Anna Quindlen, NANAVILLE: Adventures in Grandparenting

[1:05]Zibby Owens: Hi, I'm Zibby Owens and you're listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, three hundred and sixty five days a year for about thirty minutes. I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now. You can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zippy's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue At 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings. But this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018. And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy.

[2:06]Anna Quindlen: This episode with Anna Quinlan is one of my favorites. Anna has been like literally on the top, was on the top of my wish list for this podcast from day one. I have admired her for so long and just followed her career and all that, and it was a dream come true that she finally came on. Thanks to Jean Hamkorlitz who introduced us. And now we're like Instagram and email buddies, which is just amazing. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Anna Quinlan is one of my favorite authors of all time and was on my original wish list when I started this podcast back in April 2018. I was like, I hope I can eventually get Anna Quinlan to come on my show. And she was. She already was on once, and now it's like Dayenu. She's she was on it once. Now she's on it again. So it's amazing. Okay. Here's more about her. If you don't know her, go research her. Go buy her books. She is amazing, and I adore her. Anna Quinlan is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self help bestseller lists. She is the author of many novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, Still Life with Breadcrumbs, and Miller's Valley. Her memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012 and was a number one New York Times bestseller. Her book, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at the New York Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in loud and clear. And we I interviewed her last year for her lovely memoir, Nanaville Adventures in Grandparenting. Welcome, Anna. Thank you for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to talk about your latest book, Write For Your Life. Tell everybody what it is about and how you came up with the idea. And, I mean, you could have written this so long ago. Why now? Well, you know, your podcast is called moms don't have time to read books. And of course the whole point of it is that moms need to have time to read books. And this book might well be called Moms Don't Have Time to Write. They need to do it. I mean, I've been saving spring on this one mentally for a number of years. First of all, from my own perspective as a writer, I'm sure you found this too. Actually writing something down as opposed to having it ricocheting around in your brain does one of two things. It either diminishes it. You write a paragraph about something and think, why was I so stressed out about this? Or it enlarges it. You write a paragraph about something and think, yes, this is my life. And the problem is that the new technologies make us think we're writing when we kind of aren't, or we are in a kind of an evanescent way that disappears. I mean, when I'm dead, I can't imagine that my children are going to rifle through the saved emails on my computer, literally maybe tens of thousands and find much of Moment About Me. I'm lucky what they will find of Moment About Me is on an entire shelf of books where they can open something that I've written and say, Oh yes, there she is. What this book says is that that shouldn't be the purview of writers, of professional writers. We've professionalized writing in a way that's both curious and counterproductive. Think about one hundred years ago. One hundred years ago, everyone who was literate wrote. Everyone wrote letters because that was really the only way to communicate. Many, many people kept journals. Lots of them kept accounts of their daily life in other ways. And then slowly over time with the advent of the telephone and now certainly with emails and texts, there's an idea that ordinary people don't write anymore. There's a moment in the book that has been replicated for me literally dozens of times. A woman came up to me in the twin cities. She's from Somalia. She now lives in Minneapolis. And she talked to me about her journey from one country to ours. And at the end of her very resonant description of her life, I said to her, You should write that down. And her response was, I am not a writer. And I've heard that over and over again. And what I wanna do with this book is to say to everyone, you should write that down. You should write it down because when you do, you'll understand yourself in a way that you didn't before. You should write that down because when things are written down, they take on a kind of a life, a reality that they don't have when they're passing thoughts. And you should write it down because fifty years from now, your granddaughter will open a drawer and find a letter or find a journal and think, I know her. And that's eternal life. And who doesn't want eternal life? It's so true. It's amazing. I mean, you had a quote in the book where you just said writing is the gift of your presence forever. And you said, think of it this way. If you could look down right now and see words on paper from anyone on earth or anyone who has left it, who would that be? And