Go back to Arts & Features pageSAN FRANCISCO -- Anna Quindlen rolls down her car window as she drives by the picket lines outside the San Francisco Chronicle. "Yeah union!" yells the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, leaning out and waving as the car speeds by.
For an ex-Newspaper Guild member who was booted up to management in 1981 when she became assistant metropolitan editor of the New York Times, Quindlen remembers her own picket duty with a mixture of nostalgia and fear.
"We were on strike for three months in 1978," she says. "I was 25. I didn't have a mortgage or kids, and at that time, trade unionism still meant something in this country, so it wasn't like it is today. Since the New York Daily News strike a few years ago (which destroyed the Newspaper Guild at that newspaper), whenever I hear that my colleagues are on strike, I feel this jolt. The Daily News strike marked a demarcation in labor history, and that scares me for all newspapers."
A "contract writer" since she began her "Life in the 30s" column in the mid-'80s, followed by her present Op-Ed Page column, Quindlen says that in her heart she's still in the rank and file. "I consider myself a reporter and stand up for reporters. I'm going to call the New York Times syndicate (which distributes her column) to see if they've developed a mechanism for a strike. I don't want them to fill the gap left by striking workers by throwing my copy into it. In some sense, that's electronic scabbing."
Quindlen's personal strike ethic has caused her to grapple with the prospect of unemployment more than once at the Times. "I think the most useful you can be to an organization is when you're willing to leave it at any time," she says, "because if you're really invested in being a company employee, you don't take the chances or go out on a limb. The reason I was able to write the column in 1991 (which was critical of the Times' decision to name and profile the alleged rape victim of William Kennedy Smith) is that I loved my job and I wanted to keep it, but it wasn't going to be the be-all and end-all of my existence if somebody thought what I wrote was so offensive that I couldn't write a column anymore.
"In the end, the publisher was happy (to use Quindlen's column) to show that the Times was big enough, having made this abysmal mistake, to have a columnist says, 'We made an abysmal mistake.' So that's one way in which I felt useful: If you're not co-opted by the company, you can say from time to time, the emperor has no clothes on. And you can also say at some point, I got other things to do.
Indeed Quindlen's recent announcement that she will leave the Times in December to continue to write fiction surprised everyone, except perhaps, for fans of her first novel, Object Lessons, and of her new one, One True Thing" (Random House; 289 pages; $22). Never one to shrink from headline issues, in this novel she tells the story of Ellen Gulden, a grown daughter who is called home to care for her cancer- stricken mother -- only to be arrested for murdering her. Moving and thoughtful at once, One True Thing strikes at the heart of continued controversies over mercy killings, ranging from the latest Dr. Kevorkian "death machine" to voluntary life termination by AIDS patients and even "living will" admonitions against the use of life-support systems. Yet, says Quindlen, "In some sense the mercy killing aspect is metaphorical in the book. It goes to issues of control, and of how we try to explain the inexplicable. At one point, Ellen says, 'I understand why everybody wanted to pin (her mother's death) on me, because death is so mysterious.' People always look for reasons why people die -- you know, she ate the wrong foods, or she lived in the wrong community, or her daughter gave her an overdose of morphine. It's because we seek some sense of control over death, which is illusory. "
"Also, the mercy killing aspect reveals just how little we understand one another. In the most acute ways, the daughter doesn't understand the father; the father doesn't understand the daughter; and neither understand the mother. Even though Ellen gets much better as the story moves along, the one thing she thinks is true is that her father gave her mother the overdose -- yet in the last analysis there are very few things you can count on."
"I remember reading a letter that Jane Austen wrote after she finished Pride and Prejudice, where she said, 'The work is altogether too light and bright.' I saw reflected in that statement every woman who's ever sat down to write a novel about home and hearth and thought, 'Gee, my book ain't a war novel. Well, that's just too bad.' I wanted to call Jane Austen up and say, 'Yo, Jane! It's 200 years later and everybody still rises and falls by your little "light, bright" book!'
