“It’s terrible to bite the hand that feeds you,” says New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen about her boss. “But the man is sticking his finger out at the whole world.” She is talking about the New York Times story naming the woman who claims to have been raped at the Kennedy compound, a story that also revealed traffic tickets the woman had gotten, that she was a single mother, and that her mom was a big shot’s mistress before becoming the big shot’s wife. Quindlen wrote a Sunday column berating her paper for running the story in the first place and for following in the footsteps of NBC News.
Looking out at the mass of women waiting to meet her one on one and to get her signature, Quindlen suddenly says, “Yesterday everyone was with their husbands. It was so different. It was a very married crowd.”
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In the 80s people were fascinated by “Life in the 30s,” Quindlen’s old column in the New York Times. She was Living Out Loud, the name a collection of her columns was published under. She had a job that required her only to stay home and write about herself. She wrote about things like the pros and cons of a certain nightgown she wore to bed with her husband, her mink coat, receiving a dress as a baby present when her son was born because one of her friends thought Quin was a girl’s name, some of her best friends who had AIDS, some of her best friends who had amniocentesis, some of her best friends who had abortions, going to the health club and doing Nautilus, getting her husband a beer, children’s cereal versus vegetables, keeping her maiden name, the time her dishwasher leaked, and the time she had to wear nice brown boots instead of nice brown shoes because she had to wear her husband’s cashmere socks instead of her designer panty hose, which happened to be stuffed inside a doll.
In her spare time over the last five years Quindlen, who’s half Irish and half Italian, wrote a novel about a large Irish-Italian family, the Scanlans, and about one summer in particular that changed their lives. She hints to the crowd at Kroch’s that Random House, which published her column collection, wasn’t too thrilled about her package deal–if it published the columns, it had to publish the novel. But Quindlen also hints that Random House has been pleasantly surprised.
“Except for Bill Safire–who worked for Richard Nixon first, which I would never recommend–newspapers trust and reward their own people with their own columns,” she states. “Be a reporter first–and show you’re a little different than everyone else. It’s like art. You shouldn’t do nonrepresentational art without doing still lifes and nudes first. You learn form doing still lifes and nudes.”
At first she had trouble giving her novel a title–she called it Untitled Work of Fiction #1. “I’m getting better with that, since I write my own headlines for my column. It’s so reductive.” Finally an editor named it for her. After running around the house with the title in mind for a while, she called the editor and said, “I like it. Object Lessons. That is what the book is all about–object lessons.”
Another woman steps up. “I’m so thrilled to meet you. I missed you yesterday, so I called your publisher in New York. I love you and didn’t want to miss you.”