don't you, as I do, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Don't doesn't that argue for doing that yourself? I feel that so powerfully about my parents, particularly my mother. My father has left more written documents behind, but my mother left almost nothing. And given the fact that she died when I was quite young, if only I had a packet of letters. I mean, used to have a persistent fantasy that she had left me letters one for every birthday and that I would be able to open them up, but she didn't. And I think probably there were two parts to that. The first part was that she would probably say as that woman did in Minneapolis, I am not a writer. And the second part, I think would be as a very ordinary woman living a very ordinary suburban life, she would have said, what do I have to say? And the answer is real life is powerful. The tiny moments of real life taken together become a person in a way that is so powerful. I mean, there's one small fact of my mother's existence that I have written down in my columns that make everyone go, Oh, and that is that my mother wanted to be an artist, but instead got married very young and had five children in quick succession. But on Fridays, when we could not eat meat because I'm from a Catholic family, she would put a hard boiled egg in my lunch and she would paint with watercolors on the surface of that egg, the face of a princess or a tree with apples or things like that. And it is no exaggeration nor diminution of my own character to say that when I was 11 or 12 years old, I took those eggs out and broke the shell. But there's something about that fact of hers that if only she'd written a paragraph about doing it would enlarge my understanding for her. So I think particularly for mothers to have that to give to your children when when you're there, but I think especially when you're gone is very, very powerful. I mean, that's the first thing I do when I whenever anybody passes away is I do, like, an inventory of what cards or what letters I have. I go through everything, like, file drawer, everywhere I can find it, what pictures and what letters. Like, that's it. And to your point, not emails. Even though sometimes emails can be so private and personal, it's it's not the same. Like you said so much of in your book about handwriting, like, you want to see where their hand touched that page. There's something about it. Well, you sent me, after you finished the book. I had to, yeah. You sent me a picture of a handwritten note to me. It wasn't long, it wasn't discursive, but it was in your writing. And that communicates something different than typing something. Now, look, I'm somebody who's been typing things her whole life long. As I say in the book, I don't handwrite my books. The thought is inconceivable to me that the synapse from my brain, from my imagination goes directly from my fingers onto a keyboard. That's how I've been writing virtually my entire life. And I compare and contrast that with a number of other writers in the contemporary era with Jennifer Egan, who writes everything in longhand, which is amazing to me because her books are so tech specific. And yet she writes everything in longhand on yellow legal pads or Mary Gordon, the novelist who also writes in longhand. And I'm just wowed by that, But that doesn't keep us from leaving some little piece of ourselves in longhand behind. I just was finishing up my healthcare proxy, and that's a very legalistic document that goes to my son, my second son, Christopher. And then I thought, you know what? It would be really helpful if I wrote a letter to Chris, not long, not discursive, but just saying, hey, I'm asking you to do this because I think that you'll be able to channel me really well. But just in case, here's the deal if I'm incapacitated. And I wrote it on the computer and printed it out, but I signed it with my name, with mommy, because you look at that and think she was here. That's what handwriting does. She was here. And even some small piece of it on a letter, I think is incredibly valuable. I actually when I did, like, my will in health care, whatever, like, five years ago or something, or I updated it, whatever. Anyway, I did write a note by hand, and I gave it to the lawyers to keep, like, with the will so that my kids would have a letter when I die. Well, you know, it's it's funny. I just executed a new will, and they made me initial every page before we got to the signature page. Apparently, that's what the law requires or demands. I don't know. But halfway through it, I thought Quinn is my executor. I thought, is Quinn gonna see this? And I asked them, will Quinn see this? And I thought to myself, seeing these initials will be upsetting for him on this particular document. But on everything else, I just feel like it bespeaks your presence. As I say in the book, when we think of letters, when we think of a group of love letters or those letters that were written during the war to and from someone who was serving, we think of them as tied up with a ribbon. And the reason I think we think of them as tied up with a ribbon is that a letter is a kind of a gift, especially now. I mean, if I wanna tell you something, Zippy meet me for lunch at Cafe Luxembourg, I send you a text. Don't send you a letter because I wanna inform you of something. I send you a letter because I want to give you something. I want to give you something substantive. And I think that's borne out by the fact that there are certain kinds of communications that we really think are only letter appropriate. For example, I'm not going to write a condolence note as an email. I'm just not. I really feel like that demands that I handwrite a note and send it off. I think email love letters. I don't know. I just rather get a little something scrawled on a piece of paper. It's true. When my my husband sometimes leaves me little notes, and I'm like, oh my god. I like, I have one right up here. I, like, taped it up. You know? And then you save them all. