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Eileen Rockefeller is the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller and the youngest child of David and Peggy Rockefeller.  She has lived an inspiring and multi-faceted life, and with her new memoir — BEING A ROCKEFELLER, BECOMING MYSELF Rockefeller shares her stories with disarming vulnerability, connecting the extraordinary experience of being a Rockefeller to the universal one of finding identity and purpose.

Growing up as the youngest of six children and twenty-two cousins, Eileen Rockefeller learned in childhood that great wealth and fame could open almost any door, but they could not buy a sense of personal worth. Her father’s frequent business trips and her mother’s mercurial moods exaggerated the competition for attention within her family.  Navigating the myriad feelings others harbored about her last name—adulation, judgment, envy, and endless curiosity—contributed to her sense of isolation and loneliness as well as her acquired skill in emotional intelligence.

As a teenager, Eileen lived on a farm-based school in the Adirondack Mountains, sowing the seeds of her continuing passion for nature, health, and environmental sustainability.  As a young woman, an extraordinary meeting with Georgia O’Keefe helped give her the courage to pursue her own path. Inspired by her mentor, Norman Cousins (pioneering author on the healing power of laughter), she played a pivotal role in legitimizing the field of mind/body connections in health and disease. She later introduced Daniel Goleman to the subject of his bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence. Together with several others, they founded the movement to teach social and emotional learning in schools.

The first Rockefeller woman to write a personal family memoir, Eileen reveals her family’s wholesome values that contrast with those often held by the rich and famous. Her intimate stories affirm how self- understanding helps make us whole, whatever the circumstances of our birth.  About writing BEING A ROCKFELLER, BECOMING MYSELF, Eileen says: “I learned how much family shapes our identity and the ways we contribute to the larger family of life.”

Although the Rockefellers are an intensely private family, they have been described as the closest America has to royalty. Their extraordinary contributions to the national and international landscape have influenced the global economy and science, and have created and preserved national parks and monuments, founded major universities, medical schools and museums, and have passionately supported the arts and culture in the U.S. and around the world. BEING A ROCKEFELLER, BECOMING MYSELF takes us far deeper into the Rockefeller landscape than ever before.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eileen Rockefeller is co-chair of her family’s generational association, the founding chair of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, founder of the Institute for the Advancement of Health, and co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). She and her husband of 32 years also manage their own philanthropic fund that catalyzes actions to stem climate change. They have two grown sons and live on an organic farm in Vermont.