Very soon after being diagnosed with diabetes, 7-year-old Sonia Sotomayor decided she would not depend on the adults in her life — a distant, overworked mother, a doomed, alcoholic father — for the daily shots of insulin that would keep her alive.
So along with the morning routine of getting breakfast and brushing her teeth, she would pull a chair up to the stove and boil water to sterilize a syringe and needle, measure carefully, and inject herself before leaving her South Bronx apartment for school.
In an extremely personal memoir to be published Tuesday, the 58-year-old Sotomayor writes candidly about how her life-long disease and the sense of "existential independence" she developed after the early death of her father fueled her rise from the poverty of the projects to the exclusive enclave of the Supreme Court.