'It's a long story, the story of our lives," writes Anna Quindlen in her latest memoir, "Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake." Long before the recent deluge of mommy bloggers, Quindlen stood alone, writing her column "Life in the 30s" 25 years ago for the New York Times about her day-to-day struggles with parenthood, maintaining a career, a household, and a marriage while remaining true to her own politics and feelings of self-worth. The response from women around the country was overwhelming and, she says, it changed her life.
Quindlen has gone on to write novels, children's books, essay collections, and has earned herself a Pulitzer Prize along the way.
In "Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake," Quindlen does what she does best. She calmly and carefully untangles the fine strands of a woman's life by examining her own, and lays them out cleanly for all to see, this time from the perspective of a woman in her 50s.
"We have all been part of the great generational chain of younger people who believe that they could do so much better than those who came before them," she writes. "And then one day we wake up to discover that we are the older women we once discounted, and our perspective shifts."
While Quindlen's perspective may have shifted, her core values have not. Her firm belief in gender equality remains, and she calls raising "feminist boys" one of the great challenges of her life.
While many may bemoan the loss of their youth, Quindlen writes about it with a graciousness that is both honest and accepting but without cloying prose. In short chapters, she speaks to shedding one's "stuff," the evolution of women's underwear styles, her decision to give up alcohol, the fresh beauty of teenage girls, the current "phenomenon of manic motherhood," her need to spend time alone, her memories of her mother, Catholicism, and the "underlying pathos" of retirement parties.
In a chapter titled "Girlfriends," Quindlen, perhaps inadvertently, reveals why so many women turn to her books time and time again. When it comes to her friend Janet, the friend she calls every day, Quindlen writes, "What will we talk about? What did we talk about? Who knows? Who cares? It's the presence at the other end of the line that matters: reliable, loving, listening, caring, continuing. What would I do without her?"
For the women who have read and loved Quindlen's work for the past 25 years, who have deemed her essays "fridge-worthy," they might ask themselves the same question: What would they do without her?
