Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 17, 1993 TAG: 9303170372
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LYNN JESSUP LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WINSTON-SALEM,N.C. LENGTH: Long
QUINDLEN MAKES HUMAN CONNECTIONS ON NATIONAL ISSUES
Anna Quindlen sits on a sofa in Strong Dorm on the campus of Salem College, looking relaxed despite a bumpy flight from New York.She laughs, recalling her expletive when the plane hit an air pocket and the advice of a seatmate:"Just remember,nobody ever died from turbulence."
Quindlen has proved she handles turbulence well - on the ground, anyway.
As an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, the paper's second woman to hold that position, Quindlen regularly hits her readers' hot buttons on topics such as abortion, gay rights, child care and Haitian refugees.
Her philosophy is to see topics not as political issues, but as problems that affect individuals.
"We turn things into issues to distance ourselves from them," she says. "It's much more illuminating to focus on people."
Then she utters a vintage Quindlen-ism, distilling one of the country's most volatile issues into one nonjudgmental sentence.
"Abortion," she says, "is one woman after another putting an EPT stick into a tube and watching her whole life pass before her eyes."
It's that humanity that helped her win a Pulitzer Prize and a host of fans, including a group of about 500 people who heard her speech earlier this month as a part of the Salem College Lecture Series.
She admits to muddling through motherhood, says that moments of unanimity with her husband are rare and calls her career "a fluke, from job to job to job."
The public soul-searching, the acknowledged confusion, prompt people to come up to her and say, "I feel like you're reading my mind."
She prefers relating with her readers to being what she calls a "gray eminence."
"I'm not that sure of myself that much of the time," Quindlen says. "I'm much more interested in the thought process that gets you from one point to the other point."
Her three children - Quindlen, 9, Christopher, 7, and Maria, 4 - and her attorney husband, Gerry Krovatin,used to show up regularly in her column, "Life in the 30s," which she wrote for the Times from 1986 to 1988.
She doesn't write about her children now that they're older, but her husband "still takes a lot of heat for my opinions," she says.
Quindlen, 40, works out of her home office and goes to the paper every two weeks to read mail and catch up on correspondence.
"For a while I used to joke and say it was the mommy track, but the fact is most of us [on the Times editorial staff] work at home," she says.
Sometimes the direction her opinion takes comes from a shared experience.
She was sympathetic with the child-care predicament that kept Zoe Baird from becoming attorney general, for example.
"I've tried to hire people to care for my children," Quindlen says. "I know how difficult it is to find somebody to do that. I've sat with warm and lovely people who told me they wanted to be paid off the books."
Quindlen now employs a woman who has a green card. Two years ago, Quindlen says, she paid the woman off the books. Quindlen and her husband are now in what she calls "the expensive process" of paying the caregiver's back Social Security taxes.
Like the Clintons, Quindlen and her husband send their children to a private school.
"I understand completely what the Clintons did," Quindlen says. "If I were going to uproot my daughter from the place she'd spent her entire life, I would choose whatever school I thought was most comfortable and I wouldn't give a damn if it was public or private."
Quindlen, who's been in the newspaper business since she was 18, joined the Times in 1977 and has been a general assignment reporter, city hall reporter and deputy metropolitan editor.
Besides "Life in the 30s," she also wrote a column called "About New York," which she called her dream job.
"You could write about the mayor or a bunch of ladies having their hair done in New York City," she says.
Her book, "Living Out Loud," was a compilation of "Life in the 30s" columns. Her first book of fiction, "Object Lessons," published in 1991, was on the New York Times best-seller list. She also wrote a children's book, "The Tree That Came to Stay."
Her third book, "Thinking Out Loud," is scheduled to be published later this year.
Quindlen says she wanted to write fiction from the start, "but never figured out how to make money from it. I still haven't."
Nevertheless,she's working on her second novel, which she won't discuss because "it's at that weird unjelled stage."
The newspaper business remains her great passion.
"If you don't really love [the business]there's no reason on Earth to do it," Quindlen says, "but if you really do, there's really nothing else. I'm one of those people for whom there's nothing else."
\ QUINDLEN MUSINGS\ THOUGHTS ON VARIOUS TOPICS\ \ The Zoe Baird fiasco: "I thought this universal gasp bespoke a true ignorance. The truth is that all over America there are kids left alone all the time. I think that there's this willful ignorance about the way we're living now."\ \ Anita Hill: "I sometimes wonder if [the senators] could vote today would they vote differently. There's many more people who believe her today than believed her then."\ \ Higher-quality prenatal care for poor women: "The chasm that exists between the poor and middle class widens even in utero."\ \ Raising a family today: "I think this is one of the most confusing times to raise a family in the history of the planet. In the last few decades, we've changed it just enough to make it radically different but not enough to make it work."\ \ The lack of black women conservative columnists: "People don't generally act against self-interests."\ \ Working at home: "The bad thing is it gives my children the illusion I don't work at all."\ \ Winning the Pulitzer: "It's really nice to be validated in that way. You're one woman slaving away in your home office, and it's nice to know people are reading you. I had given up on it."\ \ Fellow New York Times editorialist Russell Baker: "Russell's a matchless stylist. He just knows how to write better than anybody else."