Anna Quindlen, journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner, novelist, mother,
will always see herself as a little girl flung legs akimbo in a great chair,
head lost in a book. When Quindlen was young, reading was far
more than an idle activity, it was her escape hatch, her dream
machine, her wormhole to a parallel universe. "In books I
have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I
learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to,
and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself,"
she writes in her latest work, a book-length essay titled How
Reading Changed My Life, (Library of Contemporary Thought,
September 1998).
It's not as if Quindlen had much to escape from. Hers was the
kind of wholesome, plain vanilla 1950s childhood that inspired
Saturday Evening Post covers. "I sometimes joke that my
greatest shortcoming as a writer is that I had an extremely happy
childhood," she says. The eldest of five children, Quindlen,
born in 1953, grew up in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, close to the bosom of her
large Irish-Italian family. Her father was a
management consultant, her mother "a sort of a world-class
mother. She seemed to believe that on the eighth day, God created
the five of us," quips Quindlen.
After graduating from Barnard College in '74, Quindlen started
out as a reporter at the New York Post in 1974. But it was at The
New York Times where her career took root and blossomed. In the
time some people take to get their own bylines, Quindlen had her
own column called "About New York." By 1990, she was
The Times's Golden Girl, the only female columnist on its op-ed
page, pontificating alongside legends such as William Safire and
Russell Baker. In her esoteric opinion columns, Quindlen stitched
together the personal and the political in elucidating and
sometimes brilliant combinations. By 1992, she had won a Pulitzer
Prize for her newspaper writing and had pundits speculating that
Quindlen was in line for a deputy editorship.
But although Quindlen had achieved spectacular success in
journalism, she wasn't working full-time at what she truly longed
to do: write fiction. "I went into newspapers originally to
support my fiction habit," she explains. "There's a
steady paycheck in reporting, and there simply isn't one in
fiction writing." As a result, she ended up leading "a
triple life," caring for her three young children (she found
time to marry her college sweetheart, lawyer Gerald Krovatin,
during her rapid ascent at The Times) and writing fiction when
she wasn't busy with her day job.
In the blur between childrearing and newspaper deadlines,
Quindlen somehow managed to turn out two bestselling books of
fiction, Object Lessons and One True Thing.
Confident that fiction was where her future lay, Quindlen decided to quit The
Times in 1995 to become a full-time novelist. Quindlen's move paid off when her third book of
fiction, Black and Blue—a moving
portrayal of domestic violence—received her best reviews yet.
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