Review of Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake:

A Memoir, by Anna Quindlen

by Ellen Newman

Inventing Ourselves
Anna Quindlen—New York Times columnist, best-selling author, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize—seems just like us, which is what makes her memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake (Random House, 2012; 182 pp.), so compelling. Quindlen first won our hearts with her newspaper column, “Life in the 30’s,” about her own life as a young mother of two little boys. Although she was unsure whether her feelings on such mundane issues as sibling rivalry and toilet training would be of interest to readers, she received feedback from readers from all over the country: Fans said she was writing about the same issues they were dealing with every day. This feedback changed her life. Quindlen’s work—a total of 13 books—has since appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists; A Short Guide to a Happy Life has sold more than a million copies.

In Quindlen’s thoughtful and funny memoir, she looks back on her life and likes what she sees. “It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult,” says Quindlen. “First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented. And finally I was what I was again.” Who among us cannot relate to that? Although I never sat down to ponder “the arc of my life,” Quindlen’s insight has helped me focus on my own life. We all invent ourselves—often more than once—and we hope that we like what we have invented.

Not Our Moms
As a baby boomer who has just turned 60, Quindlen makes it clear that she wanted a life very different from the one her mother led. “I thought of myself as a woman who had burst free of the circle of Avon Lady, Tupperware Party, and Fuller Brush Man that my mother inhabited. . . . The mother I knew spent years in maternity smocks and seemed to iron incessantly. I don’t own an iron, never have, and that’s no accident,” writes Quindlen. Yet she now realizes that she underestimated her mother and other women of that generation. Although Quindlen had seen the drafting table in the basement and her mother had told her she had been a draftsman for General Electric—the only woman there at the time—before she had children, Quindlen never thought to ask her about it. In fact, Quindlen learned from her father that her mother had kept the drafting table all those years, intending to go back to work after her children were grown.

But as a teenager, Quindlen saw only the woman in the maternity smock with the iron in her hand, and she never got the opportunity to see her mother any differently. As the oldest of five children, Quindlen reluctantly left college at 19, at her father’s request, to take care of her siblings when her mother was terminally ill. She writes, “I was afraid of the briars of housewifery turning me into a Sleeping Beauty, taking away Doris Lessing and Simone de Beauvoir and leaving me with Joy of Cooking, Jaqueline Susann, and slipcovers.” Terrified that she would never get her life back on track, after six months, she hired a housekeeper and went back to school. In her 20’s, Quindlen had her tubes tied because she never wanted to have children; yet she woke up one day 10 years later and decided that she wanted four children, and she wanted them right away. She begged the doctor to reverse the operation and had the first of her three children at age 31.

Different, Yet the Same
My own background was very different. I never had such responsibility thrust on me at a young age, nor did I see myself as so different from my mother. Perhaps it is because I am six years younger than Quindlen, and other women had made the breakthroughs for me. Or, perhaps it’s just because I have a different temperament. As Quindlen says, “I’d been a child in an either-or world, in which the career choices I faced were to be either a mother or a nun. . . . And believe me, for a girl who was outspoken, intelligent, insurrectionary, and always faintly pissed off, that was a powerful goad to think the world needed changing.”

What’s interesting to me is that despite our differences, our lives have turned out to be somewhat similar. Although I haven’t written a bestseller, I too balanced motherhood with a freelance career. Like Quindlen, I wrote and edited, “typing as fast as I could because I never knew when I would be interrupted by the appearance of a toddler in the home office.” Like Quindlen, I have too much “stuff,” and like Quindlen, my views on marriage have changed. Quindlen writes that traditional marriages “seemed to imply an arid and empty existence”—the wife had “nothing to think about but the living room drapes and the tuna casserole” and the husband had “the weight of the world on his shoulders.” As she says now, “It turned out that some of this was hooey. Lots of those old-fashioned marriages were happy ones, in part because no one expected to look over and see their best friend in the adjoining twin bed.” And I agree.

Youthful Challenge
As Quindlen reflects on her life, she realizes that younger women continue to challenge the status quo and think they know better, just as she did. As she says, “And then one day we wake to discover that we are the older women we once discounted, and our perspective shifts. Younger people came along to criticize their elders, and their elders happened to be us.” But she takes it in stride and doesn’t mind the criticism, noting, “I’m not sure, if we are being honest, that we would consider our alternative ideal. I’m developing a certain comfort level with the criticisms of those young women who will make a different sort of life for themselves. . . . [I]t doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ungrateful. Maybe it means they’re sane.”

Throughout Quindlen’s memoir are sentiments that empty nesters—as well as women of all ages—can relate to: shopping “as a competitive sport,” the importance of girlfriends, the “Fountain of Botox,” and the “ten commandments of incapability,” all examined with humor. Quindlen wonders what it means to be “old” today, when people can lead active lives in their 70’s and beyond, noting “I feel young. I certainly feel a good deal younger than the older people of my past. Our grandmothers at 60 and my friends and I at the same age: We might as well be talking about different species, in the way we dress, talk, work, exercise, plan—in the way we live.” She quotes a birthday card that a friend received: “After the middle ages comes the renaissance.”

Becoming Ourselves
Perhaps the best indication of Quindlen’s attitude toward aging is her reaction to her personal trainer’s suggestion that she learn to do a handstand. Although at first she came up with many reasons she’d fail (her lack of balance, avoidance of risk, and love of keeping both feet on the ground), in the end she was just too determined, persistent, and just plain stubborn not to try her best. She succeeded two long years later, and noted that part of the reason she decided to do the handstand was that she was afraid, and she didn’t like the idea of being afraid. But her determination paid off, Quindlen says, because “I can do something today that I couldn’t do a half-century ago. And if I can do one thing like that, perhaps there are others.”

Now 60 years old, Quindlen writes, “Many of us have come to a surprising conclusion about this moment in our lives . . . It’s that we’ve done a pretty good job of becoming ourselves, and that this is, in so many ways, the time of our lives. . . . I wouldn’t be 25 again on a bet, or even 40. And when I say this to a group of women at lunch, everyone around the table nods. . . . What comes next? Who knows? . . . All I can say for sure is that I want more.”

Ellen Newman is a freelance editor who recently became certified to teach in Pennsylvania. She is looking forward to having her own classroom; now, she is content meeting new children every day, who describe her as “the best substitute ever.” Ellen and her husband are empty nesters nine months of the year when their daughter is in college. When she’s not editing, teaching, or having fun with her daughter, Ellen makes the most of her free time reconnecting with old friends.