Writing Fiction Always Author’s Desire

More than once, each of Anna Quindlen’s three children has asked her: “Why do people always lean down and say to me ‘I remember the day you were born?”’

“Because they do,” explains their mother, who gave up a high-profile column on the New York Times op-ed page three years ago to go home and write novels. Quindlen won a Pulitzer prize for that column, Public & Private, ruminations on the personal and political, many written in a mother’s voice. But it was through her enormously popular “Life in the 30s” column in the mid-1980s that the Times-reading public got to know her kids.

Quindlen’s latest novel, “Black and Blue,” is dedicated to her oldest, Quin, who’s now 14, who was featured in the Times lifestyle pages before he was born. “It is a littleknown fact that New York deli countermen can predict the sex of an unknown child,” his mom-to-be wrote of lumbering around Manhattan in late-stage pregnancy.

She gave up writing purely newspaper personal prose with the birth of Maria, now 9. “So much of ‘Life in the 30s’ was about my kids. But it was about my kids at a time they couldn’t read,” she explains. Home and professional life had become too enmeshed. At one point, her husband asked her: “Could you get up and get me a beer without writing about it?”

Quindlen left what she calls the “best job in newspapers” to do what she’d always wanted to do, write fiction, because she could afford to do so. Her first two novels were bestsellers. The second, “Living Out Loud,” was just made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and William Hurt. It’s due out in October. Meanwhile, “Black and Blue,” the story of a battered wife who leaves her husband and tries to disappear into a new identity, debuted on the Times bestseller list at No. 11 last Sunday.

“I always wanted to be a fiction writer,” says Quindlen, 45, knocking back a bottle of Evian water in a room at the Four Seasons last week on the Boston stop of a book tour. “The problem is I also wanted to buy clothes, be able to eat, send my children to nice schools, that sort of thing. Early on in my career, it seemed impossible that you could make a living. But then the opportunity presented itself and I just went with it.”

Opportunity has had a habit of presenting itself throughout Quindlen’s career. She joined the Times as a general assignment reporter when she was 25, and rose quickly to deputy metropolitan editor. She was writing the “About New York” column before she was 30. “Life in the 30s,” which was syndicated, was her idea.

As a columnist, Quindlen wrote about the American baby-boom experience, holding up a mirror to her famously self-absorbed generation. But her voice was less whiney, less strident than those of a lot of her peers, hence her more widespread appeal. Quindlen was “a Paul girl,” she wrote once. In that adolescence-defining moment in the 1960s when tens of thousands of prepubsecent girls chose their favorite Beatle, she picked the safe one, the cute one, the one who appealed to the kilt and crew-neck-sweater girls, not the Indian prints-and-sandals types who favored John.

Quindlen’s columns tended to be smart but not condescending. She was an unabashed middle-class liberal who showed respect for lunch bucket Democrats, and an outspoken feminist who admitted to qualms about abortion. Her most controversial column, “Bar None,” touched on those reservations and her decision to not undergo amniocentesis to screen for birth defects when she was pregnant with her third child.

“People went berserk,” she recalls. “My own constituency thought that I had somehow said the wrong thing. There was a landslide of mail. The signal letter was the one that said “The Anna Quindlen I know would never have written this column.”

Nor would the Quindlen her column readers knew have written “Black and Blue,” a bleak, sympathetic portrait of a mother who stays too long in a violent marriage. Had she penned the novel when she was younger, Quindlen suspects, she would very likely have been more judgmental.

“There’s more maturity to this book and more of a sense of perspective,” she explains. “You start out from adolescence seeing things as black and white and you move increasingly into shades of gray. But it takes you a long time to get to the moment when you see everything in shades of gray and the gray doesn’t scare you. You’re not affronted by the notion that everything can’t be conveniently filed into right or wrong, or true or false, or good or bad.”

Quindlen has little desire to return to newspaper writing and no regrets that she isn’t covering the current White House crisis. Not that she doesn’t have plenty to say about it.

“I hate this story. I hate how you can’t get a handle on it,” she says with exasperation. “It sort of fits in with this book, or part of it. Because I think the thing that Hillary knows that nobody seems to get is that the compromises of marriage take place on a sliding scale. And you make them a little at a time until, 20 years later, you wake up and say ‘Whoa! Look at the deal I’ve made. How did I get to this place?”’

Quindlen lapses into the editorial “we” to answer the question she says she’s sick of hearing about Hillary’s husband: “Why are women still with him?” she asks. “Hey! We made this deal in ‘92 and the deal was: We don’t like what we think we know about the way this guy acts. But in terms of policy issues, show me somebody better.”

She returns to New York commuter-mom mode to talk about Monica Lewinsky. “If I were writing about Monica Lewinsky, I would write that she should get herself a better class of friends. Ya know? I mean, your friends are supposed to be the people you never have to pat down to see if they’re wearing a wire,” she says, then guffaws.

Lewinsky is the sort of girl who never got over being boy crazy, Quindlen muses. “And she never got over being heavy in high school. Can’t you just see her in the hair salon in the basement of the Watergate hotel? She’s ready for her close-up, Monica is.”

Quindlen, meanwhile, is ready to get back to her novel-in-progress. “It’s still mushy. I don’t like to talk about them until they’re at least half-baked,” she says. “I want to continue writing fiction as long as I can get away with it. I loved being a street reporter, but I couldn’t go back to that.” She pauses to chuckle, this time at herself, then adds: “I don’t think the public at this point would accept me as a dispassionate observer.”