PT INTERVIEW
Columnist Anna Quindlen has become the standard bearer of a new
brand of journalism that obliterates the line between what happens at
home and what happens in the world of politics and business. You may
disagree with her take on abortion (she's for) or on the death penalty
(against), but every column clamors with the sound of one person
thinking.
PT: You've implied that one of your goals is to advance the
understanding of the human condition. How do you, Anna Quindlen, do that
as opposed to what other columnists do?
AQ: The most important thing that I bring to this column is years
of experience as a reporter. I still do an enormous amount of reporting
for my column. I don't write about the homeless from an office at The New
York Times. I go to homeless shelters, I talk to people on the street. I
always have a notebook in my purse. One of the ways that you expand your
understanding of the human condition in my work is to reflect the human
condition, to talk about how people are living now. The ideal way for me
to do that is through reporting.
But once I've done that, the key. element for me in writing this
column has always been walking people through the arguments. I don't find
inherently interesting a column that says you should be for capital
punishment or you're a moron. But if you walk people through arguments
for and against capital punishment that they haven't heard before,
perhaps looking at a specific human being who's sitting on death row, at
the end of that process they can say to themselves, "Gee, I never thought
of it in quite that way before." It's not that I want to make them think
like me, and in fact, given the mail we get, it's dear that many readers
do not think like me on many subjects. But I like the idea of making them
think about an important issue in a different way.
PT: Columnists traditionally tell people what they themselves think
Is this what you set out to do?
AQ: Telling you what I think about a certain issue is basically
paragraph D. How long does it take to figure out that I think abortion
should be legal? The rest of the 750 words, to be interesting, have to be
taken up with: here are the arguments, and here is an argent that you may
not have heard before. Sometimes I can do that myself and sometimes other
people do that for me. In the column that I wrote about what I like to
call the Nicole Brown-Simpson case, as opposed to the O. J. Simpson case,
I quoted the L. A. city attorneys in charge of domestic violence, saying
that their coroner, by unofficial count, is seeing a domestic violence
homicide every day and a half. That's the kind of thing that makes you
look at the issue in a whole new way and it's where reporting serves me.
Do you know that I'm against domestic violence? Sure. But at the end of
that column you may be thinking a slightly different way about a case
that heretofore has been predominantly about the person who is accused of
roughing up his wife in 1989 and not about that wife who is now a murder
victim.
PT: Do you ever find it tiresome to be in your column as a
person?
AQ: Yeah, I do. There are certain days when I don't want to appear
too much in those 750 words, and those are days when I'll turn to
reporting and take more of a look from the outside in. The fact is,
though, that there are certain subjects on which the most powerful
statement you can make is a personal statement. So, for example, I could
have written a more hands-off column about grief than I did last spring,
but the reason I was writing that column and felt so strongly about it
was because my brother had just lost his wife to cancer. When I feel that
it's useful to talk with the readers about something that will affect
them very powerfully, too, I don't hesitate to do it, but I couldn't do
it twice a week, 52 weeks a year.
PT: One day you're writing about how your kids spent a snow day.
The next day you're analyzing Whitewater or clerical denunciations of
homosexuality. What kind of journalism is that?
AQ: It's journalism that reflects the way real people live. Most of
us ricochet wildly from thinking about Paula Jones to thinking about
whether our kids ought to go to private or public school. I fail to see
why our newspapers, in some sense, shouldn't reflect the way we live now.
The very same readers who will be interested in what I have to say about
the newest nominee to the Supreme Court, because it's something that
they've been thinking about, will also be interested in seeing what I
have to say about telling the kids about Santa Claus, because, again,
that's something they've been thinking about The idea that we have to
divide the world into what happens at home and what happens out in the
orbit of the professions and of politics is specious, because I don't
think anybody lives that way.
PT: So are you really redefining public issues or what we consider
public issues?
AQ: I don't think I'm redefining them. A lot of what we do in the
press has been transformed by the woman's movement, which, argued that
the personal is political. I do believe that the personal is political. I
don't think most people feel the way they do about abortion rights
because they've read a variety of medical and legal treatises about the
subject, but because of thoughts they've had about their own situation,
about friends they've had who mayor may not have chosen to have abortions
because of ways they think about what they would like the future to hold
for their children.
Tags:
Anna Quindlen,
arguments for and against capital punishment,
columnist,
death penalty,
death row,
element,
feminism,
homeless shelters,
journalism,
mail,
moron,
motherhood,
notebook,
purse,
standard bearer
