Meeting Anna Quindlen and Having Enough Bookshelves

Last spring I received an invitation I never dreamed I’d receive, an opportunity to spend an evening at a Pennsylvania farmhouse with Anna Quindlen and a group of other women who have been long admirers of her work. 

Our host asked us all to read Anna’s most recent book, Write for Your Life. I bought it at my local Barnes & Noble along with several Quindlen novels I hadn’t yet read to add to the shelf already dedicated to Anna Quindlen books in my home with Enough Bookshelves. 

When my husband and I first moved into our New York City apartment 28 years ago, he said, “The first thing we absolutely need to get in here is an air conditioner.” Spoken like someone born and raised in the South. And I said, “The first thing we absolutely need to get in here are bookshelves.” 

It was a mere five years since Anna had published her New York Times’ Public and Private column, “Enough Bookshelves,” but her words were ingrained in my heart: the story of her son finishing The Phantom Tollbooth and her handing over A Wrinkle in Time, the story of her sister reading her copy of Pride and Prejudice “and saying irritably, ‘Look, tell me if she marries Mr. Darcy, because if she doesn’t I’m not going to finish the book.’ And the feeling of giddiness I felt as I piously said that I would never reveal an ending, while somewhere inside I was shouting, yes, yes, she will marry Mr. Darcy, over and over again, as often as you’d like.” I’ve already quoted that story in a previous newsletter, I love it so much. 

And of course, the most famous line from that essay, which appears on Quotes pages all over the internet: “I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” 

Every time we did any renovating to accommodate our growing family, my husband and I found a way to put in more bookshelves. I remember someone coming over once and looking critically at the very first shelves we’d had installed in our living room, on which books by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Daphne du Maurier and small, blue volumes of poetry keep me such good company, and saying, “Are you ever going to read any of those books again? Why don’t you take those shelves down and put up a piece of art?”

I was flabbergasted. What piece of art existed in the world that could possibly give me the same pleasure to look at as my books? But I didn’t say it, because this friend and I were never going to look at a wall and see the same potential. I just glanced at Frenchman’s Creek and thought, oh, yes, I am so going to read you again, my friend. 

When my friend from the city and I arrived at the farmhouse, I confessed to my host that I’d brought ten books and asked if it was going to be horribly obnoxious if I asked Anna to sign them all. I’m not like this with most authors. I actually prefer not to have many of my books signed because I want to be able to give them away after I read them. But some I want to keep and I want to keep hers. Anna was gracious enough to sign them all.

One of the books was the slender volume, “A Short Guide to a Happy Life,” which I wanted her to inscribe to my daughter, who had graduated from college during Covid and had no ceremony to mark the event. This book reads like a commencement address, which made a lot of sense after Anna shared with our group the story behind it. 

She’d been asked to give the commencement address at Villanova University in 2000 and receive an honorary degree as well. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks before graduation, some students began protesting her appearance because of her position on reproductive rights for women. She said if she had just been invited to lecture, she would have lectured anyway, but since the occasion was a graduation, she didn’t want controversy about her to take away from the students’ big day. So, she wrote to Villanova and withdrew from the event. Then she published the manuscript of her speech in the form of this book and it went on to sell millions of copies. 

At one point, when we were expressing our gratitude to her for sharing with us about her writing journey and process and other stories, she said that she spends most of her days alone, writing, and sometimes wonders if her words and all the time she spends on them matter, if they’re going to make a difference for anyone. So to be in a room with people who could reflect to her how much her words have touched their lives meant something to her. 

In my copy of Write for Your Life, Anna wrote, “For Kate, Keep Writing––Anna Quindlen.” 

Oh, Anna. You have no idea how much those words mean to me.