What Peggy Orenstein Learned Making a Sweater from Scratch

Peggy Orenstein, the author of seven bestselling books on girls, boys, women, men, sex, self, and the culture, has a lot of well-earned grit. She’s gone through two rounds of breast cancer, six years of infertility treatment before the pregnancy that resulted in the birth of her daughter Daisy, now 19; the pain of the recent death of her mother, and the mental decline of her father—and more.

She is also multi-skilled: A practitioner of yoga for 20 years, she has tried windsurfing, has tinkered with the guitar, is a cook (but not as good of one, she says, as her husband (Oscar-winning documentarist Steve Okazaki), a grower of fruit and vegetables in her Berkeley garden, an avidly environmentally aware consumer, and a lifelong knitter, a craft she learned from her mother. (SLFHM is her acronym for the many women who similarly learned the skill from theirs.)