Roland Merullo ’71 Recounts Career Journey

“When I grew up, people would ask me what I wanted to be,” award-winning author Roland Merullo ’71 said. “It’s kind of a terrible thing that adults do to kids, asking a little kid what he wants to do with the rest of his life. So my response was I’m going to be a doctor, and I got that question out of the way.” Merullo, who has published 20 books of both fiction and non-fiction, described his winding journey to writing at last Friday’s assembly.

Merullo’s path to writing began with his parents. “My mom and dad were good people, smart people, hardworking people, but there was kind of a frustrated ambition to them,” he said. “They had these nice lives, but in both of them there was a sense that there was something bigger that they had wanted in life.”

“I’m telling you this because when you’re 15, 16, 18 or even when you’re 25 and 30, if you can’t answer that question when people ask you what do you want to do later in life, that’s okay,” Merullo said. “There is something out there waiting for you; there is some reason why you are here. It just might take you awhile to figure it out.”

His parents encouraged him to become a doctor, and that was the career choice he had in mind throughout his adolescence. “When I grew up, being a doctor was the epitome of human achievement,” Merullo said. “Not only did you help people who were sick and dying, but you had a nice life and made more money. So my parents wanted that for me, like any parent wants for a child: something better.”

With that vision for his career in mind, he graduated from Exeter and enrolled in Boston University as a pre-medical student. After his first year, he had a talk with his father on the back porch of his parent’s house. This talk proved to be a theme throughout Merullo’s life. Showing his report card filled with Cs and Ds in the sciences and As and Bs in Russian, he told his father that perhaps he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor.

“[My father] puffed on his pipe and said be a Russian professor,” Merullo said. “It sounded good, it was a stable, honorable profession.” After deciding on his new career choice, Merullo enrolled in Brown University’s one-year masters program. During this grueling program, he spent up to eight hours in the library per day, and after this experience, went back to his home to have a discussion with his father.

They decided that his next career move would be as a diplomat. Sure enough, the following February, he got a job in Soviet Union with the United States Information Agency (USIA). While he loved his role, Merullo noticed that diplomats lived a very public life. “If a husband and wife who worked at the embassy were going to have an argument, they had to go to “the bubble,” we called it, in the basement, which was a little soundproof room,” Merullo said. “They went there to have their fight because it was assumed correctly, I think, that the Soviets were eavesdropping electronically.”

Unnerved by this insight into diplomacy, when the job ended he found himself back on his parent’s porch telling his father that he was, like his past jobs, just not cut out for this line of work. “I think you probably know what he said. My father was such a great guy. He said, ‘Okay, you’ll figure it out.’ ” After this experience, he experimented as a Peace Corps volunteer but quit before his assignment was over. “ I came home, in my mind a disgrace,” he said. “I felt terrible about myself.”

Instead of losing hope, Merullo took the opportunity to evaluate himself and for the first time thought about what he wanted to do. “I was able to say to myself, even in the depths of all this negative feeling about myself, what do you want to do? Not what do your parents want you to do, not how do you make a lot of money, not what would give you a lot of prestige and status in the world,” Merullo said. “I was able to say I want to be a writer.” Twelve years later, at the age of 37, he published his first book.

Merullo concluded assembly with a comforting message for students and others who are still finding their passion. “I’m telling you this because when you’re 15, 16, 18 or even when you’re 25 and 30, if you can’t answer that question when people ask you what do you want to do later in life, that’s okay,” Merullo said. “There is something out there waiting for you; there is some reason why you are here. It just might take you awhile to figure it out.”