Still Life with Bread Crumbs

by Anna Quindlen

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A superb love story from Anna Quindlen, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Rise and Shine, Blessings, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life
 
Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.
 
Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.

“There comes a moment in every novelist’s career when she . . . ventures into new territory, breaking free into a marriage of tone and style, of plot and characterization, that’s utterly her own. Anna Quindlen’s marvelous romantic comedy of manners is just such a book. . . . Taken as a whole, Quindlen’s writings represent a generous and moving interrogation of women’s experience across the lines of class and race. [Still Life with Bread Crumbs] proves all the more moving because of its light, sophisticated humor. Quindlen’s least overtly political novel, it packs perhaps the most serious punch. . . . Quindlen has delivered a novel that will have staying power all its own.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] wise tale about second chances, starting over, and going after what is most important in life.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Quindlen’s astute observations . . . are the sorts of details every writer and reader lives for.”—Chicago Tribune

“[Anna] Quindlen’s seventh novel offers the literary equivalent of comfort food. . . . She still has her finger firmly planted on the pulse of her generation.”—NPR

“Enchanting . . . [The protagonist’s] photographs are celebrated for turning the ‘minutiae of women’s lives into unforgettable images,’ and Quindlen does the same here with her enveloping, sure-handed storytelling.”—People

“Charming . . . a hot cup of tea of a story, smooth and comforting about the vulnerabilities of growing older . . . a pleasure.”—USA Today
 
“With spare, elegant prose, [Quindlen] crafts a poignant glimpse into the inner life of an aging woman who discovers that reality contains much more color than her own celebrated black-and-white images.”—Library Journal
 
“Quindlen has always excelled at capturing telling details in a story, and she does so again in this quiet, powerful novel, showing the charged emotions that teem beneath the surface of daily life.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Quindlen presents instantly recognizable characters who may be appealingly warm and nonthreatening, but that only serves to drive home her potent message that it’s never too late to embrace life’s second chances.”—Booklist
 
“Profound . . . engaging.”—Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812976892
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/28/2014
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	100,582
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Anna Quindlen could have settled onto a nice, lofty career plateau in the early 1990s, when she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column; but she took an unconventional turn, and achieved a richer result.

Quindlen, the third woman to hold a place among the Times' Op-Ed columnists, had already published two successful collections of her work when she decided to leave the paper in 1995. But it was the two novels she had produced that led her to seek a future beyond her column.

Quindlen had a warm, if not entirely uncritical, reception as a novelist. Her first book, Object Lessons, focused on an Irish American family in suburban New York in the 1960s. It was a bestseller and a Times Notable Book of 1991, but was also criticized for not being as engaging as it could have been. One True Thing, Quindlen's exploration of an ambitious daughter's journey home to take care of her terminally ill mother, was stronger still—a heartbreaker that was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep. But Quindlen's fiction clearly benefited from her decision to leave the Times. Three years after that controversial departure, she earned her best reviews yet with Black and Blue, a chronicle of escape from domestic abuse.

Quindlen's novels are thoughtful explorations centering on women who may not start out strong, but who ultimately find some core within themselves as a result of what happens in the story. Her nonfiction meditations—particularly A Short Guide to a Happy Life and her collection of "Life in the 30s" columns, Living Out Loud—often encourage this same transition, urging others to look within themselves and not get caught up in what society would plan for them. It's an approach Quindlen herself has obviously had success with.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

July 8, 1952

Place of Birth:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Education:

B.A., Barnard College, 1974

Website:

http://annaquindlen.net/

Read an Excerpt

9781400065752|excerpt

Quindlen / STILL LIFE WITH BREAD CRUMBS

No Outlets

A few minutes after two in the morning Rebecca Winter woke to the sound of a gunshot and sat up in bed.

Well, to be completely accurate, she had no idea what time it was. When she had moved into the ramshackle cottage in a hollow halfway up the mountain, it had taken her two days to realize that there was a worrisome soft spot in the kitchen floor, a loose step out to the backyard, and not one electrical outlet in the entire bedroom. She stood, turning in a circle, her old alarm clock in her hand trailing its useless tail of a cord, as though, like some magic spell, a few rotations and some muttered curses would lead to a place to plug it in. Like much of what constituted Rebecca’s life at that moment, the clock had been with her far past the time when it was current or useful.

