Every Last One (37 page)

RHRC:
Motherhood is a central theme of many of your books. Why do you think the subject has held your interest over the years?

AQ:
I once wrote that reading makes us feel less alone. It’s why I love it so. But writing, if we touch a chord in others, can make both the writer and readers feel less alone, feel connected to others like themselves. My life experience, and thus my work, is often a reflection of being female in America. And while we’ve expanded expectations and opportunities enormously over my lifetime, there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to that the fact that in our competitive, perfectionist culture, in which the price women are required to pay for freedom still seems to be martyrdom, almost everyone lies about motherhood. Part of that lying is loyalty—I can’t let on that my kid is the only one on the playground who can’t read or play the piano—and part of it is self-protection, since we’ve made hyper-motherhood a measure of female success. The preferred answer to the question “How are you?” is always “Fine,” and the answer to the question “How are the kids?” is supposed to be “Great!” That’s true even if the accurate answers would be “terrible” and “a mess.” I think that produces its own kind of desperation, especially for women, who yearn to be emotionally open. Thank God for good girlfriends. That’s a theme in this book as well.

RHRC:
Mary Beth’s friendships change during the course of this book. Are you suggesting that tragedy can end or alter even a close friendship?

AQ:
I think that’s inevitably true. All of us have had the experience of a friend who was comfortable with ordinary interactions but buckled under the weight of cataclysm and, conversely, of casual friends who somehow really stepped up when things were bad. And, as Mary Beth notes, we often have situational friendships. We become close to the moms with whom our kids are in preschool but drift away from them when the kids grow up and are no longer friends. In this novel, there is the friend who is lifelong, the one who can’t respond in a warm or helpful way to the changing emotional landscape, and the new friend who provides exactly what’s needed. I think that’s about par for the course.

RHRC:
Mary Beth and Glen’s marriage rings very true. Tell us a bit about how you developed their relationship.

AQ:
I’m offended by the people who suggested that their relationship was lame or passionless. That reflects what I think is an unrealistic expectation of long marriage. We don’t expect an eighteen-year-old girl to be the same as a forty-year-old woman. But we expect new marriage and established marriage to be the same thing. Mary Beth and Glen don’t have the same chemistry that they had twenty years ago. But they have something else, maybe something more important: they have history and stability. They have a deal, that they were once a couple but now they’re a family, and they’re at a time in their lives when raising that family is paramount. Maybe they are on the cusp of coming together again in a different way, with the kids poised to fly the nest. When I started to write about them, I wanted to show the kind of marriage that has its ebbs and flows, that has morphed into something that works for the moment and that likely will morph yet again.

RHRC:
Every Last One
raises many questions about parenting—when to micromanage, when to punish, and when to let go. In your opinion, is Mary Beth a good mother?

AQ:
I think Mary Beth is a wonderful mother, sensitive, attentive, and loving. But the whole point of this book is that sometimes that’s not enough. There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can’t always anticipate them all, especially when the outside world, other people, play such a huge role in their lives as they grow older. With independence there is one kind of pitfall; with overprotection, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It’s as simple, and as scary, as that.

Of course, when things go wrong, it’s still the mother who gets blamed. Where was she? What was she thinking? I wanted to look at that phenomenon in this novel, too. I’ve been distressed at how many people immediately concluded that Mary Beth was at fault in the events of the book. But I wasn’t surprised. Despite the increased role of fathers in parenting in our society, there’s still a sense that motherhood is the big fail if anything goes wrong. Yet it’s independence that is the ultimate success for your kids. If your goal is to build strong people from the ground up, the only way to do that is to give them enough rope to sometimes make their own mistakes. That’s a big theme in the novel, balancing oversight and independence.

I do think this sort of oversight is more frequently the purview of women. I used to say that my editorial direction on “Life in the 30’s” was to write about what my friends and I were discussing on the phone. And then I would add, “If my husband had to write a column based on his phone calls …” I never got to finish that sentence. Every woman in the audience would bust up. It was assumed that women were in the business of emotional deconstruction, and men weren’t. Sometimes it means that we’re more engaged in certain aspects of our children’s lives. Sometimes it means, as Glen says of Mary Beth in
Every Last One
, that we’re way overinvolved.

RHRC:
Your novels spur debate on serious, complex issues from euthanasia to domestic abuse, and now parenting and teenage depression. What sort of discussion do you hope this new book will provoke? What are the advantages of exploring an issue through fiction rather than nonfiction?

