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By Susannah Meadows
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When Anna Quindlen was about 10 years old, she went to the library to scope out her future real estate. She found the exact place on the shelf where her books would be filed: one day she'd be sandwiched between Marcel Proust and Ayn Rand. (There were no Q's at the time).
The NEWSWEEK columnist has long since widened the gap between the French symbolist and the objectivist. "Blessings," which hit No. 2 on Amazon last week just as it arrived in stores, is Quindlen's fourth novel and 10th book. As a journalist, she's won a Pulitzer--for her former New York Times column "Public and Private"--and this year she was a National Magazine Award finalist for her NEWSWEEK writing. As a novelist, she's a best-selling author, and one of those books, "One True Thing," was made into a film that snagged Meryl Streep a best-actress Oscar nomination. Quindlen, a mother of three who turns 50 this year, values her double life as two kinds of writers. "I think they're both who I am," she says. "I get to be a columnist-slash-novelist."
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She is also a heartwarmer. There are still more than 1 million copies in print of her most recent book "A Short Guide to a Happy Life," the text of the commencement address she never got to deliver to the Villanova University class of 1999 (Roman Catholic groups threatened to demonstrate against the pro-choice speaker). In "Blessings," as well, Quindlen quickly gets down to the business of inspiration. The book opens with a storklike delivery of a baby. In this case, the stork happens to be a teenage couple, who've wrapped their unwanted newborn in a flannel shirt and left her in the garage of the Blessings, the rich family in town. Though the kids likely hoped for a fairy-tale--or, at least, wealthy--ending for their child, it's the caretaker, just released from jail, who finds the baby and decides to keep her. The 80-year-old woman of the house, Lydia Blessing, has always been a tightwad with her money and her emotions, but she finds herself helping the caretaker with his child. Soon, Mrs. Blessing is listening to the baby monitor and starting to defrost. Does Quindlen envision the book's making it to the screen like "One True Thing"? "It will never be a movie," she says. "It's about an old woman!"
In a 1993 column, Quindlen said that when she writes fiction, she lives among her characters, inhabiting their houses. The grand old house in "Blessings" is a force of safety, home and family, which is the role houses play in Quindlen's own life. "I would be just as happy if I never had to leave home at all. Maybe I'm a borderline agoraphobe," she says. "In a perfect world, I would buy as much real estate as possible." The house in "Blessings" is based on Quindlen's family's own house in Pennsylvania. Now that the writing is over, Quindlen misses the characters she lived with while she was working on "Blessings." "Frequently the characters become more real to me than some politicians," she says. "I believe in Lydia Blessing. I'm not entirely sure I believe in the president!" No doubt fodder for her next column.
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