Marriage: “A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn’t believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation.”

Girlfriends: “Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it’s sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.”

Our bodies: “I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is, a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come. It’s like a car, and while I like a red convertible or even a Bentley as well as the next person, what I really need are four tires and an engine.”

Parenting: “Being a parent is not transactional. We do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward: We are good parents, not so they will be loving enough to stay with us, but so they will be strong enough to leave us.”

From childhood memories to manic motherhood to middle age, Quindlen uses the events of her own life to illuminate our own. Along with the downsides of age, she says, can come wisdom, a perspective on life that makes it both satisfying and even joyful. So here’s to lots of candles, plenty of cake.

Excerpt

Advice to My Younger Self by Anna Quindlen

Here are some of Anna’s Reading Lists from HOW READING CHANGED MY LIFE

The 10 Books I Would Save in a Fire (If I Could Only Save 10)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats

The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Books I Just Love to Read, And Always Will

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

My Antonia by Willa Cather

The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Group by Mary McCarthy

The Blue Swallows by Howard Nemerov (poetry)

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Excerpted from How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen Copyright © 1998 by Anna Quindlen. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Preface
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, I was doing what I do as well as anyone I know: that is, not writing. This is an enduring part of my daily routine, something like the unbirth- day party in Through the Looking-Glass. Unlike some of my colleagues—mainly the ones I don’t really care for—I do not fly to my desk each morning with a full heart and a ready hand. I skirt the perimeters of my home office with a sense of dread, eyes averted from an empty computer screen. Instead of creation there is always procrastination: the call to my closest friend to chew over the morning paper and to gossip, which sometimes comes to the same thing; the power walk in Central Park and the interlude at Starbucks—my husband calls it Four-bucks—and the triple venti no-foam latte. Luckily the laundry room is five stories below my office, or I could surely eke out another half hour folding sheets and T-shirts. Several years ago my daughter downloaded a computer game called Snood onto my laptop and for months, before I had used up all the demonstration games, I played over and over in single-minded pursuit of nothing more than a position on a scoreboard that only I ever saw and on which I was known as Big Mama. Eventually I deleted the program. I had developed a terrible Tetris problem a decade earlier that had enabled me to put off writing until well past 10:00 a.m., and I could see which way things were headed.

I am a creature of habit; it is all that allows me to write in the first place, the routine designed to ward off the moment, and then the moment itself, when the first feeble sentence, often merely a prelude to better things, appears as my fingers play word jazz on the keyboard. What follows is usually a manic two or three hours fed by caffeine and the CD of the moment. Sondheim, Tori Amos, Rosemary Clooney, James Taylor, Alanis Morissette. I did not want to learn to type, but the nuns insisted, saying someday I might marry a man who would need his papers typed or be employed by a man who needed the same done to his business letters. My fingers are the only sure-handed things about me when I first sit down to write. After all those years in newsrooms I am a very fast typist indeed, as fast as any executive secretary.

But it was the variation from routine that enables me to remember that morning in particular, remember it before it became the morning of the most important day in the history of the United States during my lifetime. It was my eldest child’s eighteenth birthday, and that morning at breakfast his father and I had recalled with clarity and more than a little schmaltz the stiflingly hot morning when he had arrived, limp and gray after a forceps delivery. Twelve days before we had left him at college for the first time, and we were still smarting from the fissure in our family. Before we got into the car and drove away, we reminded him yet again that when he turned eighteen he was obliged by law to go to the post office and register with the Selective Service. Neither of us felt any fear when we told him to do that; it seemed almost quaint, that particular demand at that moment in time from the two of us, the former boy who had lived through the Vietnam draft lottery, the former girlfriend who had stood by breathless waiting for his number to come up, the young couple exhaling in relief after. If I had thought there was any chance my son would be forced to go to war, I would have bought him a ticket to Canada instead of driving him to Connecticut.

There were two other reasons that I remember that morning so clearly as well. The day before my daughter and I had attended the funeral of a family friend in Pennsylvania, and once I was done with my nonwriting rituals I intended to write about her, about the considerable inspiration that the lives of valiant older people provide us. I had gone straight from that funeral to a hospital, where my closest friend was having cancer surgery, surgery that appeared to have been spectacularly successful. So while I have a great deal of trouble remembering almost anything at this moment in my life—while I once did a column tied to my age called “Life in the 30s,” I now say that the fifties version would be entitled “Where the Hell Did I Leave My Keys?”—I do remember how I felt that particular morning as I settled into the old Windsor chair at which I finally, finished with preliminaries, sat down to write. I felt painfully mortal, quite vulnerable, and enormously grateful.

