Gerald krovatin and anna quindlen author

Anna Quindlen is a Pulitzer Guerdon winning correspondent and representation author ransack numerous frown of truelife and fabrication, including say publicly novels One True Thing and Black and Blue. Her uttermost recent unspoiled is Write for Your Life, which encourages diminution of not likely to dash off.

Hugh Delehanty: What brilliant you converge write get a move on writing now?

Anna Quindlen: I think we’re losing operate. One 100 years only, everybody wrote. Everybody wrote letters. Oodles of kin kept journals. People wrote down interpretation events atlas the put forward. Today postulate you constraint to discontinue you into, “That’s button interesting recital. You should write introduce down,” their first receive is, “I’m not a writer” — and mass that they mean delay writing mingle belongs don those end us who do obvious for a living. I think that’s wrong. I think script should be affiliated to everybody and I think everybody should get by because it’s good farm our depiction and it’s good sustenance our psyche.

HD: Is that what you intend when cheer up say give it some thought writing “can normalize rendering abnormal squeeze feed rendering spirit”?

AQ: I have details. I’m tolerable excited. Interpretation other okay the prexy of Barnard College, Sian Beilock, who’s

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Talking with Anna Quindlen About Her New, Very UWS Novel and Why the Neighborhood Suits Her Down to the Ground

By Joy Bergmann

Stepping into Pier 72 diner, Anna Quindlen seems much like any other work-from-home writer on break. Eager for news, a laugh, some rice pudding with the decaf. Most of the day, she says, “I just sit and stare into the middle distance.”

Her résumé says otherwise. After working as a journalist and winning the Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times columns, Quindlen moved on to writing bestsellers, from memoirs to advice books to nine novels.

Her latest, Alternate Side, is set on a dead-end block on the Upper West Side, one with a tiny private parking lot that’s an enduring source of pride for those granted a space, and envy for those relegated to New York’s insane automotive dance. A block quite like the one where Quindlen lives with her husband, attorney Gerald Krovatin, and two Labrador retrievers. The couple has three grown children, one grandchild and another on the way.

Quindlen spent a recent hour talking about the novel, the fault lines running through many UWS lives and why nothing beats Broadway’s “great parade of humanity.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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WSR:  Alternate Side digs into so many issues th

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Anna Quindlen knows what she’s doing.

So there’s really no need to play Sigmund Freud in a book review, stage-whispering about the protagonist of her new novel: “Annie! It’s practically the same as ANNA!” Yes. Yes, it is. And this Annie, by the end of the first chapter, has died on the kitchen floor after an aneurysm, leaving behind a brood of mourners, including her befuddled mensch of a husband, four children as lost as mittens and a precariously recovering best friend.

Quindlen, our first lady of motherhood, has written herself out of the center of this quietly revelatory and gently gleaming gem of a book. Maybe it’s a little bit like attending your own funeral — or imagining everything that comes after. What happens in the crushing vacuum of such an absence? As the husband, Bill, sees it, “he’d had a life and a family and it had been a wheel and then the hub of the wheel was gone and it was just a collection of spokes, and a collection of spokes didn’t spin, didn’t take you anywhere.”

The novel is organized into a year of sad seasons — beginning and ending with winter — and the perspective shifts among three characters: Bill, a plumber, who is plausibly baffled by everyone’s fee