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

by Anna Quindlen

Time passed, almost imperceptibly. First we were so young and then we were so busy and then one day we awoke to discover that we were an age we once thought of as old. When I wrote about my life and discovered that it intersected with the lives of so many women like me, most of us were concerned with just managing to hold things together, managing to move from school drop-off to work assignments to making dinner to homework supervision to nodding off over the evening news, with the occasional truncated conversation thrown in, or not. We were trying to make it through each day, and then suddenly we looked around and realized the days were months, were years, and, almost magically and unconsciously, we had made it through a couple of decades.

Asking the question now is more a matter of testing the limits of what sometimes seems a narrow world, a world of unrealistic expectations, of conventional wisdom. One of the useful things about age is realizing that conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.

Is there a certain predestination to our lives from here on in, an existence that is inevitable because of all that has gone before? At what point is the clay set, the mural done and signed? Or does it all depend on whether we see our swan song as a dirge or a ditty?

Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of our longer life expectancy is that we have time for a half-life, a quarter-life, in which, if we’re courageous and strategic, we can make that sort of unrealized dream come true.