For novelist and journalist Anna Quindlen, "real life is in the dishes," as she told Sybil Steinberg in a Publishers Weekly interview. Her columns for the New York Times, collected in Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud, as well as her popular novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, and Black and Blue, are about the dramatic and important aspects of domestic life. "Quindlen tackles the basic questions of life with trenchant and sensitive insight," Steinberg wrote. "[S]he has a gift for turning the quotidian into the existential, the mundane into the meaningful." Quindlen's material ranges from the examination of political issues from a mother's perspective to criticism of the Catholic Church for its stands on birth control and abortion from the perspective of a practicing Roman Catholic. A feminist, Quindlen promotes equality. As the mother of three, she chauffeurs her children to their after-school activities, and...