Now it’s on to fiction. Her first novel was a best seller. Her new, second novel, “One True Thing,” about a woman who quits her job to take care of her dying mother, received a mixed review in the Times but has already been sold to Hollywood. Quindlen doesn’t think she’s stale as a journalist, and she won’t endorse the increasingly popular notion of term limits for columnists. But she does believe she’s successful enough to concentrate on improving her fiction without the distraction of a twiceweekly column deadline. “I didn’t think I could do both without running ragged,” she said last week. Eager to debunk the impression of her as a superwoman, she adds: “I’ve never thought of myself as an object lesson in having it all. My house [in Hoboken, N.J.] is filthy.”
But Quindlen’s unusual 17-year career path has provided inspiration for women trying to balance motherhood and work. The men who run the Times, once rigid in their definition of the ticket-punching required for advancement, repeatedly accommodated her desire to stay at home with her three children, now 11, 9 and 5. “Every time she drops out to spend time with her family, she ends up higher, which makes her a role model,” says Maureen Dowd, whom Quindlen brought to the Times when she was deputy metropolitan editor. Dowd, a possible op-ed successor to Quindlen (in the meantime, Thomas L. Friedman has been promised the next slot), is one of many bookless Times reporters who stand in awe of her drive: “Anna’s become a famous columnist and written two great novels while I’ve been lying around watching budget debates on C-Span II.”
When she told Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. last winter that she planned to leave, he couldn’t offer her anything to stay. “The publisher had already given me the best deal in the world,” Quindlen says. But within the paper, her departure, effective at the end of the year, set off the usual round of Times Kremlinology. For years Quindlen, while maintaining that Times management doesn’t mesh with child rearing, has been touted as a future executive editor. She’s popular with the troops, and her bosses revere her. In the old days, leaving would have meant being permanently cast out of the Times family. No more. Even as she left, the paper went out of its way to defend her against a critical piece in Vanity Fair.
But a return to the fold isn’t likely. The decision to leave, made when she found work on her second novel so satisfying, marks one of those passages that Quindlen chronicled so well in her old “Life in the 30s” column. “I’ve always felt that as soon as you get comfortable in a job, you’ve got to start asking yourself what the next challenge is,” she says. “I’m 42. There’s a certain now-or-never quality when you’re in your 40s. This is what I want to do.”
