Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

by Anna Quindlen

It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented.

The most liberated generation of women in American history, raised on the notion that they could be much more than caregivers, became caregivers cubed.

Petty grievances in marriage are like hothouse tomatoes: they get way bigger than they ought to, and they bear little resemblance to the real thing.

Feminist theory has it that girls tamp down their authentic selves after they reach puberty and don’t really recover them until years later; when we turn away from who we are, we turn away from others like ourselves as well.

Maybe that’s what happens to all of us, why friendship ebbs and flows in many of our lives. That kind of connection to another human being is both soothing and scary, at once threatening and essential, because it reflects the tension in all of our lives between individuality and community.

There’s an apt quote from Virginia Woolf: “I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

We trust our friends to tell us what we need to know, and to shield us from what we don’t need to discover, and to have the wisdom to know the difference. Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it’s sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.

One of the most important parts of tending our friendships is working our way, over time, into the kind of friendships that can support cataclysm, friendships that are able to move from the office or the playground to hospital rooms and funerals.

One of the useful things about age is realizing that conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

But there’s another moment of truth I’ve learned to recognize, and it’s the moment when we realize that other people, often other women, often women of another generation, are not what we so conveniently expect them to be. It’s that moment when we realize that we—we!—were prejudiced, that we lapsed into stereotype based on sex.

Karma is a boomerang, and a bitch.

It’s odd how we approach all those things we want for the next generation, the things we say we value most. We want them to have children of their own, but much of our discussion about childrearing makes it sound difficult and terrifying. We want them to have work they find satisfying, but we complain often about our own jobs.

particularly if they’ve had a few kids. It’s hard to communicate to our male counterparts that one of the greatest gifts of growing older is trusting your own sense of yourself; their investment in their reflected image was not forged in childhood, as ours was.

we have a culture that reflects contempt and antipathy toward a realistic female body, which is just another form of hating women.

When we think of longer life expectancy, we may envision ten years added to our existence later on. But it may also be that we’ve added time to adolescence, which now stretches past the teen years and into the twenties.

“If you want help, you shouldn’t act like a person who never needs any,” my daughter muttered to me one night when I was angry, and for once I was at a loss for words because she had so completely nailed my modus operandi.

I knew the secret that was not a secret, that the molecules of the living world are always rearranging themselves so that something is lost, something is lost every day.

The reason we’ve made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.