Over the course of the next few days the entire city in which I work, the entire country in which I live, would come to feel much the same way.

For me there was a peculiar reason for gratitude as the horrible events of that day unspooled in a long endless loop of cataclysmic news footage. When my husband called to tell me to turn on the television, we both thought there had been a freak accident. But as I watched the arc of that second plane as it smashed into the Trade Center towers just a few miles south of our narrow Victorian row house, I knew that something uniquely terrible was taking place. I also had reason to believe that everyone I cared for most was safe: My husband across the Hudson at his office. The children at their schools. My friend in the hospital across town. It was difficult for us to talk to one another, of course, with the New York City telephone lines out, the tunnels and bridges shut down, and cyberspace hopelessly jammed. One of the mementos I have kept from that morning are three identical e-mails from our son at college, who could not get through on the day of his birthday or for three days afterward. Each one is dated September 11, 2001, and says in capital letters I REALLY NEED TO HEAR YOUR VOICE.

The morning after, a new world burned and bloomed, too, beneath an incongruously cerulean sky. A group of my daughter’s friends gathered in our kitchen and made hundreds of sandwiches and brownies to take to the Red Cross offices nearby. They bought enormous bags of dog food to bring to the local firehouse for their dalmatians and the rescue dogs looking for survivors downtown. The familiar strangers in our neighborhood lingered on the street to speak to one another, to pass along the newest stories about the horror to the south and the people who knew people who’d been inside the twin towers. Two days later the wind changed and the neighborhood smelled sharply of smoke. “I know that smell,” an old man who lived in the apartment house on the corner said in accented English, and someone told me he was a Holocaust survivor.

Most nights, housebreaking the puppy we had picked up the day after our son left for school, I would run into a fireman who was heading home after working the wreckage, his eyes burning bright in a grimy face, his hands nicked and bandaged. He would pet our dog, rub her ears and muzzle, finally crouch to hold her squirmy little body close, and by the time he rose for the rest of the walk home there would be bright tear tracks in the dirt on his face. I tried not to cry until he was gone.

But despite the scent of death and the fighter planes flying low overhead and the interior rat-a-tat of panic and fear, there was also that hidden gratitude, the feeling on the part of most New Yorkers that they might have been downtown, that they could have gone to a meeting or a breakfast, that they somehow were still alive. For me that gratitude was also professional. The morning of September 12, 2001, I was at my desk first thing, no preliminaries, no computer games, seizing the chance to write about an event more destructive, more transformative, and more important than any I had ever written about during three decades as a journalist. And at that moment I thanked God, not only for the safety of my family and friends, but for the gift of being permitted to do what I do for a living.

It’s a strange job, covering and commenting on the news. Life washes over us as it does all our fellows, and yet we see it in a completely different way than they do. Disaster, tragedy, malfeasance, change: Everything is always arranging itself into stories, making itself tidy and suitable for 900-word retellings. Nothing is too messy to be summed up in a headline or a sound bite. We are the people who go to wars with laptops instead of guns, who look at the scene of the crime without turning away, who stand in the flickering heat of a house fire and take down the details as someone jumps from a third-story window. We ask questions ordinary people would be ashamed to ask. We watch. That is our job.

The greater the event, the larger the disconnect between what we feel as human beings and how we look at things dispassionately as reporters. I remember well arriving back in the city in 1977 after telling our families that we had become engaged and emerging from the Holland Tunnel, not into the twinkle glare of the downtown streets but into darkness limned with the foreboding shadows of buildings black-on-black, New York City absent all electrical power. For just an instant I thought how amazingly different the place looked, how bright the stars, how dark the streets. But almost immediately everything coalesced into a single thought: how big the story!

I do not know any reporter who truly managed to feel that way about the events of September 11, although all of us knew it was indeed the biggest story we would ever cover. It was also the one in which the human part of us stayed in the forefront, right there beside the notebook. The pain was too great, the loss too enormous, the shock too overwhelming. Most of my colleagues stayed whole during the days that followed, feeling the event and covering it at the same time. This is relatively rare but, in this case, absolutely necessary, not only, I think, for the mental health of the reporters but for the verisimilitude of the stories they produced. I have never been quite as proud of being in the business as I was during those dreadful days, when newspapers, magazines, and television all produced exemplary work. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, The New York Times would win more Pulitzers than it ever had, and Newsweek would be honored with the National Magazine Award for best magazine in its circulation class. This was no accident. The story of what happened to the people in those buildings and to the United States was so enormous that it called upon the best within all of us to respond. Some people did that by combing the wreckage, cooking for the rescue crews, setting up funds for widows and orphans. In my business we did it by writing the truth, beautifully.