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I'm thinking, gosh. I don't write him any notes. Better start I better start writing it. I mean, maybe, like, once or twice. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. 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[18:28]Anna Quindlen: Yeah. I I feel like it's one of those things that I've been, like, crossing off the list because it takes too long and it's such a shame. Because I do love writing, but I'm like, oh, I could just as easily type you know, send this I could send 20 thank you notes in the time it would take me to handwrite two, basically. Mhmm. So is this really the best use of my time? But it is there is something gift worthy and you learn so much and there's nothing like it. I think we've underestimated what writing can do for us. And it can be really therapeutic too. And I think it's interesting that more and more entities are using it with a therapeutic model. I mean, I don't know if you recall the chapter in the book about doctors and nurses and about how this wonderful doctor who also has a PhD in English literature, Rita Sharon, has invented this program called Parallel Charts, narrative writing in medicine and how it helps medical students and doctors understand themselves and understand the people they're treating. So the parallel chart is, the one chart is the chart we know, right? Blood pressure, sex, ailment, whatever. And the parallel chart is what you can tell about the patient, but you would never write on the chart. Like the patient having this kind of family or the patient having this kind of affect about what's going on or stories the patient might've told you. And that's exactly what people who are seeing doctors and nurses want. They want somebody who sees them. And the rating, I think, helps healthcare professionals see the people they're working with, but it also helps them. I mean, we've all talked about how the burnout, particularly in the last two years, is so considerable. And there's something about writing these things down that, again, helps you sometimes diminish and enlarge them at the same time. I keep thinking about that letter that's in the book from the young nurse, Lucian Van Wert, who talks about the first time she's ever seen one of the soldiers she's treating during the epidemic die. And the epidemic she's writing about is the flu epidemic of nineteen eighteen. And as I read that letter, I kept thinking, will we have this? Mhmm. Will we have this about COVID? We need to have this about COVID. It's true. No one's gonna print out your Instagram posts or, you know, all of that stuff. I actually during COVID, I was writing so much on Instagram. I went through and, like, copied and pasted them all and, like, put it all so I could remember what it was like in those minutes when my mother-in-law was sick, like, what each day was like. And I'm not ready to read it yet, but I I know I have it, but I know I'm not gonna go back and read it on Instagram. I have to have it, like, printed in a cabinet. It's not the same as handwriting. But Well, but that's a smart thing to do because I think when you're writing episodically on some sites, it sort of gets away from you. I'm not saying you shouldn't write episodically. I mean, if you were keeping a journal during COVID, that's exactly what you're doing. Writing from the very beginning when we all thought, oh no, two weeks of Oh my gosh. To then, when we realized that we were deep, deep into it to, when we started to climb out and then fell back the 7PM applause in the streets of Manhattan, the groceries that were left out in the driveway, because we weren't sure how this was communicated. I mean, all those things will be in the journals that some people kept. I was asked whether this book was a product of COVID and it wasn't. As I said to you, I've been thinking about this for years, but it was kind of thrilling to find out over and over again that while no one was buying fancy dresses. In fact, today everyone's opening their closets going, Wow, I totally forgot I had any of this stuff. I put on dress shoes the other day for a gig, heels. And I thought, Are there cobwebs in here? I'm literally doing that tonight. I literally. And I had to go shopping this weekend because I was like, I don't think I have a single thing that is still gonna fit from, like, two years ago. Like, these are not even, like, in style anymore. And, I'm gonna dust off the heels and I might I not be totally forgot about half the clothes I had. And nobody was buying those kinds of clothes, but apparently people were buying yarn and knitting. People were buying yeast and making bread and people apparently were buying journals with empty pages and stationary because they decided that they were gonna go back to writing. I think people circled back to all the things that slow you down. And that result in something that