"So I think that along with all the gains in the other areas women have made in the last 25 years, one of them is female writers saying that the affairs of home are really the stuff of life. Someone told me Alice Hoffman said she tended overwhelmingly to read new fiction by women writers because these were the people who reflected real life. Now, 20 years ago, look at what any intelligent woman had to choose from when she sat down to read: Salinger, Updike, Cheever, Mailer, Bellow, those guys. Now look at the Alices alone: Alice Walker, Alice McDermott, Alice Hoffman, Alice Adams, Alice Munroe. These are the women who speak to the soul."
"I made the decision in January that I was going to leave at the end of the year, and I told the publisher in May. By the time we made the announcement in September, I had so completely internalized it that I was caught flat-footed by the uproar. Suddenly these conspiracy theories emerged about how I resigned because the Times wouldn't make managing editor, or because I was jockeying for power. Honestly, it had never occurred to me that anyone wouldn't take me at my word. My joke was that a button was going to be distributed that said, 'I believe Anna Quindlen.'
"The other thing that drove me crazy was the assumption that I was resigning to be with my kids. Anyone who has read my work has to know that if I'm with my kids any more than I have been, we're all going to kill each other. And of course, if one of my male colleagues were to say that he's leaving to write a book, I can't believe anybody would say, 'He's really quitting his column to go hang out with his kids.' "
The problem is, though, that when Anna Quindlen leaves the New York Times, few writers of either gender will be able to replace her. But that's the wrong way to look at it, she says: "I hope one of the things my departure says to people in top management, not only at the Times but to papers all over this country, is if you take the one-fer approach -- if you designate somebody 'the woman,' or 'the person of color' -- you're really at the mercy of that person. What's smarter is to have so many people of color that if one decides to leave, it may make you unhappy, but it won't leave a void.
"The void comes about when a class of people is underrepresented -- when you only have a single human being who stands in for that entire class of people. There should be at least three or four women writing op-ed page columns at every paper in the he country. Instead what you see over and over again is that usually the op-ed page has one, occasionally two women. And then as soon as they have the one, they become complacent.
"I remember this one editor came up to me and said, 'We'd love to publish your column, but we already have Ellen Goodman.' He didn't think there was anything peculiar about that until my eyes got as big as saucers. Imagine him saying to, say, George Will, 'We'd love to run your column, but we already have Bill Safire.' But don't conservative writers say they're in the minority, too? "That's so untrue. Conservatives are really overrepresented in the press at this point. The media think they have to have this balance, but to some extent it's a guilt balance, because we're so worried that newspapers appear to be too liberal in their communities."
"I think the Pete Wilson race actually is in a category all its own," Quindlen muses. "Kathleen Brown and I are on the same side on most issues, but I think her campaign was slow to get off the ground. She was just not getting her message out. It was a classic case of a strong campaign strategy versus a shaky one.
"What we do see is that the tide is turning in practically every race except for the North-Robb race. People got excited when a new guy came on the block, but once they took the time to really look at him, they weren't so sure. I mean you can beat up on Ted Kennedy until the cows come home -- and I've done it, so I know -- but when you examine his record, the kind of legislation he's worked on, the kind of staff he's put together, you have to conclude that he's a hell of a United States senator.
"But look at Kennedy's opponent Mitt Romney for a while and you realize, heck, this isn't even an even trade. I think that's what happened in New York with Mario Cuomo; it's happened here in California with Dianne Feinstein; and I hope it happens in Texas. Every morning I get up and say a little prayer for Ann Richards, who i think has been an extraordinary governor, and people who've looked at her record know it. What's scary about these races is that if most of them had been held six weeks ago, the results would be completely different than they're going to be Tuesday."
But is that because when the polls record a trend, people naturally begin to go the other way, so that at any given time it's sort of a crap shoot as to which side voters will support?
"I think to some extent we're influenced by the polls because they can suddenly turn someone into an underdog," Quindlen responds. "But I also think it's because campaigns take a while to play out. You can spend a couple of weeks listening to Ross Perot say, 'I can get rid of the federal deficit without even breaking a sweat,' but after two or three weeks you say, 'Wait a minute. How are you going to do that?'
"Then he does two weeks of charts, and you say, 'OK, put down the charts and tell me how you'll do it in your own words.' That's the point at which he hits the wall and you say, 'No deal.' So this kind of electoral process does take some time, and it also takes us, we reporters, time to do the investigative research, to look at the issues in depth."
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