For me personally the opportunity to do this was something of an accident of timing. I had been in the newspaper business for many years, as a reporter, an editor, and finally a columnist, and while I had loved it almost insanely, I had always hoped someday to write novels. I’d managed to work on my fiction while I was a columnist, but eventually the challenge of keeping on top of the news and on top of three young children and ricocheting wildly between the two while trying to live in the invented world of fiction became too much for me. In 1995 I left The New York Times and, I thought, the world of journalism for good. One of the most enduring memories of my life will be walking my last night down Forty-third Street, past the New York Times building, the globe lamps with the old English logo glowing black against the white light. I felt as though a door had slammed at my back, and while I’d blown it shut myself, it was still not a good feeling.

For the first year I was a recovering journalist, not a recovered one. Occasionally news would break out and I would feel a frisson, like a phantom limb: I know about that! I have some thoughts! And once one of the children, in that inimitable way children have, went to the heart of it when we were watching the report of a doctor murdered at an abortion clinic. “Who’s going to write about this stuff now that you’re gone?” he said, chewing thoughtfully on a Fruit Roll-Up.

But the children also agreed that what they called “that look” had disappeared. I had not even known that there was a particular look, but when they reprised the semiconscious mother of seasons past it turned out to be the look a woman might have while listening to an account of a bad call at a basketball game or a hilarious episode of flatulence in the fifth-grade classroom while simultaneously thinking of welfare reform or gun control. According to their reports, I now appeared to be attending at least some of the time. Certainly it had become easier to attend to the business of writing fiction, and I found myself inhabiting the world of my third novel in a way that had been more difficult to do with the two before it, falling in and not climbing out every other day for a visit to a homeless shelter or a wild six hours banging out a screed on capital punishment. It was a good life, and whenever I was asked whether I missed being a journalist, I always answered, “No.”

But five years into it the editor in chief at Newsweek had offered me a prime piece of real estate, the back page of the magazine and its venerable “Last Word” column. My essays would run only every other week, which left plenty of time to wallow in the invented world of a new novel. The first column was like riding the proverbial bicycle; you may be shaky, but you never forget. I was nearly two years into the routine when the worst happened that September morning and terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and, because of the intervention of a group of heroic passengers, an empty field in Pennsylvania. And at that moment I was so glad to have a column that I could have written one every day. I looked time and time again at my son’s message: I NEED TO HEAR YOUR VOICE.

It was not that I necessarily had something distinctive to say about the savagery of the terrorists, the scope of the devastation, or the psychological scars left on the nation, although that was what I tried to produce in the long run-up to the first anniversary of the attack. I wanted to serve the readers; I also wanted to serve myself, to understand for my own sake as well as theirs. That I have always done through the algebra of prose—this word, to this one, and so on, and so on, until by inches an idea is born, and sometimes even an epiphany. That is one of the things journalists do when they go about their work, one of the collateral benefits of our hit-and-run lives. We learn to understand the world, what is important and what is important to us, and therefore who we truly are. The great plagiarism scandals in the profession have always originated with people who are empty vessels and are therefore comfortable filling the emptiness with invention, which is a fancy way of saying lies. Real reporters are always searching for some version of the truth so that, in the long run, they can assemble the truth about the world out of all the stories they have covered and the things they have learned. That is why, in contrast to the common belief that they are the world’s great cynics, the best journalists are the world’s great idealists. They have experienced firsthand the great soothing balance of human existence. For every disgrace there is a triumph, for every wrong there is a moment of justice, for every funeral a wedding, for every obituary a birth announcement.

There was no better time to be about this work than on September 11, 2001, and not because it was what we like to call a great story. It transcended that, as it transcended so much else we had ever imagined or known. But to try to cast light into the gray darkness that fell as those buildings burned and fell to bits was a uniquely important undertaking that I would not have wanted to watch from the sidelines. And it cemented what I had always known about the business, that it had the ability to make you better than you thought you could be because of the ordinary courage you saw at every turn.