AQ:
I never think about issues when I’m working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they’re just life happening. Any issues grow out of the story. I don’t think you experience
Bleak House
, for instance, as a story about the convoluted British legal system but as the story of a family and the way money, or lack of same, has poisoned relationships among them. A successful novel is always driven by character. And frankly, when I write, I’m mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting and, worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things. I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: think and talk about it in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

RHRC:
Your focus has shifted in recent years from journalism to fiction. Is there anything you miss from your days as a full-time journalist and columnist? Are your writing habits different, depending on what you are working on? Describe a typical day spent writing.

AQ:
I would say my most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write. I used to think this was just me, but recently I read an interview with the brilliant playwright Tony Kushner, and he said the same thing, which made me feel much better and made me suspect the attempt by writers not to write is more widespread than people think. My closest friend is a book reviewer and we talk every morning. I walk for an hour every morning, too. I would rather exercise than write—that’s how bad it is. But by about 10
A.M.
, I just do it. I always have music on unless I’m reading my finished work aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It’s the only way to know if a sentence really works. It’s also the only way to know if dialogue sounds like human speech. I’ve read
Every Last One
aloud twice, once after the first draft, then after the last. I had to give up after that second time because I was so wiped from weeping. My elder son, who is a whiz at grammar, did the final copyedit so I wouldn’t have to look at it again.

Recently I was spending some time with one of the great masters of the modern novel. And he said, “You know, the problem with talking about writing a novel is that you have to pretend you know why you do what you do.” In the show
Sondheim on Sondheim
, Stephen Sondheim talks about those happy moments when you go into a trance and produce something good. The bottom line is that there’s a certain mystery to reproducing human emotion in words so that it feels true. I don’t know how I accessed, lived, and described grief of a sort I have never personally experienced, just as I don’t know exactly how I felt the emotions of an abused woman in
Black and Blue
. People assume you do research. I’ve had years of doing research, as a reporter and a columnist, but all I bring to the novels is my imagination. If you can imagine it, it can happen.

RHRC:
When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

AQ:
I can’t remember the point at which I decided I wanted to do it for a living. But I do know that I got constant positive reinforcement from teachers for my writing. I always say that I am a writer because of teachers, because they encouraged me to continue with it. By high school, I was fairly sure it was the path I would follow.

RHRC:
What writers would you say have had the biggest effect on you? Share with us some classic authors, and some contemporary ones, whom you admire.

AQ:
I am hugely influenced by Dickens and the notion that it is possible to combine a good story with an interest in social welfare. At opposite ends of the spectrum, I admire Jane Austen for her sense of restraint and irony, and Faulkner for his fearlessness and emotion. For more modern writers, I love Alice McDermott, Don DeLillo, and Russell Banks. I think all my work is influenced by growing up Catholic, not necessarily in terms of content but in terms of themes and values.
Blessings
, for instance, is a novel about redemption. Actually, in some fashion all my novels are about redemption.

RHRC:
What are you reading now?

AQ:
When I’m revising a novel I can’t read literary fiction, so I only read mysteries (although increasingly some of them are quite literary). My friend Jean just introduced me to a Scandinavian novelist named Karin Fossum whom I really have taken a shine to. Her entire backlist is in a stack on my bedside table. I read
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
, by David Mitchell, soon after it appeared, and recommended it to everyone. It is a modern novel that could just as easily have been written in 1880, and it is astonishing in its richness, complexity, and characterizations. Dickensian—which is the greatest compliment I can pay.

RHRC:
What’s next?

AQ:
I’m working on a memoir about aging that will be published around my sixtieth birthday. People always wanted me to go back to the kinds of personal observations I made in my “Life in the 30’s” columns, which are collected in
Living Out Loud
. So I guess the memoir could be thought of as “Life in the 50’s.” I’m intrigued by the notion that we’ve gained fifteen years of life expectancy since I was born. We’re figuring out how to use those years, especially in our fifties and sixties, when people once wanted to slow down. There was an old ad slogan: You’re not getting older, you’re getting better. It was for hair color, I think, which I don’t use; I wear my gray proudly. But the sentiment is true. I am better. Except for my knees.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Before the unthinkable happens, the Lathams are like any other American family. Discuss Mary Beth and Glen, and their relationship, and then talk about Ruby, Max, Alex, and how they all relate to one another.
   
2. Mary Beth has a successful landscaping business, but she seems more focused on her family than anything else. Talk about Mary Beth as a mother, and discuss the relationships she has with each of her children. How are the relationships similar? Different? What kind of relationship do they have? Has Mary Beth focused on her children to the exclusion of her husband?
   
