“It’s that we’ve done a pretty good job of becoming ourselves, and that this is, in so many ways the time of our lives.” – Anna Quindlen

I admit that I relate to Anna Quindlen because we both were good little Catholic girls of Irish and Italian extraction, born in the 1950s. We came of age in the long shadow cast by the Vietnam War when America’s values were changing at a dizzying pace. We were the first generation of girls who voiced our belief that we had the right to be or do whatever we wanted to. I know because I was there and I remember.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, Quindlen’s new memoir, is written, first and foremost, for the girls of the fifties. In it Quindlen talks about what it meant to her to be a young woman making her way through those times. She also talks about how she  feels now as she approaches sixty, reflecting on what she has achieved and where she is today.

Anna Quindlen is a writer’s writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column, “Public and Private”. She has written five best-selling novels, three of which have been made into movies. One True Thing (1994) is about a daughter called home from her exciting career in New York City to care for her dying mother. The movie version of the book stars Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger. She has written numerous other essays, stories and opinion pieces and holds many honorary degrees.  She is, as the saying goes, the real deal.

When you learn that at the age of nineteen, Anna Quindlen left Barnard to care for her own mother, dying of ovarian cancer at age forty, a light goes on. Oh. Really. Here again is another example of a writer’s life experience informing her work. The heart of the pathos, so beautifully captured in One True Thing, is explained in Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.

The reason that I love to write about women is that I feel that women, more so than men, carry parts of their mothers and grandmothers forward with them. Much has been written about the fact the many women today have chosen to leave their careers, enabled by expensive college educations, many at schools that once only admitted men. Instead, they choose to stay home, raise their babies and bake cupcakes as many of their grandmothers did. Many of their grandmothers did not have the right to make that choice.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is Anna Quindlen’s own story, but at the same time it the story of a generation’s struggle to make sure that women have choices. We fought for them. As one of those demur little white-gloved girls, frequently told to “ sit still and be good”, I am thrilled to be able to tell my granddaughters, “You can be anything that you want to be. Go for it.”

I loved Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. Let me know what you think of it, if you decide to read it.