We were delighted to welcome author Annie Barrows as speaker at our 2025 commencement ceremony on Thursday, May 22. Barrows has written many books for children, including the New York Times best-selling Ivy and Bean series, which were released as films by Netflix in 2022, and the Iggy books, which began in 2020 with The Best of Iggy. Other kids’ books include mid-grade novels, a young adult novel entitled Nothing, and, most recently, Like, a picture book illustrated by Leo Espinosa. In addition to her works for children she is the co-author, together with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which spent over a year on the New York Times Best Seller list and was translated into 34 languages as well as a major motion picture. Annie’s most recent book is the first in a new series, Stella & Marigold, illustrated by Sophie Blackall.
We're happy to be able to share the full text of Barrows' address below and we offer our warm congratulations to Berkeley English's Class of 2025!
Welcome and congratulations to all of you graduates and to your families and friends.
When Dr. Falci invited me to address you on this great occasion of your commencement, I said, “Excuse me, I think you have the wrong Annie Barrows.” He assured me I was the correct Annie Barrows. “But I’m a children’s book writer,” I said. He agreed that this was true, and I was still invited.
I will do my best. I have never given a commencement speech before. Usually, I talk to six-year-olds. My general understanding is that a commencement speech includes exhortation. I think I should be exhorting you to use your education to combat the perils of AI and climate change and autocracy. Unfortunately, I am in no position to exhort you. I don’t know what to do about any of these problems, or, if I do know what, I don’t know how. Therefore, I’ve decided to instead use this opportunity to congratulate you on your excellent good sense in graduating with a degree in English.
I’m sure that sometime in the last four years—and possibly repeatedly—you have heard that the study of literature and reading itself are a great waste of time. This is hogwash. Reading is a great expansion of time. Reading books allows you to experience events without having to live through them yourself. What can possibly be more efficient than that? You can understand a good deal about trench warfare and trench foot without have to fight in a war. You can get a grip on the hazards of adultery without having to be adulterous or even married. Long sea voyages without leaving the couch! The trials of drug addiction without the wear and tear of being an addict! Essentially, reading allows you to live hundreds of lives in the span of one.
So what, your STEMophile may ask. What good does it do to know a bunch of stories? What is reading for? I expect you have developed a good—and, I hope, crushing—answer to this questions, but just in case, I’m going to give you three.
First, reading is for understanding your fellow humans. It’s for developing an imaginative bank that will loan you some empathy when you need it. As the great David Foster Wallace said in the best commencement address ever given, the purpose of education is to make each of us step for a moment outside our hardwired belief that we are the absolute center of the universe. It’s for endowing us with enough experience—via those hundreds of lives—to remember that there are other entirely valid perspectives than our own. Ultimately, it’s to keep us from killing each other in the parking lot by allowing us to recognize, no matter how wearily, that this bozo sitting in his car, looking at his phone, instead of backing out of the space so we can just park, this bozo is more like us than not.
The second function of reading is comfort in extremis. Your education in literature is going to comfort you. And I’m sorry to report that as an adult, you are going to need comforting. Each of the catastrophes that comes your way is going to arrive without much context and with a lot of hysteria. You will be assured that nothing like this has ever happened before. That the magnitude of the event is singular, and you and your generation alone have suffered it. This is wrong. This is totally incorrect. Reading of almost any kind will assure you of the exact opposite. It’s all happened before. Covid? How about the bubonic plague? Economic collapse? Sure, about every twenty-five to thirty years. Rise of autocracy? Yes, repeatedly. Extinction? This will be the sixth.
Now, it is true that some people do not find it comforting to read about the Black Death in the face of Covid. But through literature, you will inevitably gain an acquaintance with the resilience of humankind, its creativity, and, not incidentally, its unquenchable thirst for beauty, that can really reconcile you to being part of the species.
So you’ve made wise choice: Literature expands your experience-horizon, which in turn has develops your capacity to not hate your fellow humans, and it comforts you in extreme circumstances. But the third and final point I want to make about the value of literature is this: it is a conduit to the person you were at the age of seven. You probably think I’m going to start talking about children’s books here, but I’m not. I’m going to talk about you. Because all of you—no matter how educated and honored and adult you currently are—were once seven. This is lucky. I consider seven to be the pinnacle of life. Sadly, this means you’re now in a decline, but somewhere inside you is your seven-year-old self, and I would suggest to you that there is no better guide to your future than this person. Why? Because at seven, you cared more deeply and personally about something—whatever it was—than you cared about what other people thought of you.
In today’s America—unless you’re an unusual kid or you live in an unusual family—it’s all over by eight. By eight, you’re pretty well stuck in the culture. By eight, a kid’s default thoughts are usually social or commerce-driven or comparative. But at seven? At seven, a kid’s default thoughts can be about sharks. I once met a kid who thought about plumbing most of the time. I want you to imagine or, better yet, remember—because I bet you did this too—what that kind of thinking is like.
It is intense concentration for no gain and no purpose other than interest. It’s something that belongs only to the person doing it. It can’t be copied; it can’t be predicted; it can’t be sold. It has no value except to the human experiencing it.
And if it has no use and no value, why do it? What’s the point of thinking about plumbing, unless of course you happen to be a plumber? The point, in my opinion, is to have a self that can be separated from context. It’s to have a self that’s not dependent on input from others but can sustain itself.
Because your context is going to change. Given the circumstances of the twenty-first century, it’s probably going to change radically, and you will need a piece of being that’s inalienable, that can’t be taken away by a change of situation or the inattention of others. If you have this, you have power. If you don’t, you’re powerless. You will have to sit around and wait for other people to respond to you. You will judge people by how much others agree with them. You will primarily care about how you are viewed. This I consider to be helplessness, and it’s a grim fate.
So, as it turns out, I actually am going to exhort you—to try to regain the power of mind you had as a seven-year-old. And I’m going salute you for giving yourself a leg up on this project: you chose literature. You read. Reading is the most accessible conduit to attaining your seven-year-old self because you begin without knowing. Even now, even in the world of AI, you have to read something before you can have an opinion or talk or write about it. Therefore, however briefly, there’s a moment when it’s just you, and the experience has no container, no defined border of meaning. It could be anything. In this moment, you have a resemblance to a seven-year-old. Perhaps you’ll be interested, maybe even deeply and personally, in what you think or learn or experience, but whether you are or not, I urge you to prolong the moment when you are your only point of reference. I urge you to spend time alone with your thoughts without trying to find out what everyone else has already thought about what you’re thinking. Because that’s what it’s like to be a little kid, and it’s your best hope for liberty.
Congratulations. Go forth. Be seven. Good luck.