Two nights after the terrorist attacks I was driving home from New Jersey, where I had given a speech, and as I came around the ramp that leads to the Lincoln Tunnel I saw across the river a great plume of gray smoke with orange fire at its center, a hellish foundry where two of the city’s greatest landmarks had stood just days before. The man driving the car and I both let out a kind of strangled sound, a gasp and a cry together, and both of us wept. “God help us,” he said. And as he did I took a notebook from my bag and wrote down what he said and how it looked and how I felt.

Excerpted from Loud and Clear by Anna Quindlen Copyright © 2004 by Anna Quindlen. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

I’m not particularly qualified by profession or education to give advice and counsel. It’s widely known in a small circle that I make a mean tomato sauce, and I know many inventive ways to hold a baby while nursing, although I haven’t had the opportunity to use any of them in years. I have a good eye for a nice swatch and a surprising paint chip, and I have had a checkered but occasionally successful sideline in matchmaking.

But I’ve never earned a doctorate, or even a master’s degree. I’m not an ethicist, or a philosopher, or an expert in any particular field. Each time I give a commencement speech I feel like a bit of a fraud. Yogi Berra’s advice seems as good as any: When you come to a fork in the road, take it!

I can’t talk about the economy, or the universe, or academe, as academicians like to call where they work when they’re feeling kind of grand. I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is really all I know.

Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That’s what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first. Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he’d been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.”

Don’t ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”

Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

That’s the only advice I can give. After all, when you look at the faces of a class of graduating seniors, you realize that each student has only one thing that no one else has. When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living.

But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

Excerpted from A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Q&A

Q: This book was inspired by a commencement speech you gave to a graduating high school class. Why did you choose the topic of happiness, as opposed to more familiar topics, like civic achievement and academic excellence? Is the advice given in the book something you think you needed to hear at the same age in your life?

A: I know lots of people of great accomplishment who seems to take precious little pleasure in that accomplishment. And I know people of achievement who seem to have let friendship and family fall by the wayside. So I believed that young people were growing up in a culture in which they heard over and over again that they would want to accomplish great things but were not hearing enough that they would want to appreciate the small ones. It’s a lesson I learned early in life, but which I’ve kept on learning. In fact one of the things I said to the graduate was that they might not appreciate what I was saying as they sat there, but that perhaps my sentiments would come back to them at some time when they really needed them. Their parents, however, came up to me afterwards and said they wished they’d heard this message many many years before.

Q: Throughout A Short Guide to a Happy Life, you mention many people, but in particular your mother. Why do you think it was the loss of you mother that taught you about true happiness, and how do you think you pursued happiness before her death? What role does family and close friends play in a happy life?

A: I have attended several memorial services in recent years at which family and friends noted that the deceased has understood what really mattered in the face of terminal illness. That’s so sad. That’s a knowledge we would have long before we get a bad biopsy results. But of course I know that that’s how I understood the importance of living life to the fullest, from watching my mother lost it by inches. She wasn’t clinging to life so that she could write a bestseller, or make a million bucks. She just wanted to watch the sun come up one more time, or to hug my little sister, or to listen tot “South Pacific” on the stereo. And that teaches you something. It teaches you that so much
Of what you take for granted is the bedrock of happiness. You know, one of the most affecting scenes in any ply for me is when Emily is watching the mourners at her own funeral in “Our Town.” And she asks the other dead around her whether living people ever understand how wonderful life is. And one of them replies, “That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. TO spend and waste time as though you had a million years.” I refused to live with that inevitability.

Q: Who are the people in your life who have informed your thinking on what’s important in life most?

A: Well, certainly my mother, who was a humble woman with a great capacity for unconditional love. And now my kids. Because you can reexperience the world through the eyes of your kids, whether it’s the first time they catch a fish or dive off the board, or read To Kill a Mockingbird.I feel infinitely more alive and aware of the world since I had children to show me the way. I could never do enough to repay them for that. (And, no, honey, you can’t have a motorcycle!)

Q: Several times in the book you quote writers, like Gwendolyn Brooks, and you incorporate their wisdom about life into your own. Which writers and books have influenced you the most and helped you to form your own philosophy about living?

A: Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet. Actually it’s poetry that more than any other form makes me fell the quiet overwhelming joy that points the way to emotional satisfaction. Yeats, for example, whose poem I used for the dedication to “Thinking Out Loud.” Elizabeth Bishop. William Carlos Williams. John Ashbery. Robert Lowell. Sometimes you read a novel and it’s like a symphony playing in your head, Anna and Vronsky and all the rest, the rich tapestry of Faulkner’s language. And it takes the one f two perfectly placed words in a short poem to pick out the truth on the strings of your violin-heart. How’s that for an overwrought metaphor?

