From newspapers to novels: Q&A with A.Q.
Anna Quindlen answers one of Maura Kelly’s questions at Peters Township High School.
Maura Kelly, right, reacts to one of Anna Quindlen’s answers.
Sara Parker sings with Room 100, the Peters Township High School a cappella group, directed by Ryan Perotte, which performed prior to Anna Quindlen’s question-and-answer session. Quindlen expressed high praise for the students.
Harry Funk/South Hills Living
Anna Quindlen signs a book for a fan following her question-and-answer session in the Peters Township High School auditorium.
Terry MacIntyre takes a photo of herself with Anna Quindlen.
Members of the Room 100 a capella group perform prior to the question-and-answer session. The Peters Township High School vocal ensemble, directed by Ryan Perrotte, drew high praise from Anna Quindlen.
Anna Quindlen’s novel “One True Thing” was adapted by screenwriter Karen Croner for a 1998 feature film directed by Carl Franklin and starring Meryl Streep, Renée Zellweger and William Hurt.
In 1995, after more than 20 years as a journalist with two major New York City publications, Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen left the world of newspapers to become a full-time novelist and essayist.
Since then, she has written 18 books, 13 of which have appeared on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list.
Quindlen was the third novelist to participate in an annual program made possible by the Peters Township Library Foundation, a nonprofit that encourages community involvement and initiates fundraising efforts for projects that are beyond the scope of what the library’s operating budget can provide.
Maura Kelly, foundation president, joined Quindlen onstage at Peters Township High School to ask questions, and here is a sampling of the novelist’s answers.
If you could choose a literary character to join you for your morning walk, who would that be?
Elizabeth Bennett from “Pride and Prejudice.” She and I have so much to discuss, especially now that she’s married to Darcy, which I think will not be as wonderful as she suspects.
That’s just sort of Exhibit A. It’s interesting how so much of the great literature by and about women, until probably the second half of the 20th century, doesn’t include particularly strong women characters.
Along with Elizabeth Bennett, I’m walking. I’ve got Elizabeth Bennett on one side and Jo March from “Little Women” on my other side. And then my life is perfect.
One of my favorite characters in literature is Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” But she’s a character who – almost from the beginning, you understand – is doomed.
It’s only when we get into the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that suddenly we have Isadora Wing in “Fear of Flying,” the kind of women who sort of, you know, kick ass and take names. And before them, to some extent, Elizabeth Bennett and Jo March stand alone, which is why they stand so tall in the minds of some of us.
Is there a room in your house that does not contain a bookshelf?
The bathroom. That’s the only room in the house that doesn’t contain bookshelves. I mean, we have books everywhere, and I’m always telling myself that I should cull them and give some away, and so on and so forth. But it’s very hard for me to do so. I just really feel like that’s how you decorate, putting out just some lamps and then a thousand books. And then you’re done.
Conversely, when I go to someone’s house, it’s almost axiomatic that somebody says to me, “You know, I’ve noticed that all three of your children read. How do you get your children to read?” And I look around the person’s living room, and there are no books. If there are bookshelves, they have, like, tchotchkes on them.
Tell us what it was like to win a Pulitzer and to have your book chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
Winning a Pulitzer is just about what you might expect. My former colleague Russell Baker used to say that always you know what the first line of your obituary is going to say, and that’s true.
At the time that I won, they still did it by sending you a telegram, but they called you with the telegram. So it was 3 o’clock on a Tuesday, which is the statutory moment at which it happened – still does – and the phone in my office rang.
And this woman said, “Um, I have a Western Union telegram for Miss Anna Quindlen.” And I said, “This is she.” And she said, “The trustees of Columbia University are pleased to inform you that you have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for … my goodness, this is wonderful!”
I said, “Thank you very much.” And she said, “Do you want me to read the rest of the telegram?” I said, “Yes, I do!”
I called my dad’s house, and his wife answered the phone. And I said, “Can I talk to my dad?” And she said, “He’s out riding around in his truck, because every 20 minutes, news radio says that you won the Pulitzer Prize.” And that was the high point of winning the Pulitzer Prize.