Later she would wonder why she had never owned one of those glow-in-the-dark battery-operated digital clocks, the ones available so cheaply at the Walmart squatting aggressively just off the highway a half hour north of town. But that was later.

As for the gunshot: Rebecca Winter had no idea what a gunshot actually sounded like. She had grown up almost entirely in New York City, on the west side of Manhattan, with vacations on the shores of Long Island and the occasional foray to Provence or Tuscany. These were the usual vacations of the people she knew. Everyone always talked about how marvelous those places were, how beautiful the beaches, how splendid the vineyards. Marvelous, they said, rolling the word around in their mouths the way her husband, Peter, did with that first tasting of wine, pretending he knew more about it than he did, occasionally sending a bottle back to make a point.

But for her family, which she had felt when she was a child hardly deserved the name, being composed of only a father, a mother, and a single child, the trips were never pleasant. Her parents were deeply suspicious of anything that smacked of nature; her mother was almost pathologically afraid of bugs, was always calling down to the doorman to deal with spiders or recalcitrant bees sneaking in from the park outside. Her father had various pollen allergies and from March until October carried an enormous handkerchief, like a white flag of surrender for his sinuses.

Certainly it did happen from time to time that there would be a noise on Central Park West or Riverside Drive or Broadway, and someone might say, Was that a gunshot? This happened especially during that period after Rebecca graduated from college, when it was agreed by people who would never dream of living elsewhere that the city, dangerous and dirty, was becoming unlivable. It was always eventually decided that the gunshot was a car backfire, or a bottle being smashed, or a door slamming to the building’s basement, where the trash was stored.

This was always, without fail, true.

Nevertheless Rebecca was almost certain that it was a gunshot that had awakened her now as she lay stiffly in the bed in the room without outlets. She tried to look at her watch, but it was a small flat gold watch, like a superannuated dime, that her parents had given her when she married, as though her marriage was a retirement of some kind. It had the initials R.W.S. on the back, what her mother called her new monogram, although Rebecca had never changed her name. Still, she had great sentimental attachment to the watch, mainly because of her father, who had selected it and had taken an enormous amount of pleasure in giving it to her. “That’s a beauty!” he said when she removed it from the mahogany box. “It’s not waterproof,” her mother added.

Under the best of conditions it was a difficult watch to read, never mind now, in a bedroom fringed with large pine trees and with the heavy cloud cover of a muggy May night, a thunderstorm moving in overhead. The room was so dark you could not see your hand in front of you. To test this, Rebecca held her hand in front of her, where it glimmered whitely, faintly. She could see it, but just barely.

She was not sleeping soundly in the strange bed, which had a well in the center into which she fell whenever she rolled over, a well like the one used for drainage along the side of the road. Rebecca still didn’t know the name of the road the cottage was on. It was the second right off 547. That’s all she knew. Then the driveway past the pump house. What did the pump house pump? She had said it aloud as she turned in. No answer.

Who lives in a house on a road whose name she does not know? Who moves into a place she has seen only in flattering photographs on the Internet? It reminded her of what she had heard a woman telling a friend at the next table when she was waiting to have lunch with an art book editor. “You walk in and you can’t pick them out at the bar because they look nothing like their picture on the website,” the woman had said. “Nothing. Not. A. Thing.” The cottage was the real estate version of online dating, built atop lies, leading downhill to disenchantment. Or capitulation. “We were so happy here,” the owner had said in an email, attaching a photo of two men with their arms around one another in front of a large tree. They were so happy here, and then they left, and took all the comfortable furniture with them, and replaced it with bits and pieces from the Salvation Army.

A true child of New York, Rebecca thought she felt the bites of bedbugs.

She rolled over and fell into the well in the mattress, the gunshot just a memory, perhaps only an illusion. It was quiet now. There was a smell. There were so many smells. Mildew, damp linen, trampled plants. The bananas in the glass bowl on the drainboard. A whiff of what might be skunk, or skunk cabbage. In the backyard she had taken a deep breath. It had smelled as though the entire forest around her was rotting by inches.

