By today`s standards, Anna Quindlen, 36, has it all: fame, fortune and a happy family life. Three years after graduating from Barnard College, Quindlen was hired as a reporter by the New York Times, and in 1983 she was named deputy metropolitan editor. Two years ago she began writing Life in the 30s, the column that has made her a household name. Married to criminal defense attorney Gerald Krovatin, she has two sons, Quindlen, 5, and Christopher, 3, and is expecting a third child at any time. Although she writes her column at her Hoboken, N.J., home, Quindlen has decided that her career does not allow enough time for her family and other interests. During a recent to Chicago, Quindlen talked with writer Molly Woulfe about her decision to end her column. Motherhood has changed my attitude toward practically everything I do. For me, it`s important to be home more than a real full-time job would allow me to be. I like to take my sons to school in the morning. I like to take off if one of them is sick. I like to have lunch with them every day.
Once Baby Snooks arrives, all hell will break loose. I remember the first six months with the others as being a vain attempt to keep chaos from breaking out. I`m still going to take the others to school and pick them up and all that, and Baby Snooks has to come along in the Snugli. The rest of the time I`d consider it a great triumph if anyone had clean clothes.
I do have this way, every time my life is settled, of throwing the cards up in the air again, and this sure is a major way of doing it.
The New York Times was not entirely thrilled (about her decision to stop writing the column), but I don`t think they saw it as something I`d do for the long haul anyhow.
I quit the Times once already. I was deputy metropolitan editor, and about four weeks before my second child was born-my second child in two years- I told the executive editor (Abe Rosenthal) that I was going to quit. I was one of the highest-ranking woman in the news department, so I knew it was going to be a great disappointment to him.
Abe said, ”Promise me you won`t work for another newspaper,” and I said, ”I promise.”
I just told him that, with two little kids, I wanted to be home a lot more. It wasn`t so much that I thought the kids needed me as it was that I felt I needed them and that I was going to miss good stuff if I was at the office too much. I`d always wanted to write a novel, and this was going to be a great opportunity for me.
So I took six months` maternity leave, during which I didn`t do any work at all, which is what I always do and which I`ll do this time.
At the end of the six months, Abe said, ”How would you like to do the Hers column?” (It was then a weekly feature in the Home section that invited women freelancers to write about any subject.) You did six or eight of them at a clip. So I did and got a very good reaction and a number of jobs offers to do a first-person column from various newspapers and syndicates.
I went back to Abe and said, ”I know I promised you I wouldn`t work for another newspaper, but were you serious?” He said, ”You bet I was!” And I said, ”Well, I`ve had all these offers, and I don`t want to turn them all down.”
He said, ”That`s okay; you can do it for us.” (So she began writing the Life in the 30s column, which is syndicated nationally.)
I thought about ending the column about a year and a half after I started it. I`ve done a column before; I did the About New York column for almost three years, and I`ve done a lot of thinking about how long you can do a column and still be fresh. It seems to me that a lot of columnists outstay their welcome. They start doing bad imitations of themselves.
My real terror is to write a sentence that I think is crackerjack and then realize I`ve written it before. Aaaaagh! Professional hell. That`s it. I don`t mean to say that I think that I`m not still fresh now. I do. It`s just that I like to get while the getting`s good.
I had decided to stop after I had done it for two to three years. I felt like that was the right shelf life. Then I came to the decision that I would stop after the collection of columns was published (”Living Out Loud”
(Random House, $17.95)). And then I found out that I was going to have a baby two months after the collection was due to come out, and it was as though the decision was made for me.
I knew I wasn`t going to work for six months after I had the baby. It just seemed like the perfect opportunity. Some people think that it`s just because of the baby, which is a good enough reason, but it`s not the whole ball of wax.
This column is very hard on me emotionally. I`ve written certain columns and cried the whole time I wrote them. There`s one in my book, about how you look at mothers and daughters together when your mother has died, that I have not read since the day I wrote it. I didn`t read it when I put it in the book. Things like that are like ripping your heart out, which doesn`t mean you wish you hadn`t done them. It just means you want to stop doing them at a certain point. I want my personal life back.
My husband often says about running: ”You do it because it feels so good when you stop.” To some extent, this will feel so good when I stop.
My husband Gerry`s ambivalent (about her quitting the column). He thinks it`s a really good column, and he`s sorry that it won`t appear anymore, but there`s got to be some relief on his part.