3. Female friendships are deeply important to Mary Beth throughout the novel, though her friendships change dramatically as her life changes. Discuss Mary Beth’s relationships with Alice, Nancy, Deborah (Kiernan’s mother), and Olivia.
   
4. As she thinks back to meeting Glen by chance at a college party decades earlier, Mary Beth reflects: “Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance” (
   this page
   ). Do you agree that our lives are built on happenstance? Discuss this quote in the context of the novel.
   
5. Before the tragic events of New Year’s, Mary Beth spends a lot of her time looking forward. She likes to think about the lives her children will have in the future, and in what ways her family will grow and change. At the Halloween party, she thinks about future Halloween parties and the jokes her grandchildren and children will make at her expense. Then, almost ominously, she thinks, “It’s only before the realities set in that we can treasure our delusions” (
   this page
   ). What do you make of this notion? Is she right?
   
6. As we read the novel, we know something awful is coming, but we don’t know quite what it will be. What did you think might happen to the Lathams? Did you, like Mary Beth, think Max might be behind the attacks on New Year’s at first? Talk about the events of that night, and discuss your reactions to the vicious crime.
   
7. Discuss Ruby’s relationship with Kiernan, and how (and why) it changes. Many people, especially Nancy, seem to think Mary Beth and Glen should have seen the warning signs regarding Kiernan’s increasingly disturbing behavior. Do you think Mary Beth and Glen could have done anything differently?
   
8. The police discover that Kiernan had been living above the Latham’s garage, and they find a disturbing photo montage of the family, with the words
   HAPPY FAMILIES
   scrawled over the images of the Lathams. Mary Beth gets the reference to
   Anna Karenina
   , a novel Ruby and Kiernan studied in AP English. She thinks, “Ruby had been disdainful of Anna for leaving her son behind and choosing Vronsky instead. Kiernan had said she couldn’t help it, it was love that made her do it, love that made her leap in front of that speeding train, it was love that made people do things they wouldn’t do otherwise” (
   this page
   ). Talk about Kiernan’s motivations. Was it love that made him do something so awful? Madness? Drugs and alcohol? A combination of all of these things? Can we really ever know why people do such horrible things?
   
9. After New Year’s, Mary Beth’s life is clearly divided into the “before” and “after.” How does she change and adapt to her new life? What gives her the strength to pull through? Do you think she would have been able to go on with her life if she had lost Alex, too? Why or why not?
   
10. Quindlen does a magnificent job portraying Mary Beth’s unimaginable grief at the loss of her family. But she also shows how the loss affects others in the Latham’s circle. Discuss how Alice, Ruby’s friends Sarah and Rachel, Nancy, Mary Beth’s mother, Glen’s family, and others cope with the loss of the Lathams. Did anyone’s reactions surprise you? How and why?
    
11. Alex decides to go see Dr. Vagelos, the doctor who helped Max with his depression. And Dr. Vagelos reaches out to Mary Beth to help her and Alex deal with the loss of their family. Why do you think Mary Beth and Alex had such trouble talking to each other about what happened on New Year’s? Why is it important for them to have open communication?
    
12. Mary Beth explains that Alex was never very emotional, and that’s part of the reason she tried to be strong for him. Dr. Vagelos wisely tells her, “Sometimes children can get more attention because they seem to be in more need of attention. And then there are children who seem so self-possessed and competent that they seem to need less” (
    this page
    ). How does this statement relate to Ruby, Max, Alex, and Kiernan? Do you think Dr. Vagelos is right? Why or why not?
    
13. Mary Beth has always had a complicated relationship with her own mother. But her mother surprises her in many ways after New Year’s. She was the one who identified the bodies of Glen, Ruby, and Max, something Mary Beth doesn’t think she could have done. She tells Mary Beth that they looked like they were sleeping in the morgue. And then Mary Beth thinks, “My mother has done it. She has made me see what she wanted me to see. The one person who understands is the one person I never expected to understand me” (
    this page
    ). Discuss this sentiment.
    
14. Though it’s impossible to say that anything good can come from such a massive tragedy, Mary Beth forms a deep and satisfying friendship with Olivia after the death of her family. How do Olivia and Mary Beth help each other survive?
    
15. Similarly, Mary Beth and Alex start a new kind of relationship after losing their family. Discuss how their mother/son relationship changes, and what each learns about the other.
    
16. At the end of the novel, Mary Beth is settled in her new home, Alex seems to be doing okay, and together they are looking toward the future. When her mother asks how Mary Beth is holding up, she replies that she’s “trying,” and that is all she knows how to do. Discuss how Mary Beth has handled such a horrible tragedy, and what you make of her progress in starting a new life.