, take your child seats along.

Test the car like you use the car. You know, if you can extend the test drive, do that. If you can go back multiple times, do that. It pays to put the time in.

GLINTON: What are some of the things that you think you guys test out that it wouldn't occur to me that's really important?

STOCKBURGER: I think some of the livability. So, often, when you're doing your test drive you're talking about the on-road performance. But I think it's important to do some of the stationary performance - controls, access, getting in and out. Is it an easy - particularly if you're limited in movement or you're an older driver, can you easily get in and out? Is the visibility enough for you to comfortably maneuver?

Maybe it means pulling into a parking space and backing out. Not all of the test drive needs to be out in the driving portion. Does it have enough cargo for - you know, you take a family trip every year. Do you think it has sufficient cargo? All that stuff that can, for lack of a better word, tarnish your perception of the car that are outside of the driving performance are those details that can be the difference between loving and hating that vehicle in the long run.

GLINTON: I've test driven cars on an airplane runway (laughter), you know, with the engineer. It was the most beautiful car, the most beautiful experience. I could imagine that before the car gets to an average journalist, there isn't any lint.

STOCKBURGER: Right.

GLINTON: There's nothing wrong with that car. So how do you - how do you differentiate - when you guys are testing, how do you get out of that for - you know, if Ford is going to send me an F-150, it's going to be the best F-150 ever to a journalist. How do you guys get around that?

STOCKBURGER: Well, we get around it because we don't take that car from - from Ford. So keep in mind that all of our test vehicles are purchased at retail as consumers. You know, and many of us get to go in five or six dealerships a year and buy a car.

And people often say, oh, you know, Connecticut's a very small state. You can't possibly be anonymous in your purchases. When we tell you some of our dealer interactions, I can promise you that we are - we are anonymous. And if we think we aren't, we leave the dealership and take it to a different dealership. So we are purchasing. We are not testing press vehicles. We are testing on vehicles purchased full-price at local dealerships.

GLINTON: Are we right to be skeptical of the dealer. You know, a lot of people struggle with that idea.

STOCKBURGER: Yeah, so - so in terms of being skeptical of the dealer from the purchase, you know, a lot of people will say to us, why don't you rate dealerships? You know, it's such a nightmare. You know, why can't you rate dealerships? And what we found in the frequency of certainly the purchase is it's not really the dealership. It's not even the brand. It comes right down to the individual salesperson.

You can have, you know, a Toyota salesperson who's awful, or you can have a GMC salesperson who's wonderful. It's the individual, not the brand, not the dealership. And people - our best advice is go to a different dealership. Be ready to walk out of that horrendous experience because even if you're buying, you know, a General Motors vehicle, another General Motors dealership might just get you a better person. You might even say, I'd really like to talk to a different salesperson. It can be as simple as that.

GLINTON: All right. So I have a pet peeve when you go into a car dealership. Mine is when I ask the question, how much is that car? And then they say, how much do you want to pay for it? But what are some of your pet peeves of dealing with dealers or going into the dealership?

STOCKBURGER: Right, and yours, it's - the one key to negotiating a good deal is don't base it off a monthly price 'cause they'll make that work however they have to. Say let's talk bottom-line price, and then we'll talk about the financing. So No. 1 to you - but mine, I think, is - is their surveys. I have actually had dealers - and again I'm going to say - not say dealers. I'm going to say sales people - that survey that they want you to fill out post-purchase that says they've gotten all glowing - glowing reviews in all areas, you know, of the purchasing process. I've had dealers hand me that survey pre-filled-out with highlighter. I say pre-filled-out, but highlighted.

If I could give them all, you know, top 10 scores if it's on a scale of 1 to 10, that would be awesome, when they really didn't put in the effort and make me feel like a valued customer through the whole process until we got to that survey 'cause ultimately when Consumer Reports buys the car, there is a check delivered at the very end that says Consumer Reports on it. And the keys and the paperwork all says Consumer Reports. And the dealers have said, if I knew you worked for Consumer Reports, I would have treated you so much better. And I want to say you don't want to treat all of your customers that much better?

GLINTON: OK. So when we think about other beings in the car, there is something that has bothered me for a while, which is dogs. Now, don't get me wrong. I love dogs. And there isn't a lot of encouragement of, you know, dog travel. You know, Subaru has a dog ramp on one of their vehicles. But I saw a guy - a young man in the Chevy Silverado pickup, and he had a dog in the flatbed part of the truck.

STOCKBURGER: Right.

GLINTON: And I - if I could have made a citizen's arrest, I would have. That's obviously dangerous. But dogs unrestrained in a car are definitely a problem no matter how small or how big they are. And I wonder if you're going to belt yourself in and put your kid in the baby seat, but Robert (ph) the dog is just, like, moving around the car, what are your recommendations about restraining your animal? How would you recommend me handling my best friend in my ride?

STOCKBURGER: Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is even if you don't consider the safety of your dog to the same level as you consider the safety of your passengers, in a crash, everything's moving towards the location of the crash. And that includes your dog or any pet. So if that dog is free to move about that cabin - particularly, you know, I've see people with the dog and the child in the back. That dog becomes the projectile. So even if you're not valuing their safety to the same level as the human passengers, they may be risking your human passengers. So certainly restraining your dog is your best bet.