She sniffed audibly, or it would have been audible if there had been anyone to hear. Rebecca was entirely alone. She told herself that she was surprised she wasn’t more frightened by the sound of the gunshot. In truth she was terrified but her body acknowledged the fear without her mind’s concurrence, the way she had developed a bad back after her divorce when she was absolutely sure she was getting along fine. Instead of pajamas she was wearing an old T-shirt that commemorated an exhibition of daguerreotypes at the New-York Historical Society and a pair of very old cotton panties. Her legs were like walking sticks beneath the wool blanket, stiff and tense. The quiet of the country was unnerving. She didn’t find it peaceful in the least, more like the TV with the mute button pressed on the remote. Empty. Her cellphone would not work in the house. Neither would her computer. She had made a terrible mistake.

That was her conclusion even before the nominal gunshot, and then the noise overhead that followed.

It sounded like an elevated subway train making a turn while going too fast. Or like a drawerful of heavy silverware being emptied into a large metal bucket. Or like the pots-and-pans cabinet of a kitchen when the contents are stacked precariously and the door is opened unthinkingly. Benjamin had loved to sit on the floor and play with the lids. “Are we certain those were washed thoroughly?” her husband would say drily. Peter was English. He said everything drily. He never offered to wash the lids, and Rebecca never thought to suggest it. She was the daughter of her father, an avatar of peace at any price.

The train or the silver or the pots or whatever it was overhead crashed again, and again. The smell grew stronger. Rebecca sat up further, with some difficulty, and looked toward the ceiling. She felt as though it might come down around her, blanketing her with plaster and lath, a snowstorm of ceiling. She could see herself in her mind’s eye, the flimsy blue blanket covered with chunks of white and wood. “Fully furnished” the ad for the cottage had said. Ha. Two bedrooms, one blanket, and not a good one, either.

She of all people, to be seduced by a series of photographs, snapshots really, none of the kitchen and bath, two of the view. That should have been the tip-off, that vista of trees with what looked like a stream snaking through them in the distance. You couldn’t sleep in the view, or take a hot shower in it, or make coffee. Nor could you do any of those in this godforsaken house. Fully furnished. Four forks.

Not a gunshot, she realized suddenly, recalling the events of the day. She must have been sleeping more soundly than she thought not to have realized what was happening above her. She reconstructed it as best she could, given her utter ignorance of the situation. First a wire trap snapping shut hard as the lever was tripped with a sound like a gunshot. Now the noise of an angry animal thrashing around in the trap, turning the metal cage over and over like an amusement park ride. Bam bam bam. Finally she was certain she had gotten it right. As for the smell, her imagination failed her. She made a faint sound, somewhere between a prayer, an exclamation, and an obscenity.

Skitter skitter skitter. That’s how it had started. “There’s something in my attic,” she had told the exterminator in town, but he was too busy with a tick outbreak at the nursing home. (False alarm: a squashed engorged mosquito on the top sheet of a woman with an excitable niece.) Instead he’d suggested Rebecca call a roofer. “If you got something in your attic, it’s because you got some way into your attic,” said the exterminator, who was wearing a T-shirt that said you bug me, except that the bug was an image of an insect and not a printed word. “No point me getting it out, then you having to call somebody anyhow to fix the hole.”

“There’s something in my attic,” she had told the roofer. He’d stood on a metal ladder as the sunlight faltered in late afternoon, a small flashlight in one hand. “Would you like me to hold the ladder?” Rebecca had asked. “I spend a lot of time up on ladders,” he’d said, shifting the flashlight to his other hand. “Is there a hatch in your hall?”

“Pardon?” Rebecca had said.

“Well, we’ve got two related problems here,” he’d said when he emerged from the attic crawl space through the hatch in the hall. “The first is that there’s a coon living up there. The second is that he’s got easy access and egress. There’s a corner of your flashing with a big hole in it. He’s climbing that pine tree in the back and using the hole to get in. I don’t think he’s got a way out of the attic and down into the house. No scat, right?”

“I don’t believe so,” Rebecca had said vaguely. The roofer’s conversation was full of mysteries. What precisely was flashing? Scat she thought she had divined from context. The idea that a raccoon was living above her was deeply unsettling.

“Oh, you’d know,” the roofer had said. Rebecca couldn’t remember his name. He was big, with fair hair and a ruddy tone to his skin. His eyelashes and eyebrows were so light they were practically invisible. There was a line of pink skin along his part as he bent his head to put the flashlight in his tool bag. The exterminator had recommended him. “Roofers are thieves,” he’d said. Apparently this one was not a thief.