My husband goes to the office, where a variety of people feel compelled to tell him what they think about what I do. He gets ribbed a fair amount. I don`t think the ribbing part is as bad as the real confrontations. He got a lot of noise about my amniocentesis column. (In that column last May she wrote that she had decided against undergoing the procedure.)
I didn`t have to argue with anyone face to face. I`d already talked to my closest friends about it, and they knew that my mind was made up. A lot of them disagree with me, and we had already gone gone back and forth on it. It had ceased to be confrontational with them.
I was shocked at the response to that column. I wasn`t just shocked at the vehemence of the response; I was shocked at how personal the response was and how many people seemed to feel personally betrayed that I made this decision. So many people felt that they knew me, that they were like me and that I would always reflect the way they thought about certain issues.
People think I belong to them and that they should have some say in this, but that`s not the way it works.
I`m not typical in a lot of ways. In some ways I am. I went to a good college; I was real ambitious; I did well in my work. I live in a gentrified neighborhood; I`m married to a lawyer, two little boys. In other ways I`m different from most people my age. I want to have more than two kids. It was relatively easy for me to decide to work part-time. I`m very domestic in some ways. I`m a practicing Catholic. There`s this odd juxtaposition of very typical things and very atypical things.
The flip side of it is that the column makes people feel like they`re not alone. It makes people feel there is this great commonality among us. We feel that so seldom. If that`s what the column has done, I rest easy in terms of it having been a success.
There will be a little bit of a financial pinch. I`m not going to have a regular paycheck, and I know it`s going to make me crazy for a while. But I have a few other things going. They`re going to make a television series out of the book, so I`ll have some income from that. Lorimar Telepictures Corp. optioned my book to develop a TV series.
And I have a novel next year from Random House. It`s a story about a large Irish Catholic family and about a summer when a lot of changes take place in all their lives. It`s set in 1966, which is the first year that the Mass was said in English in America. I still have to do some rewriting and fine-tuning.
I was much more worried (about being criticized for leaving) when I quit as deputy metropolitan editor. That was a position where I really had the ability to assign women, to hire women and to act as a role model in an institution that didn`t have a lot of woman at role-model level. I was real torn.
I think with this one some of my sisters in the movement have never been that happy about this column anyhow. They think it`s too domestic, not radical enough. There was a review of the book in Ms. magazine that described me as the ”good girl” of the Times and said I`m not able to offer any radical perspectives on life in the `80s because of that. I think that`s a fairly accurate representation of my role at the paper. I`d like to think that even the good girls can be committed and ticked off enough to make a difference.
The last column is going to run right after the baby`s born. I`ve already started to write it. It`s about change and about how children bring change to your life and how you have the courage to undertake change. In the beginning of the column I expect to include the name of the baby and the day the baby was born and what sort of baby it is. I feel like there`s a lot of people who have gotten invested in my life sufficiently to want to know the punchline of this particular story.
I think I`ll miss having something to say publicly. My God, if Roe v. Wade is overturned and I`m not writing a column anymore, I`m going to go berserk. I`m going to stand in the shower and pound my head against the wall. I mean, why aren`t I writing something about this?
But that`s happened to me in the last 2 1/2 years. When news has broken out, it`s made me crazy not to be a reporter in the newsroom. There`s part of me that thinks, ”You have no business being at home. You ought to be covering this.”
But I don`t really think I can go back to being a street reporter again. I`d still like it, but I think it`s naive to expect the readership to accept it. The readership has gotten used to me as a first-person, not a third person. I couldn`t cover a right-to-life convention now. I couldn`t cover anything in prenatal testing. I think I`m as able to bring an objective perspective as I once was, but I think it would be asking a lot of people now that I`ve come out from behind the partition. If I were an editor, I wouldn`t take that chance.
Five years from now I`ll have a 10-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 5-year-old and hopefully a 3-year-old. I definitely want another baby. I would probably like to have more than that, but I don`t like to gamble with bad odds. I`m 36 now.
I won`t do this kind of column again. I don`t like to go back. Maybe I`ll get a contract for another novel, do some other kinds of writing, maybe a nonfiction book. I don`t know how to do anything else now, which is one of the reasons I keep doing it.
I really want to tell people that I`m sorry about ending the column. Obviously, as a typical woman who`s used to being all things to all people, one of the I`m things I`m least comfortable with is that people are going to be unhappy about this. But we`ve all had to make hard decisions about when it`s time to stop doing something or time to do something else. I think people will understand. I hope so.
