It’s a little like a friendship you understand much more at ﬁve years than you do at one year. Q: How did you create the members of the Gulden family? Did you know from the beginning how their characters would take shape?ĪQ: I was pretty clear on Kate and Ellen from the very beginning, although in the natural order of things you always learn a great deal about your characters as you move along. In this case I knew a lot about issues surrounding cancer and euthanasia, and it was helpful from a legal standpoint that my husband is a longtime trial attorney.

In fact I have never done any research for any of my novels. I did no research on either the medical or legal aspects of the story. The second was to explore the notion of that traditional woman, and the probability that beneath the surface there was more steel and strength than met the eye. I believe that in ﬁction, as in life, people become most themselves under pressure. The ﬁrst was an attempt to sharpen the characters of all involved. Originally I had the idea of the mother and daughter it was only after some consideration that I decided to introduce the notion that the mother was dying, and the mystery about how she ultimately died.

And I wanted to explore a series of events that would take Ellen there, or at least place her closer to some more balanced sense of what it means to be female. Of course, as we all know now, what works for so many people is a synthesis, something closer to the center. To me, Kate and Ellen represent the two polar ideas of women that arose at that time: the traditional woman, who embraced life as wife and mother alone and the new woman, who rejected those roles in favor of a life in the world. Urn:oclc:611578969 Scandate 20111114213201 Scanner : Where did you come up with the idea for such a complex story? How did you do your research on the medical and legal aspects of the novel?Īnna Quindlen: Odd as it may seem to some readers, I wanted to write a novel about the lives of women at the end of the twentieth century, in light of the modern feminist revolution. OL16051510W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 93.10 Pages 408 Ppi 643 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0099461358 Urn:lcp:onetruething1995quin:epub:72b9bd16-5db0-47fc-8b5f-1e08b6d604f1 Extramarc OhioLINK Library Catalog Foldoutcount 0 Identifier onetruething1995quin Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3fx8943z Isbn 9780440221036Ġ44022103X Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition

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One true thing by anna quindlen