He’d taken a card from a banged-up metal case in his back pocket. Rebecca thought his hands cried out to be photographed. They had light hair on the backs, and were covered with scars—small lines, larger circles, a big snaky one that was a pale pink and covered the side of his palm. On his left hand his index finger was missing the last joint. In black-and-white the scars would be more prominent, Rebecca knew, the hairs a kind of faint cross-hatching.

“Bates Roofing,” the card said. “Family Owned Since 1934.” Grandfather, father, son. Someday this man would be too old to climb a ladder and a young fair-haired man would show up to check the flashing in his stead. By then she would be long gone. Maybe by next month she would be long gone. Her apartment in the city had been sublet for a year. She’d signed a lease for the cottage for a year, too. She sighed and let her eyes close. An uncomfortable bed, a room with no outlets, a raccoon overhead. Surely she could get a visiting position at a college in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago. Someplace where a super worried about the condition of the flashing, whatever flashing was.

“Give me a minute,” the roofer had said, opening the back of his truck.

He’d baited the trap with one of her bananas. He’d wanted peanut butter, but she had none in the house. In the refrigerator there was cream cheese, two bagels she’d brought from the city now hardening into a food artifact, a six-pack of Diet Coke, a cold chicken, and some lettuce. In the pantry there was canned soup and tuna fish and a half loaf of bread with a faint rime of mold around the edge of the last slice. She had to find a supermarket, she thought as he put the baited trap into the attic.

The trap, she thought now, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Overhead the crashing stopped, then started again. She lay in bed in the unyielding darkness wondering what time it was, whether it was too early to get up. (It was 2:08, too early to get up.) The roofer’s card was on the kitchen counter, next to a list: bottle opener. Scissors. Trash bags. Spaghetti. He’d said to call if she thought the trap had been sprung. “How will I be certain?” she’d asked. “You’ll know,” he’d said. He’d been right. The trap had been sprung, in her muscles, her nerves, her fingertips, the soles of her feet. The house was nothing but the darkness, the odors, and the noise of a trapped raccoon thrashing his way from one end of the attic to another.

Maybe the roofer was imagining all that when he’d looked at her and added, “You know what? I’ll just stop back in the morning in case we get him overnight. Let’s hope it’s not a mom with a couple of babies.”

Was the roofer’s name Joe?

There was a long silence, and she shut her eyes. Then the crashing began again. It sounded as though it was over the living room now. How did I wind up here? Rebecca thought. How on earth did I wind up here?

Reading Group Guide

A Conversation Between Anna Quindlen and her Editor, Kate Medina

Kate Medina: Early readers have especially responded to a theme in Still Life with Bread Crumbs: changing your life at any age; starting again when you feel your life isn’t working. Would you comment on this?

Anna Quindlen: I’m actually not sure that’s how I saw the book when I began it, Kate, although, as you know, my motives aren’t always clear to me, in real time and in retrospect. I’ve always been in­terested in the notion of being pushed aside over time, maybe ­because I was once interviewed by a young(er) woman who ­introduced herself by saying, “I’m our paper’s Anna Quindlen!” In the case of Rebecca Winter, the protagonist of Still Life, the upside to her fall from the limelight is that she gets to figure out how to value herself rather than let the world do it for her. I think that’s the journey many women take, and since the value the world assigns to who you are and what you want is so often narrow and even unworthy, getting out of its clutches and into your own comfort zone can be really powerful.

KM: What does a woman want? is an age-­old, supposedly un­answerable question. I think Still Life with Bread Crumbs illuminates some answers to that question. We would love your thoughts!

AQ: Well, we could go on and on about that question, and the short snappy answer is that there are as many responses as there are women. But I do think that after a certain point, women seek authenticity. There’s an essential phoniness to the way we sometimes present ourselves, physically and socially—­wearing uncomfortable clothes that someone, somewhere, has deemed fashionable, being nice to people we don’t even like. How many times has someone said to me about their much older mother, or grandmother, “You wouldn’t believe what comes out of her mouth!” Maybe that’s a response to a lifetime’s worth of so-­called social graces.

