Living Out Loud
Authors: Anna Quindlen
“If you open
Living Out Loud
,
you will find a lifelong friend.”
—
Gloria Steinem
“What Quindlen has is an ability to look at herself, at her husband and sons, at friends and strangers … [and] make believable mountains out of the molehills of everyday life. Her 960-word column is sometimes political, like Ellen Goodman’s, sometimes comical, like Erma Bombeck’s, but is still somehow different.”
—
Washington Journalism Review
“Like a visit with a good friend over tea and just-baked homemade chocolate chip cookies … Columns that read like a heart-to-heart chat … The collection blends such delightfully witty personal confessions with some poignant pieces on the more serious topics that get front-page attention … Quindlen is deft at reducing the largest issues of the day to their smallest, most essential, most human components.”
—
Providence Sunday Journal
“A panopticon of life in this decade, sure to be valuable to future social historians. She touches on life, love, home, family, work, men, women, children and issues large and small.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Quindlen is a graceful writer who has moments of eloquence.… While [she] may not have all of the answers, her exploration of life’s questions is illuminating.”
—
Kansas City Star & Times
“Anna Quindlen’s beat is life, and she’s one hell of a reporter.”
—Susan Isaacs
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming edition of
Loud and Clear
by Anna Quindlen. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1988 by Anna Quindlen
Excerpt from
Loud and Clear
by Anna Quindlen copyright © 2004 by Anna Quindlen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Irving Music, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from the lyrics to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher. Copyright © 1966 Sea of Tunes/Irving Music, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-90726
eISBN: 978-0-307-76354-9
v3.1_r1
To take what there
is
, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of
that
—this doubtless is the right way to live.
—HENRY JAMES
CONTENTS
IN THE BEGINNINGI
t was very cold the night my mother died. She was a little older than I am today, a young woman with five young children who had been eaten alive by disease, had wasted away to a wisp, had turned into a handful of bones wound round with pale silk. When my father came home from the hospital we gathered the younger children in his bedroom and tried to tell them what had happened. Naturally we could not; it would be years before we would know ourselves. Perhaps it is some indication of how spectacularly difficult our task was, and how spectacularly we failed at it, that, when we were both adults, my younger sister told me that she had spent five years waiting for our mother to come home from the hospital, where she was certain they would find a way to make her well.
I suppose this is an odd way to begin the story of writing a column of personal reflections, a column that I did not start to write until a full
fifteen years after the January evening on which my mother died. And yet it is the beginning. For there are two parts to writing a column about yourself, about your life and your feelings. One is, naturally, the writing itself, the prose and, if you’ve got it in you, the poetry.
But the other is the living, and that is the harder part. When I was twenty-two, I wanted badly to do such a column, but the managing editor of the newspaper for which I was working said that I was a good enough writer, but that I hadn’t lived enough to be qualified for “living out loud.” At the time I was enraged by his attitude; now I know he was right. My prose may have been adequate, but my emotional development was not.
It was not until the aftermath of my mother’s death that I began to realize that I would have to fashion a life for myself—and that is what I have been trying to do, in a workmanlike way, ever since. This seems rather ordinary to me now, but at the beginning it was odd and frightening. Up until that point life had fashioned me. There had been almost no decisions for me to make, in part because I was not permitted to make them, and in part because I saw no path other than the one I was on. I went to school, did well, came home, ate dinner, finished my homework, went to bed. I fought with my brothers and loved but did not know my parents. I wore what my friends wore and said the kinds of things they said, and if, somewhere, someone was deciding what we should wear and discuss, I did not know who that someone was. There were two good reasons not to interfere with such a life. I felt powerless to do so, and I was happy.