a chat with Anna Quindlen

“Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted.”    ~ Anna Quindlen

I have been having a lively conversation in my mind with author Anna Quindlen for about twenty-five years. She’s my wiser, more observant, funnier best friend — albeit, the one I’ve never actually met. Still, I’m pretty sure if we were neighbors we’d get together to walk our dogs every morning and compare notes on what’s going on in the world, what we’re making for dinner, what we’re reading and thinking and worrying about. (I’m also pretty sure every other Anna Quindlen fan feels exactly the same way I do. To read Anna Quindlen is to wish she lived next door.)

So when Ann Patchett asked if I’d like to come to Nashville to interview Anna about her new novel I leapt at the chance. At last! Our conversation would finally move out of my head and into real life.

Alternate Side sneaks up on you. It begins simply enough, with a middle-aged man’s acquisition of a permanent parking space in his affluent, tightly knit Manhattan neighborhood and his wife’s less than enthusiastic response to his good fortune. And from there it goes on to explore just about all the questions I lie awake pondering at two a.m. – everything from Is my family ok? to Is our country ever going to be ok again?

With great insight, tenderness, and humor Anna creates a portrait of a long-lived, seemingly happy marriage, and then she reveals the fissures beneath the surface. She draws us into a tranquil community of privileged people and introduces the dedicated, far less privileged men and women who make such lives possible. And then, pulling no punches, she reveals just how little we actually know of the people closest to us and how precarious even the most carefully constructed life really is.

Frankly, it was a little eerie, reading Alternate Side. Whether you live in Kansas or California, New Hampshire or New York, it’s the kind of book that asks you to stop and take a closer look at the divisions, tensions, and alternate sides of your own world. It may also make you feel as if the author is hanging out on your doorstep, reading your mind, eavesdropping on your phone calls, debriefing your kids, and listening in on the argument you just had with with your spouse at the breakfast table.

Perhaps, given our long relationship with Anna Quindlen – nine best-selling novels and eight works of memoir/nonfiction — this should come as no surprise to anyone. She knows us so well! She is us. (A critic once called her “the sanest person in America,” and it’s easy to see why.) Still, when a book hits this close to home, when it cracks your heart open and makes you rethink all of your assumptions, you can’t help but sit up and pay attention.

And when a novel comes along that’s as timely and as unsettling as Alternate Side, you also want everyone you know to read it – soon — so you can all get together and have a chat about it. It’s a page-turner. And once you turn that last page you’re going to want to have someone to talk to.

I wish you could all come to Nashville on March 28 to join me and Anna Quindlen for our conversation at the Nashville Public Library. (If you live nearby, do come! Ticket info for this free event is on the Parnassus Books site, here.)

But here’s the next best thing:  I’ll come home with a signed book from Anna to give away here.

P.S. It just so happens that the arrival of Anna’s galley coincided with a brief family vacation in Florida, hence my goofy sun hat. But the truth is, Alternate Side should be the beach book of 2018 — and the book club novel of the year as well.  With my appetite whetted for more, I went straight back to one of AQ’s earliest and best-loved novels, One True Thing, which is really one of the great classics of mother-daughter relationships.  And if you want to know exactly why I feel such a kinship with Anna, treat yourself to her most recent collection of personal essays, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.  You’ll wish she lived next door to you, too.

to enter to win a signed book

Just leave a comment below to enter to win a signed first edition of Alternate Side. Have a question you’d like me to ask Anna? By all means let me know. (She says nothing is off the table.) If you’re willing to share an “alternate sides” situation from your own life, I’d love to hear about it. Or you can simply say, Count me in.  I’ll choose a winner at random after midnight on Thursday, April 5.

If you want to be sure of getting your own signed copy, you can pre-order one from Parnassus right here.  (Or, order from Amazon here. This is an affiliate link.)

The post a chat with Anna Quindlen appeared first on Katrina Kenison.