PORTLAND, Maine — In 1975, after her husband decided to start a business that would manufacture tents, Marilyn Moss Rockefeller spelled out exactly what he could expect from her.
“Bill, I want nothing to do with this new company,” she told him. “I want no part of the idea. It sounds completely overwhelming.”
Within a few months, with the initial investment money already gone and the business flailing, she stepped in and became president of the company. She was the mother of two young kids, had no management training, and no experience running a business.
“Those first few weeks,” she writes, “I had a severe case of impostor syndrome and plenty of doubt. But I did not have any fear, and that distinction is worth pointing out. Fear could have stopped me. Doubt, I could live with and fake my through.”
This is one of the many stories Rockefeller tells in her new book, “Mountain Girl,” her account of a life that took her from a poor childhood in the hills of rural West Virginia to a career as a successful entrepreneur in Maine. The journey was not smooth, but Rockefeller believes it may inspire others.
Her hope, she writes, is that readers will “find something that resonates for you here in these stories about facing our fears and daring to do that which calls us most.”
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