Subaru has been at the forefront of some of this work in working for the Center for Pet Safety and doing some of this. Their harnesses in a crate is even better than just around the car. And the other piece I will add is there's a lot of distraction there in terms of the dog hanging on the wheel, sitting in the person's lap. If you crash, you're crushing them against the wheel. So they may injure you. They may have airbag interference, so it can't protect you.

So if the dog is going to be a passenger in car, think about that when you're buying the car. Perhaps you need something with a hatchback or a wagon styling. You know, I think of Outbacks and a lot of small SUVs. But the dog is safer in that cargo area with some sort of divider to protect passengers ahead. They can still get air. They're probably more comfortable than riding around on the passenger seats than they would be, you know, in the front unrestrained or trying to get comfortable on a passenger bench.

GLINTON: Jennifer Stockburger, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.

STOCKBURGER: You are so welcome.

GROSS: Jennifer Stockburger runs the test track for Consumer Reports, where they test new cars. The magazine's annual car issue was published last week. She spoke with guest contributor Sonari Glinton. After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review a new novel about migrant children at the southwestern border. This is FRESH AIR.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Valeria Luiselli is only 35, but she's won two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award and has been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Luiselli, who was born in Mexico City, has just written a new novel that focuses on migrant children at the southwestern border. It's called "Lost Children Archive." Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Valeria Luiselli is on to readers like me - readers with a skeptical attitude towards novels ripped from today's headlines. I always wonder whether the social commentary in such fiction will be its big selling point, compensating for a thinly imagined, overly reportorial narrative. Luiselli's latest novel is called "Lost Children Archive," and it's about the so-called border crisis, focusing on the migration of thousands of unaccompanied minors who've crossed from Central America and Mexico into the U.S., seeking asylum. She's written about this issue before in nonfiction, a long essay called "Tell Me How It Ends," borne of her own work as a volunteer court translator for undocumented children in New York.

The book was structured around a series of official questions the children answered, as well as a car trip Luiselli and her own family took to the border. That same scaffolding pokes through "Lost Children Archive." The main narrator here is an unnamed woman researching a sound documentary on migrant children. And the novel is composed mostly of her thoughts on the road trip she takes with her family from New York to the desert reaches of the great Southwest.

As to my skepticism about whether or not such a baldly relevant political subject as the fate of undocumented migrant children can be transformed into art, Luiselli's narrator - her semi stand-in in this novel - asks those same questions. She worries whether her documentary will be moralistic, boring and heavy-handed. In response, the novel Luiselli has created vaults over those pitfalls, thanks mostly to the inexhaustible buoyancy of its language. But be forewarned. That soaring writing style is practically the only uplifting element in this fictional travelogue. Luiselli shuns the jauntier adventures of a Kerouac or Whitman, and instead sticks to the American Gothic pathways charted by Poe, Carson McCullers and Cormac McCarthy. Indeed, audios of some of their books are packed like roadmaps of hell into the glove compartment of the family car.

When "Lost Children Archive" opens, our narrator, her husband, 5-year-old daughter and 10-year-old stepson are in their car driving over the George Washington Bridge. Even before they reach New Jersey, there are signs that the narrator's marriage, like the country she and her family are exploring, is splitting apart. The narrator's husband, who's also a sound documentarian, wants to travel not to the border but to Apacheria, the Southwestern lands that were once Apache territory. In fact, he wants to move there for a few years to create a soundscape of the ghosts of Cochise, Geronimo and what he calls the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender. Our narrator, in contrast, wants to work on a soundscape giving voice to child refugees, the lost children, children who have lost the right to a childhood.

Mile after mile, tension tamps down the atmosphere in that car, an accompaniment to the unspooling, ragged roadscape (ph) of motels, Dunkin Donuts franchises and big box stores. Our narrator describes her husband as silent, remote, persistent in his task behind the wheel. The sun has set. The light is blue-gray. And he focuses on the road ahead as if underlining a long sentence in a difficult book. Who can blame the kids for asking every so often, are we there yet?

But lest we readers also weary of the emotional flatness of this trip, Luiselli takes lots of detours in subject and style. "Lost Children Archive" is epic in its assured embrace of American history, literature, pop culture and, yes, politics. Luiselli smoothly integrates different ways of telling the same story - fragments of poems, a bravura sentence that runs on for 20 pages, Polaroid photos and other documents, like migrant mortality reports. Throughout, we hear about children from the past, who also became lost in America - children packed into slave ships or orphan trains. And towards the end of the novel, the boy takes over the narration to give a harrowing account of how he and his sister got lost in the great emptiness of the Southwestern desert.

That's really the point of all of Luiselli's elegant exertions in this novel - to draw readers into the gut realization that if not for luck, the grace of God, money, whatever, those lost children could be our children. Not every reader is going to like that message. Not everyone is going to want to go along for this rough ride. But there should be no worries about Luiselli's up-to-the-minute subject. "Lost Children Archive" ratifies the power of great fiction to expose our deepest desires, fears and hopes as we stumble through a world we share with others yet barely understand.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Lost Children Archive" by Valeria Luiselli. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we'll talk about Mike Pompeo with Mattathias Schwartz, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. In the current issue, he writes about what he calls Pompeo's balancing act as secretary of state, translating Trump to the rest of the world. I hope you can join us.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer for digital media. Is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross.

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