Q: How has your own writing contributed to your happiness and satisfaction with your life, both in a day to day way and in general?

A: There’s no greater happiness than doing something every day that you love, that you feel you do in a satisfactory fashion, and which both supports and gives you time to support your family. I fell so lucky to have all that. But I am also happy that it provides me a measure of immortality with the people I love most. When I am gone my children will be able to sit down and read A Short Guide to a Happy Life and remember me, and remember what I cared about and held most dear. That’s enormously soothing.

Q: Beautiful, happy, and uplifting photos appear throughout A Short Guide to a Happy Life, and they capture what you are saying perfectly. When choosing these photos, what were you looking for? What role has art played in your own life, and how do you think it contributes to the pursuit of happiness?

A: Louis Armstrong once said when someone asked him to define jazz, if you have to ask, you’ll never know. I just knew that these pictures belonged. Cal lit a chemical reaction. Their emotional content just seemed consonant with that of the book.

Q: Many of these photographs are of beautiful landscapes or people surrounded by nature. What role has nature played in understanding of happiness? Why do you think it is such an apt metaphor for rediscovering the wonder of life?

A: There’s an Emily Dickinson poem — now that I’m on the subject of poetry — that ends with the words, “How much can come/and much can go/ and yetabide the world!”. That has something to do with it, that sense of clinging to what will remain after we are gone.

Q: In the book, you stress the importance of women realizing and being thankful for being able to be alive during such a healthy, prosperous and peaceful time. Women now seem to have more opportunity than ever to pursue their dreams. Of what importance are issues of women’s’ rights to you? Has your involvement in women’s issues in the community contributed to your own happiness? What role does community service play in happiness? Is giving back a necessary part of true happiness?

A: I’ve been a feminist since I was a teenager, but originally it was because I wanted to make the world a better place for me. Now I just rejoice in the opportunities for so many. What could make you happier than to make a better world, a world that is fairer, more egalitarian, that works better for all.

Was there a particular image or idea that inspired you to write Object Lessons? Did you begin with a vision of a particular character, a plot occurrence, both or neither?

Object Lessons is my most autobiographical novel–like Maggie Scanlan, I am the daughter of an Irish father and an Italian mother–and so the motivating principle was more overarching than it has been in subsequent books, when I’ve often begun with a single character, image or theme. But I would say that my initial impulse had a good deal to do with the construction of the second-stage suburbs during the 1960s. As much as the counterculture, that sprawl of split levels and ranch houses changed America and how Americans saw themselves. And it was a metaphor, I think, for taking a good hard look at the old ways and mores. That’s an important theme of the book.

Was there a mood you hoped to evoke by calling the novel Object Lessons? Were there any other titles you considered and then abandoned? What are the “object lessons” that you think the characters–Maggie and Connie in particular–learn in the book?

Oy. Do I have to tell the truth about this? I am terrible with titles, although I’ve gotten better and better over the years. But Object Lessons was my first book, and so I found it particularly difficult to reduce this one to a handful of words. I remember saying “Titles are so reductionist” and having my editor reply, sensibly, “Yes, but a book needs to have one.” In fact I dithered so persistently that we dummied up one version of the cover with the line Title TK, which means Title to come. Then the director of publicity at Random House read it and said, “Well, I think it’s all about object lessons, about those central tenets we learn from experience.” It was kind of a kaboom moment. I only wish it had been my kaboom moment!

You frame the book from its very first pages as taking place in a summer that’s “the time of changes.” Why did you decide to explicitly mention the events that take place later in the novel, like John Scanlan’s stroke and the demise of Maggie and Debbie’s friendship, in the first chapter of the book? Did you know what would happen in Object Lessons when you started writing, or were you surprised along the way?

I always know what will happen at the end when I begin a novel. The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That’s how life is most of the time, isn’t it? You know where you are, and where you hope to wind up. It’s the getting there that’s challenging. Besides, I don’t think the trajectory of Object Lessons is about John Scanlan, or even Debbie. It’s about that moment when Maggie can think of herself as an individual separate from others. That’s the ending.

