Anna Quindlan fans
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TV ClubHouse: archive: Library - Miscellaneous thru May 2003: Anna Quindlan fans

Seamonkey

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 - 02:59 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I've got her new book, Blessings, heading my way..

The author will be interviewed on UpClose tonight.. UpClose, follows Nightline on ABC (Nightline follows the 11pm news here).

Thought I'd pass along the info:


"I remember I had this double stroller, and I was on maternity leave
before I started doing 'Life in the 30s,' and I would walk for ages during
what are called the 'arsenic hours,' after the afternoon nap, but before
bedtime. And this poem by Emily Dickinson would run like a loop through
my head, 'I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too?' And that's
sometimes how I felt, the way you'd feel when you have an infant. I'm nothing except the person who breast-feeds, the person who changes the diaper, the person who puts to bed."
-- Author and Columnist Anna Quindlen


It's no secret that women bear the brunt of the choices life presents.
Pursuing career goals while nurturing children is one of the great juggling acts women perform. (Yes, we can stipulate many men find themselves in similar circumstances. But few would argue that women don't have an added measure of pulling and tugging between the worlds of work and home.)

Few have been as public about the shifting demands of those worlds as Anna
Quindlen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She was clearly on the
fast track as a New York Times columnist when she shocked many of her
colleagues and readers and gave up power and status to care for her
children and transform herself into a novelist. Walking away from such a
job was not easy, and Quindlen writes about difficult choices in her
latest novel, "Blessings."

Quindlen's book is very much about expectations. Lead character Lydia
Blessing, a wealthy widow who has spent decades in a self-imposed exile on
her family's vast estate, is imprisoned by choices she made in her youth,
haunted by thoughts of what might have been. The arrival of an abandoned
child forces her to examine her carefully controlled life.

On tonight's UpClose, correspondent Michele Norris asks Quindlen about the
reaction to her leaving the New York Times to care for her kids.

"People were pretty unhappy. I mean some people had to find some other
reason. Oh, I'd been passed over the managing editor's job at the New
York Times, or, you know, there was something wrong at home. I heard
great rumors about that. Or I'd played a game of brinksmanship with the
publisher and had lost. I mean it was just preposterous. Some people
really felt like I was letting down the cause, i.e., feminism, by doing
this. Lots of guys I knew in high-powered positions just didn't get it,
and couldn't take it because they felt like there was no way in which
you'd give up that sort of power."

But she did, and has managed to have the best of all worlds -- to be there
for her children and to keep her hand in writing. She uses what she calls
the "F" word to describe herself: "The three kids, the lipstick, the work,
the husband. This is what feminism looks like...if we've gone from a time
when a woman had no choice but to be a wife and mother alone, to a time
when one individual woman has no choice but to keep doing a job that she
feels doesn't suit her anymore because everyone around her thinks she
ought to be doing it, then we haven't moved anywhere at all. We're still
in a mindset in which women ought to do X because people say they ought
to. I'm never living that way."

Anna Quindlen is a woman who knows what she wants and doesn't look in the
rearview mirror.


Richard Harris
Senior Producer
Nightline UpClose

Hermione69

Tuesday, October 08, 2002 - 03:46 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I love her column in Newsweek. I think I devoured Black and Blue in a couple of days, and I loved it, but it made me very sad. I've had One True Thing on my shelf for a couple of months, but Anna is not for light readers and I haven't been in the right frame of mind. She wrings every drop out of every emotion that she can. Thanks for posting this. She is someone I admire greatly.

Marysafan

Wednesday, October 09, 2002 - 06:16 am EditMoveDeleteIP
I read both Black and Blue and One True Thing, and realy liked them both. I am looking forward to reading Rememberance.

Bastable

Sunday, February 09, 2003 - 08:24 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
I love her column in Newsweek, too, Herm! She's a voice of reason in a cacophony of panic. Yay, Anna! Long may she write.