Balancing Act Quindlen Successfully Combines Career With Family

Anna Quindlen felt incensed when writers cast her decision to leave the New York Times last fall as a desire to spend more time with her children.

“It couldn’t be because she said to herself that real power is the ability to do what you want and make it pay,” Quindlen said in a brisk, friendly New York accent over the telephone. “That’s the thing I never forget.”

These days Quindlen, former New York Times op-ed columnist, is writing fiction from her office at home and driving her children to Episcopal Day School in the mornings as she always has.

The motherhood angle was a “false spin” on the story, she says. “Even during the last 10 years at the New York Times, I was working at home and working around the kids’ school schedule.”

On Tuesday in Spokane, Quindlen will squeeze a rare speaking engagement into her kid-driven schedule. She’ll speak at noon at the Women Helping Women Fund luncheon at the Spokane Ag Trade Center, fly to Portland for another speech that evening, and take the red-eye home in the middle of the night so she’ll be in New York in time to drive her children (11, 9 and 6) to school Wednesday morning.

“It’s just worth it to me,” she says. This schedule, with its emphasis on quantity time over quality, has been carved by both grief and love.

Quindlen usually speaks only once a month and rarely leaves overnight or on weekends.

But the Women Helping Women Fund luncheon she couldn’t resist. This is a Spokane gathering of more than 1,000 women who come together to pledge $100 apiece to benefit women and children’s programs.

Last year, the group’s luncheon raised $132,000. Mari Clack, president of the Women Helping Women Fund, looked out over the crowd and saw 1,200 women with tears running down their faces.

“My husband was just stunned,” she says. “He said, ‘There’s so much power and emotion in this room you can just feel it.”’

Women who have achieved enough to be able to donate $100 - many of them in pledges of $8.33 per month - find the luncheon moving and validating. For many it’s a symbol of having arrived, of having attained the financial means to make a significant monetary contribution to the lives of others.

It’s just the sort of event Quindlen relishes.

After a luncheon such as Women Helping Women’s, Quindlen says, “You walk out and think women run the world.”

Besides, she says, “It’s a standing joke in our family that if I want to speak to men, I can stand around in the kitchen and yell at my sons.”

Quindlen, who was widely seen as the first woman likely to crack the top ranks of the New York Times, combines feminist fire and intellect with her mother’s ‘50s-era sensibilities. She revels in paradox. She is a pro-choice Catholic, a children-focused career woman.

She will talk about the way the world has changed for women in the last 25 years, of the importance of balance.

She will advise women that the answers won’t be easy to discern from the external world, that they’ll only be spoken by the inner voice.

It was a lesson burned into her brain at 19 by her mother’s death.

“I’ve had to listen to my inner voice since I was 19 years old,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of outer voices.”

She became fearless.

“Nobody can ever say anything as bad to me as my father said to me when he said, ‘Your mother has ovarian cancer,”’ she says.

Now Quindlen can spot another motherless daughter at 20 paces. They have, she says, a trademark sense of urgency.

When Quindlen met former “Today Show” co-host Deborah Norville, she said, “She’s one of us. You could just tell. She had a full-speed ahead attitude toward life.”

Madonna, too. Says Quindlen, “She’s the prototype.”

The motherless daughter’s message: “The heck with what you all say, this works for me.” Madonna’s spin: “I can do anything I want.”

Now Quindlen, at 42, is watching her friends discover their own mortality.

“Part of me wants to say, ‘Oh, surprise, surprise, we’re all going to die,”’ Quindlen says. “I’ve been thinking that for a long, long time. I was a 20-year-old going around saying, ‘Any minute now.”’

She jumped into journalism early; married the right man, attorney Gerald Krovatin, at 25, and gave birth to three children before her biological clock ran out.

“I can’t think of anything that takes place in my whole life that isn’t affected by having lost my mother,” she says.

Now she writes novels about family life. Her latest, “One True Thing,” explores the heroine’s choice between her mother’s or her father’s approaches to life.

The heroine winds up discovering that it is not her career-driven father’s route, but her mother’s path of the heart that was the “one true thing” in her life.

The heroine chooses not to return to journalism. She resists the idea “of facing a future skimming the surface of life, wringing my way in and out of other people’s traumas, crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.”

The heroine’s choice sounds like Quindlen’s own.

When Quindlen is asked if she misses journalism, she answers in one word.

“Nope.”

Nope, she’s not longing to write another column about Robert McNamara shedding tears over Vietnam.

“That’s not the one,” she says. “When Harvard decided to withdraw the acceptance from the girl who killed her mother when she was 14, that was the first moment I was sorry I didn’t write the column anymore. The New York Times is such a perfect place to say to Harvard University, ‘Boy, are you stupid.”’

But Quindlen’s life now sounds fairly idyllic. Her usual schedule is this: Take kids to school in the morning. Return home to talk to closest friends - often New York Times film critic Janet Maslin and Moscow correspondent Michael Specter - on the phone.

(Quindlen believes friendships keep women whole. “Any issue,” she says, “from ‘Have they ever made a recliner that wasn’t ugly?’ to ‘I don’t know if I want to stay in this marriage anymore,’ you get on the phone with your three best friends, you take it apart, you clean it and you put it back together again.”)

From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.: work on the novel. Then answer mail and write speeches until either she or the sitter picks the kids up from school. Hang out with kids, ready for those meaning-of-life questions that usually manage to hit around a quarter to 5.

This is a year of keeping a fairly low profile while the furor over her leaving the newspaper calms down.

Quindlen was “flabbergasted,” she says, at the response to her decision. Articles appeared in Newsweek, New York magazine and newspapers throughout the country.

“I thought it would be like one sentence in Liz Smith’s column,” she says.

Also last summer Vanity Fair published a piece asking, “Now that Anna Quindlen is the Woman’s Voice on the powerful New York Times op-ed page - with a Pulitzer under her belt and a shot at the editor’s job in her future - why is her writing so timidly girlish?”

Quindlen hated the piece. “The idea that I wrote this softball column was just absurd,” she says, pointing out that she was the only writer to risk a tough piece on her own newspaper’s decision. She criticized the Times for printing the name and drinking habits of William Kennedy Smith’s accuser.

In the Vanity Fair piece, Quindlen comes across as a perky, straight-A student, an annoyingly nice girl.

Quindlen says she was in a terrible mood for about a day and a half after the story came out, and then it became yesterday’s story.

“The writer who did the piece is in the business of debunking people,” she says now. “That’s why this month she’s writing about why Phil Gramm is really much nicer than you think.”

Quindlen moved on. Right now she’s about 10,000 words into her next novel. “I’ll be able to speak intelligently about it when it’s 20,000 words along,” she says.

Quindlen so far has refused the New York Times’ requests to write again for its op-ed page. She believes it would be bad grace to quickly reappear there, and so far she has said no.

“But,” she says, “My motto is, ‘Never say never.”’

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: LUNCH INFORMATION Anna Quindlen will speak at the Women Helping Women Fund luncheon Tuesday at the Spokane Ag Trade Center. The benefit begins at 11:30, and a minimum contribution of $100 is required. For reservations, call 747-0802.