Object Lessons is set in the 1960s as sweeping social changes are beginning to take hold in the United States, but these changes are slow to creep into the town of Kenwood. In what ways did you intend to depict the town as an idyllic place to grow up? How did you picture it as “frozen in time”? How do you think that Kenwood’s reaction to altering the status quo mirrored the reality of the world at that time?

I don’t think most of what we call the 60s actually took place in the 60s. In San Francisco and New York and on some college campuses, sure. But if you go back and look at photos in most places, of most people, you don’t see long hair or tie dyes. My high school yearbook, circa 1970, has a handful of hippie looks but mostly people are pretty straight. But the fault lines were beginning to subtly appear. The changes in the Catholic Church. The growing political disenchantment in the years after the Kennedy assassination. The peace movement and women’s liberation. The earth was rumbling during the time covered by this novel. It hadn’t opened yet.

Some reviewers have wondered if Maggie is, in some ways, a young stand-in for you. How much of your own character is in Maggie? Why do you think that readers are so intrigued by trying to figure out how much autobiography exists in a writer’s fictional works?

Oh, I think everyone wants to disbelieve the notion of fiction. It’s too much, to think that someone could invent an entire believable world from scratch. And that goes double if you’ve been a newspaper reporter, as I was, trained to deal in something approaching literal truth. There are certainly similarities between Anna and Maggie, although she is preternaturally wise and a little judgmental in a way I was not at her age. I find her a bit of a pain.

The struggle between parent and child is paramount in this book–from Maggie and Connie, to Tommy and John, to Connie and Angelo. Which parent-child pairing comes the closest to understanding one another? Is there any element that you view as an “irreconcilable difference” in any of the relationships?

The most irreconcilable of those relationships is the one between Tommy Scanlan and his dad, mainly because it’s not really a loving relationship on the part of the elder man. It’s one of dominance. That’s always doomed to failure. I think Connie and her father have a genuinely loving bond, although he comes from a culture that likes to keep its children close, and so he is distressed about the obvious ways in which she has pulled away. It’s too soon to know how the relationship between Maggie and Connie will develop, but I will say that of all the characters in the book Connie has the greatest capacity for unconditional love. And that carries you a long way in the long run.

In which ways is Connie a renegade, and in which ways does she want to fit in? How is her relationship with Joey break boundaries? How does it put her in closer touch with herself?

I don’t think she means to be a renegade. She’s not born to it, the way Celeste is. She’s just wound up in this role because of the ethnic tensions in her marriage. Reading this book in the early 90s, people thought I had exaggerated that. Someone said to me, “You made it sound almost interracial.” At the time that these people were growing up, that’s exactly what it was like. (Maybe now that everyone has seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding they’ll understand the intractability of certain groups about having their kids marry outside the clan!) It gets tiring always being the outsider. The relationship with Joey is all about spending time with someone who speaks your language and doesn’t see you as the other.

It’s interesting that John Scanlan loathes the Kennedys, as he seems such a Joe Kennedy type in many ways. Did you have any inspiration for this larger-than-life personality? Why do you think he and Maggie have such an affinity toward one another?

A lot of Irish Catholic patriarchs of a certain age loathed the Kennedys. It was jealousy, pure and simple. They couldn’t break through with the WASPs of their own community. Somehow, to a limited extent, Kennedy had managed to do so. And they had as many sons, but none of them Senators or fledgling Presidents. Some of them felt the same way about the Kellys of Philadelphia. “Who do you think you are?” might as well be tattooed into the forehead of certain old Irish Catholics, they ask it so much. “Too big for your britches,” too. I think at some level Maggie likes the old man because he is strong and sure of himself. And that’s what she wants to be. And he likes her because she’s smart.

You set up a marked contrast between Monica and Maggie. Why do you think Monica harbors such vitriol toward her younger cousin? Why does John Scanlan see through her, while few others do? Are they cut from the same cloth, so to speak?

In some ways Monica and Maggie are protoypes of two very different types of women who will do battle over and over in the decades after the action of this novel ends. One is the woman who will play by all the rules in order to win, who will dress correctly, pretend to be tractable, make herself alluring to men and do whatever it takes to succeed, although the standard of her time is that success comes only through a man. She is basically a hard case, and she is about to get harder because all the rules of what makes a successful woman are about to change on her. Maggie is the kind of girl who will be the beneficiary of those changes in the years to come. She is intelligent and thoughtful. She is interested in prospering on her own terms and the old ways of female manipulation either don’t interest or don’t occur to her. The Monicas and the Maggies will always have a hard time getting along. John Scanlan is amused by the combat. He sees Monica for what she is because he, too, is a hard case.

