While it is often exciting to find a new book by a new author that hits the spot, sometimes I like to know before I open a book what I’m getting and that I am going to like it. I can do this sometimes when I see an author’s name I know. When I spotted the author’s name on this book at the Oak Grove Library book sale (back when they used to have group things before Corona arrived), I grabbed it for my stash. You might ask if I really needed any more books in that stash, but that issue looms too big for this blog and needs to be saved for another day and time.
I have read Anna Quindlen’s fiction as well as her nonfiction takes on life and have never been disappointed. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman’s Life lived up to my expectations. Anna’s sixtieth birthday formed the impetus for this writing as she looks back to youthful dreams and looks around her to see how they have turned out. She sets the mood with an introductory statement, “I would tell my twenty-two-year-old self that what lasts are things so ordinary she may not even see them: family dinners, fair fights, phone calls, friends.” She marvels that the young woman learned that lesson by trial and error.
The book is unfailingly optimistic and even seems to relish the age she has become over the ages she has been. I found a couple of noteworthy changes to the young woman’s dream particularly interesting. With a significant difference in her personality and her mother’s, there was still a strong bond between them, shown as she dropped out of college at nineteen with aspirations of becoming a writer, to care for her mother in her last days. Returning to college, she pursued that writing dream with the intent of becoming a childless career woman. That idea ultimately morphed into a new plan to have five children and adjusted back to three. As I often do, when I read her work, I saw parallels in my own life, especially to dreams shifted and adjusted. Maybe relatability is part of the appeal of her work. A bonus to the book is an interview with her friend Meryl Streep in the back matter.
While my photograph would indicate this book came from some bargain book rack for which I paid $3.00, the truth is I probably paid fifty cents at the book sale. But even if you pay Amazon’s price of $4.99 for a Kindle edition or $10.64 for the paperback, you are getting a bargain.