we sometimes take for granted because of the speed of daily life. But that matter, when you knit a sweater by yourself and you're done, it might not be perfect and it might not look like what you would have bought at a department store, but you made it. And I think that's the way people felt about journals as well. And I think they also felt that sense. I talk in the very beginning of the book about Anne Frank's diary and about how people think, oh my goodness, she wrote this incredible book. But the truth is she didn't write a book. In the very beginning when she first got this diary for her birthday, she was talking to herself. And I think that's some of what people were doing during COVID. They were talking to themselves on the page so they could understand what they were thinking and feeling. And I think we all need to do more of that and not say, I'm not a writer. Everybody can write. Everybody can write. If you can read, you can write. Yep. My mom said the same thing. I was, like, encouraging her to write something. I feel like it was maybe in my book club or something. And she's, oh, well, I don't have a story to tell. I'm like, mom, what are you talking about? You know? How can you say that? Like, you you know, as like 57,000, like, funny things. She's funny or meaningful or sad or you know? All I know what's happened to her. She and even if nothing happened, even if it was just about her day. And I keep sending her all these, like, blank things like, you know, fill in this, whatever. But anyway, some people maybe don't feel comfortable. What I say at the very end of the book is that's why history feels so bloodless to us so much of the time. Because, you know, God bless them. I'm happy to know about the constitutional convention and I'm happy to know about the founding of the United Nations, but I live in daily life. And what I really wanna understand is is the daily lives of people who lived at that time. That's why I quote from this amazing book, which I'm so happy is still in print called Pioneer Women, where one woman in Topeka, Kansas reached out to all of these women who had once settled the state and asked them to write down their recollections. And from plagues of grasshoppers to hand making all of their children's clothes, to having their young children die because of how primitive the conditions were to digging out the dugout houses where they lived before they could build them. It's such rich history of a kind that we don't usually get in part because as Arthur Schlesinger says, when I quote him in the end of the book, most history is written by and about powerful white men. And the history I'm really interested in is the history that can be written by women and people of color. And the only way that history gets written is if those people decide to write it. Very true. What's the last thing that you wrote by hand? I just wrote a condolence note yesterday, actually, on my stationary. I do feel really strongly about that. That that to say you're sorry you've lost someone has to be done by hand. I actually I feel I shouldn't even admit. I have sent electronic email condolence notes, but I also feel like when I'm going through a loss, sometimes I like getting it on email. Like, I like opening email and seeing that it's not that somebody, like, sees what I've gone through. Or that there's an immediacy to it. Yeah. It happened to you a day or two ago, and the email says, I just heard that you've just suffered this loss. It does have that kind of immediacy. Yeah. But I feel like You're right. You're right. Right too. No. No. You're right. My mother would say, you're shame on me for doing that. But I don't know. I won't tell her. What's your next project? Do you have a next project? I am kind of through the the first draft of a new novel. Oh, exciting. I always hesitate to say that because I'll knock wood and, you know, I won't jinx it for you. Wood must be knocked. It's just such a difficult prospect. I mean, that's one of the things that I hope I successfully communicate to people who don't do this for a living in the book. I'm not saying it's easy because it's not easy for me And this is book 21. Oh my gosh. So I never sit down and think, Oh, piece of cake. But I do feel afterwards like there's a piece of my life that's frozen in amber. And I feel like that's only for the good. But I do understand that when you sit down, you've gotta wrestle with that voice in your head that says, I have nothing to say. Very true. Amazing. Anna, thank you. Thank you for this book. Thank you for the chat again, and thanks for encouraging people to read and write, especially. I am always telling people to write stuff down and saying, oh, your daughter said she's you know, write tell her to write it down. But, you know, there's never you can't say it too many times. And, of course, the way you said it is just so powerful for all the many people who have been benefited by writing from Freedom Riders to Anne Frank to really everybody. So thank you. Well, now you know what it's like, Zibby. You know what it's like to be one of us. Now you're a member of the sisterhood, lean hardcovers. Thank you. I would say you'll be kinder to those of us who do this, except that you've always been notably kind to those of us who do this. So thank you. You're welcome. All right, well feel better. See you soon. Okay. Bye bye. Bye.

[30:58]Anna Quindlen: and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.