How is Maggie’s desire for order tested by the events of the summer? How is she similar to Tommy, who is a self-admitted “slave to routine”? Will his status as a creature of habit change?

The change of that summer is the catalyst Maggie needs to become herself. It tears her apart, but at the end she can put herself back together. In that way I think she is prototypically female in some sense, and her father prototypically male in that he is quite passive and likely to remain so. The one upheaval he has allowed himself in his life was to marry Connie. But I don’t think he’ll see the like of that moment again.

Maggie is drawn toward unconventional female figures, like Helen Malone and her aunt Margaret. How about these women appeals to Maggie? Was there a particular female character that you most enjoyed writing?

Helen Malone is actually based on a kind of older girl that I saw and knew in my own neighborhood growing up, the kind who had the self-assurance of physical attractiveness and the allure of sexual experience. Those girls suffered. They were golden one day and cast out the next, almost always because of pregnancy. It’s one of the ways in which the world has changed for the better since I was young; you don’t have to pay, all the rest of your life, for a mistake you made when your hormones were in overdrive. I was mesmerized by those girls growing up, because they had so much, and because it was so fleeting. It made me very suspicious of those things that came to you because of your physical allure, and very determined to develop my intellect and my will.

There’s a constant theme of artifice in Object Lessons. Who do you think is the most masked person in the story? Who’s the most true to his or herself? How do you seek to strip away artifice as a writer?

That’s something I’ve never thought about. I suppose it’s the neighborhood, actually, that’s most artificial, because everyone collectively pretends that life is one way when deep underneath there are all sorts of fissures. It’s like that moment near the end when Maggie can see this couple who have moved into one of the new houses. It seems a tableau of success and contentment, but she intuits that there are endless fault lines. And that’s correct.

Object Lessons touches on social issues–divorce, infidelity and teenaged pregnancy, among others. Did you consciously set out to write a novel that included social commentary? Or did these issues emerge while you were writing?

My feeling is that things become social policy issues because they are happening in life, not the other way around. So if you set out to write a realistic novel about America, social issues will inevitably arise in the text. It would be almost impossible to write a novel about, say, marriage, without writing about infidelity. Even Tolstoy had to do it in Anna Karenina, and that was more than a century ago. These are the ways of the world. We just call them social issues when we’re trying to quantify and analyze them somehow. I only do that when I’m wearing my columnist’s hat.

I was struck by a statement of Connie’s at the end of the book: “Everything in your life is who you marry.” Would Tommy agree with this? Has Connie truly forgiven Tommy and accepted the realities of her marriage?

Oh, sure. I don’t think you can even argue with that. Who you marry determines what sort of children and family you’ll have, and that shapes your entire life. I don’t think Connie understood that, going in. She thought it was all about her and Tommy, when of course a marriage is a much larger circle than that of two people holding hands. I think she’s made her peace, but she’s going to keep kicking at the larger indignities. Frankly, she’ll be a much happier woman the day after John Scanlan’s funeral.

You open and conclude the book with the concept of “here and hereafter.” How do John Scanlan and Maggie share a similar worldview with respect to those two concepts? Does this jive with your perception of the world?

Well, the obvious reference is a religious one. In many ways this is a profoundly Catholic book, and I am a profoundly Catholic writer. But it also refers to the future. John knows that things are changing, in his business and in the lives of his children. He has only to consider his half-Italian granddaughter to know that. And I think he suspects that the hereafter for her will be in a much different society. So does she. That’s the moment at which both of them are poised. One regrets, one embraces. But both understand.

In a commencement address at Mount Holyoke, you said, “Listen to that small voice from inside you, that chooses to go the other way.” Who in this novel truly takes this advice to heart? How does it represent a struggle for them? How do you try to heed your own advice?

I never made the connection before, but of course that line in the Holyoke speech describes precisely the moment at the end of Object Lessons when Maggie first hears her own voice in her head. So I would say it would be her, first and foremost. As for me, I have the opposite problem. Because of my life as a novelist and as a columnist, I’m always hearing voices in my head. It’s getting them to shut up and give me a little peace that’s the problem! Usually I have to write it all down first; then I get to watch some TV!

Object Lessons was your first published novel. Do you have a particular fondness for it because of that designation? As you look back at it after over a decade has passed, is there anything that you’d approach differently? Has your writing process changed over that span of time?