KM: Still Life with Bread Crumbs is your seventh novel. You write both bestselling fiction and nonfiction. How are the processes different for you, if they are? How do you decide which one to write next?

AQ: I always mean to sound purposeful when we talk about things like that, but it’s all pretty unexamined and intuitive. My last nonfiction book, the memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, came to life with an offhand comment I’d made to my daughter and a piece of data I stumbled across when writing my last Newsweek column. I’d been very satisfied writing novels, and I had no intention of moving back into nonfiction. Right now I’m juggling a novel in its nascent stages and a nonfiction book, as you know, and the most obvious difference is that on the first, I eventually plunged right into the writing, but on the second I’m still doing the reporting. Sometimes the reporting is an excuse not to write; other times it is such an aid to composition because, unlike the material in the novels, it is in your notes or on tape and doesn’t have to be excavated from the sometimes hard rock of imagination.

KM: People love to know where the inspiration for a novel comes from. Would you say something about Still Life with Bread Crumbs in this regard?

AQ: It’s not one thing. It’s never one thing. I’ve thought a lot about the nature of art, and why women’s art, particularly if it arises from domestic life, is minimized, or denigrated—­why, for instance, we pay less attention to the work of Alice McDermott, a genius miniaturist whose novels reflect the quiet everyday, than we do to the more sprawling, outward-­facing work of Philip Roth. Some of my thinking on that is embodied in Rebecca’s photography and the public’s reaction to it. I’m sixty-­one years old, and I’ve thought a lot about aging and the stages of a woman’s life, and that’s in there, too. From a purely mechanical point of view, I try to do some essential thing in each novel that I haven’t done before. In this book it was twofold: I’ve never written a love story, and I haven’t written a book with a happy ending, and this material lent itself to both.

KM: We’ve been working together for twenty-­five years, on a wide range of your books—­fiction, nonfiction, memoir. We are both often asked about the editorial process between writer and editor. Might you comment briefly about that process? What is the heart of it for you?

AQ: Oh, Kate, you broke me in. I cringe when I remember the first draft of Object Lessons. You said the writing was lovely, and the characters memorable, but not much happened in the course of the book. And I replied, “That’s how real life is.” You said, so sweetly, “And that’s why we call this a novel.”

The heart of the editing process is a fresh pair of sensitive and informed eyes. By the time I’m done with a draft, I have no clue. Is it the best thing I’ve ever done? Is it a complete disaster? Depends on which day you ask me. But more than that, I am so close to the material that I not only can’t get out of the weeds, I can’t figure out where they are. That’s where you come in. You read and read again and then send me your long memo, which always begins “I love this book!” Then come the buts—­about murky character development, fallow areas, missed opportunities. I’m not going to go into detail and thus illuminate my own dopiness, but sometimes you ask a question about something I’ve done, or failed to do, and I want to smack myself in the head, it’s so obvious.

Of course, a critical part of this process is the trust between us. You speak fluent Quindlen and you don’t try to edit me into someone else. And once our dialogue begins, I become more confident about my own work in that I know where you are right about changes, cuts, amendments, and where I disagree and will leave well enough alone.

KM: Rebecca Winter, the main character in Still Life with Bread Crumbs, is an artist—­a photographer. You are a different kind of artist—­a writer. What do you see as connections between the way Rebecca does her work, and the way a writer—­you—­do yours? What might be similar, or different, about creativity in different forms?

AQ: Certainly this is the part that will make readers and critics suspect autobiography in this novel. In her thirties, Rebecca becomes famous almost accidentally, through some photographs taken in her kitchen at the end of a dinner party. The work is hailed as feminist, deconstructed and described in terms of women’s household roles. None of this is Rebecca’s conscious intent. I had a somewhat similar experience when I created a column called “Life in the 30s” for The New York Times. I was writing about being stuck in the house with small children because I was stuck in the house with small children. It was not my intent to be a standard bearer for working mothers, just to get through toddlerhood while still earning some kind of disposable income. But I don’t think this means either Rebecca or I are accidental artists; I think art is accidental in many ways that are unacknowledged. Something . . . just . . . happens—­in the work and in some chemical reaction a viewer or a reader has to the work. A hugely esteemed novelist and I were talking one day about going on book tours. He growled, “The worst part is having to pretend you know why you do what you do.” I almost kissed him, I was so relieved that I wasn’t the only one who feels that way!

