Tracy Kidder and my dad Tom West speaking to a room of people in 1983

A few people reached out to me after learning that Tracy Kidder died this week. I knew him when I was younger and he was friends with my dad who has been gone since 2011 so this has been an interesting time to be thinking back to the 1970s when everyone was alive and things were happening. This is a combination of a few things I wrote to people who have written to me this week.

Tracy basically lived at our house on weekends while he was writing Soul of a New Machine. Sometimes he and my dad would go sailing, sometimes he’d just hang out at the house or go to work with my dad. He and my dad were pals their whole lives, though as my dad became less and less social (wanting to be a destination friend instead of going out places) they did not see each other as much. Tracy did a eulogy of sorts at my dad’s memorial service saying, among other things “The book was very good for me, but I always wonder if it was good for Tom?” and I really don’t know.

The book created an inflection point in my life. My dad became kind of niche famous (and shortly split up with my mom and moved out) and my Mom became sort of crabby and in a weird place being essentially thrust into single parenthood. The book almost never mentions my dad’s home life and it only mentions me for a sentence and my sister not at all. My mother told the most telling story about when she called him at work once in the 70s. He was not in and the assistant said she’d take a message and my mom said “Tell him his wife called” and the assistant said “Tom is married?!”

So, the message of the book was odd, “This guy was A LEGEND at working,” but at the same time we could read it and think “Yeah and he was absent as a dad.” I wound up working it out with my dad just fine later in both our lives, my sister maybe not quite as much. My message to the men who told me how much the book meant to them when they were entering the world of technology (and it was always men even though I’m sure the book was useful for people of other genders in tech as well) was to find a more well-rounded life for themselves, to value being a good partner and parent as much as being good at their job. I work in technology now, but I’ve managed a balance that I’ve had to work for. Tech will take your life if you let it. Tech is an empathy-removal machine.

I liked Tracy when I’d hang out with him if we saw the Todds or something, but he always felt to me like that sort of “went to the right schools” kind of guy–had a boat, had a summer place–which I felt a bit alienated from. To be fair, I think my parents grew up in worlds like that, but they chose a different path for me and my sister and so we grew up not like that. I’ve read a lot of Tracy’s other books and it’s so clear he had such a talent. I am still in touch with Susan Todd (wife of Dick Todd (RIP), editor of Soul of a New Machine) which is one of the few tangible living-person links I have to my younger years besides my sister. Every time a big thing like this happens, I get into my nostalgia feels for a bit. On the pages of SOANM Tracy brought out parts of my dad, both good and bad, which I never knew at all.

My favorite little bit of content about SOANM, and Tracy, is attached to this 2013 blog post (itself quite good). It’s a 1983 report from The Computer Museum (Inside “The Soul of a New Machine” an interview with Tracy Kidder and Tom West on page five of that PDF) which contains the partial transcript of an event that Tracy and Tom did together, a thing that I don’t think they ever did again. When Tracy was asked what he was up to and if he was sick of computers, he said

“I’m digging out from under. I’m writing some articles about atmospheric research. To be honest, I’m a little tired of my book. I put it on my shelf and won’t read it again for years. I think I know what’s wrong with it. In some sense, writing a book is like building a computer. There are rewards but one of the main ones is that Sisyphean one that if you do one you get to do another. So, I have an opportunity now to write a better one.”

And he did, he wrote so many books that were, if not better, at least just as good.