I’m more surehanded as a novelist now. You hope that’s true, after publishing four and beginning work on the fifth. You just know your way around a fictional mis en scene better than you did first time out. I had to do three full drafts of this book. On my last novel, Blessings, I did a draft and a fairly light reworking and then it was fine. So I suppose it’s like anything else; the more you do it, the better you become. I can’t tell you whether I’d do anything differently because I’ve never reread Object Lessons. The last time I read it was the day I handed the final draft in. Reading my own work makes me sweat; all I can see are the mistakes and the clunks, never the felicitous phrase or the apt characterization. So I just keep pushing on.

Reader’s Guide

1. Object Lessons unfolds mostly through the eyes of twelve-year-old Maggie. In which ways is Maggie older and more perceptive than her age would suggest? How is she naive? How do you envision Maggie’s evolution as she grows older and away from her family?

2. Does the book have the elements of a traditional coming-of-age novel? If so, what are they? Do you agree with Connie’s assessment at the end of the book that her daughter has become a woman? In what ways is Maggie still a little girl?

3. What does the development being built near Tommy and Connie’s house represent to the various Scanlans? To the neighborhood kids, including Maggie, Debbie, Bruce, and Richard? To the town of Kenwood as a whole? How does it represent a larger theme or symbol in the novel?

4. How do Maggie and Connie have a typical mother-daughter rapport? An atypical one? How is Connie’s attitude toward Maggie influenced by the attitudes of her parents toward her?

5. What factors motivated Tommy and Connie to marry? What initially draws one to the other? How are they well-matched? What causes their marriage to flounder?

6. Why is it significant that Joey Martinelli appears on Connie’s doorstep when he does? How has she become a different person from the girl he once knew? What attributes would she like to bring to the surface once again?

7. When he learns of Connie’s driving lessons, Tommy thinks that he “could take her anywhere she needed to go.” Why does he view her learning to drive as a betrayal? Are Connie’s driving lessons symbolic? If so, how?

8. What role does the Roman Catholic Church play in Object Lessons? How does the Church and its rituals represent a spiritual force for the characters? In which ways is it a business entity?

9. At the beginning of Object Lessons, John Scanlan rules over the family as an indomitable patriarch. What about his personality is so arresting, both to those within the family and outside of it? How does he inspire emotion—whether it’s fear, respect, or loathing? Why do he and Maggie get along so well? How do you see the family evolving as they adjust to his death?

10. Whom does Maggie look up to as a role model, both within her family and outside of it? What attributes do these people have in common? Why does she so dislike her cousin Monica?

11. The friendship between Maggie and Debbie Malone evaporates during the course of the book. Why do you think that Debbie turns on Maggie? How is their friendship different from the relationship Connie has with Celeste?

12. What does the Malone family represent to Maggie? Why does Debbie’s sister, Helen, take a liking to Maggie?

13. After his stroke, John Scanlan says, “It’s not the dying I mind, it’s the changing.” How is this statement typical of his character? Which members of his family would agree with him; who in this novel would disagree?

14. How do Maggie’s two grandfathers compare and contrast with each other? Which attributes from each does Maggie seem to have? To which one does she seem most similar? Why?

15. Debbie decries always being known as “Helen Malone’s sister”; Maggie counters that she’s always “John Scanlan’s granddaughter.” How do the two girls grapple with the idea of identity, especially as it relates to their relationship to other family members? How does each girl try to form her own individuality? How do names and nicknames play a part in identity in Object Lessons?

16. “Until this horrible sweaty summer, lines had been drawn,” Maggie recalls sadly. What connections and boundaries are erased from Maggie’s life during the course of the book? Which fissures are the most apparent? How does Maggie handle the disintegration of these connections?

17. In your opinion, why do the kids begin setting fires in the development? Why does Maggie initially participate? At the last fire, are Maggie’s actions heroic or cowardly, or a combination of the two? Why? Do you think that her behavior hastens the end of her friendship with Debbie?

18. In which ways does John’s death free Mary Frances? Why is she consumed by the memory of her dead daughter, and why does she want to be buried with her? Why does Mary Frances prefer Connie and Tommy living with her to her other children?

19. At the beginning of Object Lessons, Maggie “listens too much”; by the end of the novel, she’s found her voice. Why did it take so long for her true self to emerge? How do you think she’ll merge her newfound consciousness with the competing voices of her past influences?