When she is criticized as writing down to women, of making all issues experience-based rather than abstract, Quindlen replies, as she did to Kim Hubbard in
Publishers Weekly, "In public discourse, it's implied that emotions are suspect--yet people make personal and even policy decisions on the basis of them all the time. I think the devaluing of emotional content is basically a devaluing of women."
Quindlen has retired from journalism several times, only to be coaxed back repeatedly into writing columns for major publications. However, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her columns, fiction was and continues to be her first love. In her fiction, she explores many of the domestic themes that are the subjects of her journalism, but despairs when her work is labeled "women's novels." For Quindlen, the domestic novel--pioneered by writers such as Jane Austen--is the perfect form for exploring the changes in society. Quindlen hopes that her novels are mirrors of these changes. "The personal has become the political in what I think is the most positive way," Quindlen told Steinberg. Her own professional life is certainly reflected in its domestic particulars.
Growing Up Catholic
Quindlen is the oldest of five children born to an Irish Catholic father and Italian Catholic mother.
