Still Life with Breadcrumbs

THE main character in Anna Quindlen’s new novel, is a photographer who was once a feminist icon. Now 60, she has won a lifetime achievement award, and this confirms her feeling that success is a thing of the past.

Anna Quindlen is now 61. It’s 22 years since she won the Pulitzer prize for her journalism in the New York Times, and 18 years since the movie adaptation of her novel, One True Thing, gained an academy award for the actress Meryl Streep.

But the author is no has-been. True, she gave up her bi-weekly column in Newsweek back in 2009, but her subsequent novels have been hailed as her best yet. Released at the end of January, Still Life with Bread Crumbs has already hit the New York Times bestseller list. She spoke to me on the phone from New York, where she lives with her husband Gerald Krovatin, an attorney. She was taking a few days breather in her extensive book tour around the USA.

“When I’m on tour I find that people are either attached to my New York Times and Newsweek columns, or the novels. And if they are attached to the novels, they are passionate about different ones. Many are attached to Every Last One; I hear a lot about Black and Blue; another woman will come and say she loved Object Lessons; another Blessings. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that you have connected with people in some way across a body of work.

“I’ve tried to do something a little different with each of them. That keeps the work challenging for me. There’s a sense of setting a goal, and doing something I have never done before.”

Still Life with Breadcrumbs opens with a gunshot. Rebecca Winter, a divorcee with one son, has let out her apartment in New York city, and rented a dilapidated cottage in the middle of nowhere. Her bank balance is dwindling, and the cost of keeping her mother in a home has escalated.

She soon finds her feet in the country, helped by her friendship with a roofer called Jim Bates, and the community who gather in the cafe Two for Tea, or More.

The book has a delightfully quirky structure, with short chapters, and inventive chapter headings. The author, while she enjoyed writing the book, says was anxious too.

“I was a little doubtful about the road I was going down. I was quite sure what I wanted to do both structurally and tonally, but I was unsure how my editor would respond.

“There is always that little backstopping voice which says, ‘This is an odd choice for you’. Luckily everyone felt the same way as I did; that the tone was exactly right in a way I hadn’t managed before.”

As well as the lead character Rebecca, there are superb subsidiary characters, such as Sarah, who runs the cafe, and Tad, a professional clown.

“I am a Dickensian, as much as any writer can say that. Being so, that has always, inevitably led me towards vivid and idiosyncratic secondary characters. Readers can never forget Fagin or Uriah Heap.”

It’s said that to be a great writer, you need an unhappy childhood, followed by a tension-fuelled life. Quindlen’s novels are full of life and death issues, yet, she says she had the happiest childhood, where her writing was encouraged. She has even managed to combine her hugely successful career with her harmonious marriage.

She met Gerald Krovatin at 18, and married him seven years later. “We’ve basically known each other for ever,” she says. “We have a shared history, and you can’t overestimate the importance of that.”

There was one great sadness. Her mother died when Anna was just 19.

“There is no question that that changed me. That has been, over the years a huge wellspring not only of writing material but also of philosophical thought about life and how we ought to live it.”

How, though, does she write if she’s not a tortured artist?

“I don’t write well, or write at all when I am rattled, or unhappy,” she says.

“For me, to produce this drama on the page, my own world has to be uneventful. I need routine, and I am disciplined, if nothing else comes between, but if the slightest thing shakes the schedule, I am sunk. I try never to go out to lunch; I always make it breakfast, because if I throw something into the middle of the day I feel I have lost it.

“Most days I have breakfast with my husband. I read three or four newspapers, go out and power walk for an hour, then come back and talk to my best friend on the phone.

“She happens to be a book reviewer. Then, when I’ve run out of things to do, I start writing.

“My son arrives at 9.30. He is writing a novel in his boyhood room. We usually meet for a quick lunch in the dining room, and never talk about what we’re working on. Then we go back to our respective offices and slog away for a couple more hours.”

Anna’s second son is a writer too; he pens young adult fiction, and her daughter writes comedy for a troupe in New York. Anna laughs.

“My poor husband. I think sometimes he finds it quite dispiriting that nobody went to law school.

“One of his famous lines, looking round the dinner table, is, ‘Not a W2 Income in the house’. Which, in America, means we are all freelancing at some level.

“Luckily my eldest is getting married in June and his fiancée is an attorney so that evens it up a little.”

With six novels, 10 nonfiction titles, and two children’s books to her name; not to mention the extensive journalism, Quindlen has been heaped with awards throughout her life. She has four Industry Awards, and 12 honorary degrees. But presumably she views winning the Pulitzer for Communication her proudest achievement?

“It was a pretty thrilling day,” she says.

“I’d been in the newspaper business since I was 18. A colleague of mine in the New York Times used to say that with a Pulitzer you never had to worry what the first line of your obituary will be. That is soothing.

“But my proudest moment was when the delivery man arrived at our house with the first copy of the first hard cover book. I was a library kid. I had spent a lot of time looking through books, and the idea that my work was finally between two covers and would go on a shelf somewhere was so thrilling. I remember hoisting the book up and feeling its weight. That moment will stay with me forever.”

Her ambition is to keep writing novels that people respond to, and that address some of their hopes and fears. “And I want to have grandchildren,” she says, laughing. “I have control over the former, but none at all over the latter.”

Does writing make her happy?

“That’s not the word I would use. I feel anxious every time I approach a blank screen. There is a sense of going out on unchartered waters on a very small boat. Some days I feel like I have oars, and other days I don’t.

“And no, it never gets easier; at least not if you are doing it the right way and are trying to challenge yourself. On some level you are intentionally setting things up so that it won’t get easier.

“But at the end, when you write a sentence and suddenly realise it is the last sentence; when you realise that in fact you did do what you set out to do — that’s a happy feeling!”