From the Princeton Alumni Newsletter, Fall 2011

After completing her seventh triathlon using a bike she welded from titanium she mined, riding on a course she designed and paved using gold she carried flake by flake from mines she discovered with her eyes closed, swimming in a wetsuit made from seals she skinned by hand and stitched together using thread she wove from her own luxurious hair, three-time MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Maxine Lopez-Keough realized her true passion and life’s ambition lay in the eternally rewarding and primordially significant world of motherhood. “It’s what my body was made to do,” she explained to your interviewer, “everything else I’ve achieved— all these awards, the world records, the artificial limbs I’ve bought for poor people, the concertos I’ve composed, the papers in Science…it’s just worthless, really, compared to the act of getting knocked up.” She is now the sole guardian of six beautiful and healthy young boys, each named Maximilian, whom she has chosen to raise out of the eye of the public, in a bunker beneath her backyard, furnished only in the Shaker style. Each of her sons is fluent in at least six languages, plays six instruments, and possesses the power to magnetize elements not usually possessing magnetic qualities. The family spends the majority of its free time identifying cracks in the walls that resemble Nobel laureates. They sing together nightly and sleep entwined in the shape of a basket. The boys have begun to communicate telepathically. They have produced thus far a collective twelve novels. They claim to have made good progress towards adapting photosynthesis into their daily meals. On the question of what the chances were that a woman would one day be able to satisfy one of her sons, their mother shrugged her shoulders and responded: “Oh for fuck’s sake, they’re just boys.”