Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen – book review

 

          Anna Quindlen, the venerable baby boomer author and Pulitzer Prize winner, has written a memoir that strings together pearls of wisdom from an older – she’s now 60 – mother, wife, friend, daughter, sister and career writer. With all this experience she’s got a lot to say on myriad subjects and, as a 60+ woman myself who also had an involving career, I am interested. She’s such an excellent writer that I would probably be interested if she was detailing her lifetime relationship with laundry. She has been described as America’s laureate of real life.

          Most of what Ms. Quindlen speaks of in this book is through the filter of aging, how things are different as an older woman versus the gung ho youngster. She starts off saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know when you’re young.” I love how she speaks warmly and humorously about getting older, for instance, depicting the cuteness some of our youthful characteristics were and how they often became irritating in old age – a flirtatious nature evolving into unattractive lecherous behavior. At the same time, she reminds us that the older we get, the better we get at being ourselves. Gone are the concerns about being judged, disliked, or not enough.
          Among other topics, she waxes so eloquently:

          - downsizing:   As we age the value of possessions lessens and it’s easy to get
                    rid of clutter. “Stuff is not salvation.”

          - marriage: “A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful
                    marriage,” and “The long sound journey of a long marriage outweighs
                    romantic love.”

          - girlfriends: In youth, other women can be viewed as a threat or competitor.
                    Over time, girlfriends are the placeholders of support and less criticism
                    and more cheerleading.

          - work: Anna admits her generation felt that they had ‘invented’ the whole work
                    and family dual opportunity for women, forgetting all about the previous
                    generation’s contribution. Later she regretted never asking her mother
                    about the drafting table that sat stored in their basement for her entire life
                    at home (her mother was the only female engineer in a prestigious firm in
                    the 1930’s.).

          - the aging process: When we’re babies and youngsters we have tantrums about
                    doing what we want to do when we want to do it and, as we age, we
                    gradually go back to that, minus the tantrums hopefully. We have become
                    the older generation we criticized so vehemently.

          The book contains an insurmountable amount of relatable moments for anyone 55 and older, even if you did have kids or a high-powered career or a marriage. This book also contains “gobsmacked,” which is a literary first for me. Look for this word to appear in a future blog post.

          Finally, in a final chapter, Anna Quindlen writes about mortality, but you’ll have to read the book – I don’t want to give away the ending.