The Oprah book thing actually was anxiety-producing, from beginning to end. I had this wonderful young Irish woman who helped me take care of my kids when they were small and when I was traveling. I was on my way to the airport, and I called Elaine and said, “Is everything OK?” And she said, “Yeah. Somebody called and said it was Oprah, but I knew it wasn’t Oprah. So anyhow, I told her you weren’t here.”
And I said, “Did not Oprah leave a number?” And she said, “Uh, I didn’t take down the number.” So I got off the phone and called my editor at Random House, and I said, “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think Oprah may have called me.”
“So, what did she say?” And I said, “Um, well, my babysitter, like, didn’t really take a message.” He said, “Stand by.” So about half an hour later, Elaine called me back, and she said, “OK, I think maybe it was Oprah, and here’s the number.” So I called back, and it was, indeed, Oprah.
She told me that she had chosen “Black and Blue” for the Oprah book club, and I told her I was really excited about that. Except the whole thing with the Oprah book club was that if you told anyone that your book was an Oprah book between the time that you were told and a month later, when she came out onstage on a Friday morning and said, “This is the new book of the book club,” it would not be the book club book. It would disappear.
I’d be on the subway, and I’d want to just turn to people next to me and go, “I’m the next Oprah book.” And then I’d think, no, I can’t do it. So it was anxiety-producing until it finally happened.
The book had already been on the bestseller list for the eight weeks leading up to that, but then after it became an Oprah book, it sold, I think, an additional 400,000 copies or something. She was just an amazing force for good in publishing.
You left a successful career in journalism to focus on both your family and your writing as a novelist. What was the most difficult part of that decision for you?
First of all, it really had nothing to do with my family. I was already working at home, around my kids’ school schedules, the whole time I was a columnist. And frankly, I couldn’t have stood one more minute of them. I was with them all the time. But my experience is that when women decide to do what they want to do, somebody has to say that it’s about spending more time their family, because women just can’t be given widespread permission to do what they want, or who the hell knows what will happen.
If you’re really going to go back to the genesis of why I decided to do that, the genesis goes back to when I was 19 years old, and I nursed my mother through the end stage of ovarian cancer. My mother had a very humdrum, ordinary life. She didn’t work outside the home. She wasn’t highly educated. She had five kids in 10 years. But when she was dying, she really wanted to stay alive.
And the lesson I took from that was that being alive was really, really great, and you probably didn’t get very much of it. My mother was 41.
What I kept thinking to myself ever after was: If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You’ve got to do it fast. So I fast-tracked through practically everything. I fast-tracked through my time as a reporter. Then I fast-tracked into being a columnist. Over and over again, I took jobs that really scared me and then discovered I could do them, and then got comfortable doing them, which was my cue to stop doing them and do something else.
I had been doing the op-ed-page column for five years. I won the Pulitzer in Year Two. I felt like I’d gotten good at it but not comfortable at it. And my biggest fear was sitting at a restaurant table and hearing somebody at the next table say, “Remember when Anna Quindlen was really good.”
I just didn’t want to become tired, and I always wanted to be a novelist. When I was a little girl, I’d just think, those people. I want to be one of them. And I put it aside because I loved the newspaper business so much, and then right after I had Christopher, my second kid, I picked it up again and started working on “Object Lessons.”
And then at a certain point, I just thought, you know, if you could do whatever you wanted, what would it be? And I thought it would be to be a novelist full-time.
The hardest part about that was that I was the only woman on the Times' op-ed page, and a lot of women felt like I was letting down the side. There was a certain level of disappointment. But I kept thinking:
If the old deal was you got to be a wife and mother and nothing else – and if you stepped outside those lines, you were in trouble – and the new deal was, you got to be the only female columnist – and if you stepped outside that line, you were in trouble – then we probably hadn’t traveled as far as we liked to tell ourselves.
So I developed a comfort level with doing it. I’ve had a comfort level with doing it ever since. Having said that, I will be a reporter until the day I die, and I have never been prouder to be a reporter than I have been in the last three years, when I feel like my former colleagues have done the best work of my lifetime. I sometimes feel like newspaper reporters are, at this moment, all that stand between us and disaster.