Word: quindlen
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...first discovered Anna Quindlen when I was 16, reading the New York Times in the morning with bleary eyes. Her biweekly column was unique on a editorial page which focused on issues such as the latest economic agreement. She talked instead about what seemed to be more human concerns: her three year old who was afraid of the dark, dysfunctional Barbie dolls, the plight of a homeless individual...
...Anna Quindlen asks in a novel if parents can be people...
Halfway through her powerfully affecting novel One True Thing (Random House; 289 pages; $22), Anna Quindlen pauses, swabs her forehead with a bandanna (so the wrung-out reader imagines) and sums up: "Our parents are never people to us, never, they're always character traits, Achilles' heels, dim nightmares, vocal tics, bad noses, hot tears, all handed down and us stuck with them...
...perhaps shouldering for space on the shelf, perhaps simply from inexperience -- Quindlen writes a New York Times column, but this is only her second novel -- she has given her story a cumbersome plot frame, involving a grand jury investigation of a mercy killing and a melodramatic double misunderstanding underlying an estrangement between Ellen and her father. This elaboration clutters the novel but does not spoil it. Nor does the sense that beyond its last page, Ellen still has a living parent whom she understands only as a collection of flawed character traits...
...particularly fascinated by on-campus issues. When discussing such matters, research isn't necessary; anecdotal evidence reigns supreme. Like the high priestess of LWFs, Anna Quindlen of the New York times, the Harvard LWF has the uncanny ability to derive whole pieces of legislation from her subjective personal experience...