She inspires adoration. Not the nervous, from-afar kind; the kind reserved for someone you know well.
A crowd has packed a small bookstore, eager to get a good spot for Anna Quindlen’s recent Chicago appearance. The room is warm with bodies and admiration for the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times.
You can feel how much they like her, these 300 or so men and women who have come to Women & Children First book store on Chicago’s North Side for a book signing and reading by Quindlen. They push forward as she enters. They listen, transfixed, as she reads from her new book, “Thinking Out Loud” (Random House, $22).
She reads only one from the book’s collection of her “Public and Private” columns, and she keeps her remarks brief. Perhaps too brief, one of the store’s owners worries. But Quindlen wants to give her readers some personal attention.
“I hate to have someone shell out $22 for a book and then not get it signed,” she says before her appearance.
She finishes to sustained applause and then the readers form an orderly line that stretches out the door. They lean forward to hear her talking while she signs books, to catch the pearls she utters. But their own words are more revealing.
Like a member of some kind of Anna Quindlen 12-step program, a young woman approaches and recites, “My name is Christine, and I think you’re great.”
“I read your columns twice,” another woman confides, “once for language, and once to hear what you have to say.”
A handsome young man in shorts and socks, but no shoes, thanks Quindlen with emotion, telling her he used a column she once wrote about homosexuals to tell his mother he is gay.
Even detractors are swayed by her presence. During the signing someone leaves Quindlen a letter criticizing her work. But the anonymous messenger has added a postscript on the envelope, writing that after hearing Quindlen he questions the letter’s contents.
It’s not surprising that the encounters seem personal; that’s how many of her readers feel-that they know her personlly.
While writing her enormously popular column “Life in the 30s” from 1986 to 1988, Quindlen revealed much about herself, discussing issues by sharing such personal details as her decision not to have amniocentesis and her feelings about Mother’s Day since her own mother died when Quindlen was 19.
She still brings a personal note to her column on The Times’ Op-Ed page, which she has been writing since 1990, but recently announced that she will take a 3-month hiatus to write a novel.
In one column Quindlen writes as the mother of a 2-year-old girl about the continued lack of equality for women. In another she recalls her own adolescence to open a discussion about laws requiring minors to inform their parents before having abortions. Quindlen doesn’t worry that these details might make her seem soft.
“I have no hesitation about bringing the personal to bear upon the political,” she says over dinner before the book signing.
She speaks as she writes, in well-crafted prose: “I had to make a command decision about whether I was going to try to do this somewhat differently than some of my male colleagues, or whether I was going to do the best possible imitation of them. And I just knew that even my worst original Anna Quindlen was going to be preferable to me in most ways than a bad copy of some of the male columnists.
“You can’t fake it, and I didn’t want to because I felt like it was finally a time when it was safe to be soft in the ways I thought were useful.”
Still, Quindlen says, she sometimes wishes the world didn’t know so much about her private life: “It’s hard, because on the one hand you’re grateful that so many people feel strongly about what you do. And on the other, you wish you didn’t feel quite so much like public property. I think what saves it is the intimacy of the connection that most of them attempt to make with me.”
It’s hard not to. Despite her status, she seems so much like, well, us. She puts on makeup in the car and complains about how old she looks at 41. She talks about losing baby fat in her face when she was 35. (“I knew there were cheekbones under there somewhere.”) All this from a woman who writes about wars and advises the President in print. The only hint of grandeur is the $5 tip she leaves for a $10 meal. Or is that just a common lack of change? It’s possible because Quindlen says her celebrity status makes her somewhat uncomfortable.
“Being the news, that part of it I just can’t relate to,” she says. “People say to me, `We’ve got to meet the reporter at the restaurant,’ and I say, `I’m the reporter.’ It makes me profoundly uneasy to be the story rather than the reporter.”
She works mostly at her New Jersey home but would stay in touch with the paper’s staff by telephone and by traveling to her New York office a couple of times a week.
Winning the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary wasn’t bad either. “The thing that you love about it is being validated by your peers,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I’d been nominated a lot of times before. `Always a bridesmaid; never a bride’ had crossed my mind more than once.” Still, nothing about her work has changed, she says. “The thing I hate about awards is that I was as good a columnist as I was before the Pulitzer as I was after.”
Her personal life-except for the leave to write the new book-hasn’t changed much either. Quindlen still takes her three children, ages 9, 8 and 4, to school in the morning, and either she or the babysitter picks them up in the afternoon. “And then, you know, I hang around the house and scream at them for the rest of the night.”
Kidding aside, Quindlen describes herself and her husband, Gerald Krovatin, as strict parents. “I really feel that kids need structure. There’s not a whole lot of staying up late. There’s no Nintendo. Not a whole lot of junk food.”
Quindlen, a Philadelphia native and the oldest of five children raised in a traditional Catholic home, says her childhood was even stricter. “My kids get away with things that would have been unthinkable for me,” she says, laughing. “My 7-year-old this morning launched into a song that he was making up as he went along about Tampax. I mean, my father would have turned purple and gone ballistic if any of us had done such a thing.”
She’s quick to quell any suspicion that she’s complaining about motherhood. “You’ve got to be careful that you never sound pompous or self-sacrificing about being a mother because the fact is, at base, it’s a great job.”
It’s one she has chosen several times over other seemingly great jobs at the New York Times. In 1985 she left a position as deputy metropolitan editor, one of the highest news positions attained by a woman at the paper until then, to stay at home with an infant and a toddler.
“I felt a lot of guilt about leaving that job,” she says, saying how her place there was good for the feminist cause. “And later I was worried that in that way we’re sometimes all so familiar with, it would not become, `Anna Quindlen has ditched us;’ it would become, `We promote a woman and look what happens: She gets pregnant two times in three years.’ “
But in 1986 her editors asked Quindlen to write a column from home. The column, “Life in the 30s,” established Quindlen as a popular syndicated columnist, chronicling witty and touching details about everyday life.
Two years later Quindlen chose family life again, leaving the paper just before the birth of her youngest child, Maria. While home caring for three young children, she also managed to write a novel, and in 1990 her editors invited her back again, this time to the Op-Ed page, a spot occupied by only two women before.
She gets a lot more mail about issues than she did when she wrote “Life in the 30s.” She also gets more mail from men, but she’s not convinced that the increase means she has more male readers now.
“By the time I’d finished writing `Life in the 30s’ there were a lot of men who described themselves as closet readers,” she says. “They would come up to me and say, `My wife makes me read your column.’ Or, `Don’t tell anyone, but I read it too.’ I think being on the Op-Ed page has made it safe for them. I went from being an illicit to a prescription drug.”
Despite her apparent ability to come down hard and fast on one side of an issue, Quindlen says she often thinks in shades of gray.
For now, at least, she doesn’t have to figure out what to do next because she is taking time off to write her new novel.
Quindlen who is taking time off to write a novel, also has said that she wants more children, but she and her husband have changed their minds. “As the immediate world knows, we don’t do amniocentesis,” she says. The procedure is a prenatal test that determines if there are any fetal defects.
“I find three really healthy, curious children a full-time, challenging job. And I’m not sure I would be able to adequately handle it I had a fourth who had some sort of problem. So we made a decision, more or less. We try not to talk about it because it makes us both terribly sad.”
“Did you hear the guy who said he sent my column to his mom? Isn’t life wonderful? That’s what this is all about.”
