Unforgettable Women: A Guest Post by Anna Quindlen
After years of reading and rereading Anna Quindlen’s work, we finally have her new book — and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Here, Anna tells us about the process of writing her new novel, After Annie, and the inspiration behind her striking new characters.
Hardcover $30.00
After Annie (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
After Annie (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
Like Anne Tyler and Anne Patchet, Anna Quindlen is a gentle guide through life’s tricky bits. We’ve missed reading her fiction and we’re so excited for her newest novel in years.
Like Anne Tyler and Anne Patchet, Anna Quindlen is a gentle guide through life’s tricky bits. We’ve missed reading her fiction and we’re so excited for her newest novel in years.
A novel often presents itself to you slowly, gradually, on long walks, in random conversations, while reading the news or dropping off to sleep. A scene, a situation, a character, another.
But Annie came to me like a thunderclap, standing in her kitchen, feeling a terrible pain in her head, dropping to the floor while the meatloaf cooled and her husband went electric with terror. My tenth novel, but my very first time seeing a scene complete in my mind’s eye at its beginning.
After Annie became the story of what happened next, of how Annie’s young daughter, her husband, and her best friend managed to make it through the year without this woman who had been the bedrock of all their lives. But in some sense it’s really about Annie, one of those unexceptional, unforgettable women who are the linchpin of all our homes and communities, the ones who show up, crack jokes, dry tears, make meals, do laundry, and surround those they love and those they know with a sense that the world is a safe, reliable, and even wonderful place.
What happens when you create a world on the page is that you always wind up surprising yourself. My happiest surprise as I created Annie and Bill’s home and family was that Annie burned as bright, maybe brighter, in death as she had in life. Ali remembers her mother pointing out the full moon from their small backyard, Bill can almost feel that moment when his wife first got him in her sights at a party, and Annemarie can’t be in the car without imagining her bestie riding shotgun. In all their minds she speaks, reminding them of how she’s fortified them for this terrible time. They are who they are in large part because of her, her legacy.
And just as Annie was the center of all their lives as mother, wife, friend, so she instantly became the center of my work as novelist. Once I had imagined her, her job at a nursing home, her early marriage, her four children, her satisfaction with the life she had even if it wasn’t the life she had imagined or might yearn for, I knew all the others who surrounded her. How Annie would mother created Ali, how she would love transformed Bill, how she would cleave saved Annemarie. Isn’t that the way in all our lives? The people who love us shape us, and thus the people who leave us never really do.
There is no ‘after Annie’. She’s there, on the page, in all their lives, from beginning to end. Her last words in the novel: I feel like the luckiest woman alive. I feel lucky to have known her.