1. What part of Rebecca Winter’s life do you relate to the most? How did the way Rebecca handled her hardships compare to decisions you’ve made in your own life?

2. One of the themes of Still Life with Bread Crumbs is discovering how to age gracefully. What has been one of your biggest struggles when entering a different stage of life? What is something you’ve enjoyed?

3. Rebecca finds herself living far outside the comfort zone of her former New York City life. What do you think is the most difficult part of moving somewhere new? Have you ever been in a similar situation? How did you handle it?

4. At one point in the book, Jim says that he believes that people live in houses that look like them. How does your own house or apartment reflect your personality?

5. “Language had always failed her when it came to describing her photographs. . . . There was nothing she could say about the cross photographs that could come close to actually seeing them.” Rebecca realizes this after speaking at the Women’s Art League event. Do you ever find it difficult to describe the effect that art—photographs, paintings, writing—has had on you? What might that say about the power of artwork?

6. Throughout the book, Sarah is often the perfect antidote for Rebecca’s unhappiness. Do you have a person like this in your life? Think about one of the times that you were most grateful for him or her.

7. One of the turning points for Rebecca is when Ben tells her, “You will always be Rebecca Winter.” How has Rebecca’s personal identity become entangled with her identity as an iconic artist? What helps her to ground herself?

8. The dog gradually becomes a bigger part of Rebecca’s life as she moves further away from her past self—the “not a dog person” city girl. The dog pictures are even the catalyst for Rebecca’s break with TG. What do you think the presence of the dog means in Rebecca’s life, especially after she discovers his name is Jack? How might the constant company of an animal have a different effect from that of the company of people?

9. When Rebecca finally learns the meaning of the crosses, she wonders if the great artists had ever considered “the terrible eternity of immortality” for their subjects. We live in a culture of camera phones and constant photography. Was there ever a moment when you were particularly grateful to have a certain photograph? Do you ever wish that our lives were less documented?

10. O. Henry’s short story and the story of Rebecca’s mother’s Mary Cassatt both have a bittersweet quality to them. Think about a moment in your life that might have been upsetting or sad. Was there someone who helped you see beauty or happiness in that moment instead?

Editorial Reviews

There comes a moment in every novelist’s career when she . . . ventures into new territory, breaking free into a marriage of tone and style, of plot and characterization, that’s utterly her own. Anna Quindlen’s marvelous romantic comedy of manners is just such a book. . . . Taken as a whole, Quindlen’s writings represent a generous and moving interrogation of women’s experience across the lines of class and race. [Still Life with Bread Crumbs] proves all the more moving because of its light, sophisticated humor. Quindlen’s least overtly political novel, it packs perhaps the most serious punch. . . . Quindlen has delivered a novel that will have staying power all its own.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] wise tale about second chances, starting over, and going after what is most important in life.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Quindlen’s astute observations . . . are the sorts of details every writer and reader lives for.”—Chicago Tribune

“[Anna] Quindlen’s seventh novel offers the literary equivalent of comfort food. . . . She still has her finger firmly planted on the pulse of her generation.”—NPR

“Enchanting . . . [The protagonist’s] photographs are celebrated for turning the ‘minutiae of women’s lives into unforgettable images,’ and Quindlen does the same here with her enveloping, sure-handed storytelling.”—People

“Charming . . . a hot cup of tea of a story, smooth and comforting about the vulnerabilities of growing older . . . a pleasure.”—USA Today
 
“Quindlen has made a home at the top of the bestsellers lists with novels that capture the grace and frailty of everyday life, and her latest work is sure to take her there again. With spare, elegant prose, she crafts a poignant glimpse into the inner life of an aging woman who discovers that reality contains much more color than her own celebrated black-and-white images.”—Library Journal

“Quindlen has always excelled at capturing telling details in a story, and she does so again in this quiet, powerful novel, showing the charged emotions that teem beneath the surface of daily life.”—Publishers Weekly

“A Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and star in the pantheon of domestic fiction (Every Last One, 2010), Quindlen presents instantly recognizable characters who may be appealingly warm and nonthreatening, but that only serves to drive home her potent message that it’s never too late to embrace life’s second chances.”—Booklist

“Profound . . . engaging.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher