FICTION
“Still Life With Bread Crumbs,” by Anna Quindlen, Random House, 252 pages, $26.
Quindlen will speak and sign books at two locations. A Cappella Books will sell copies of her new novel at both events:
- 7 p.m. Thursday, March 13, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, 441 Freedom Parkway. Price includes one signed first edition of novel. $28 individual, $38 couple. 404-681-5128. acappellabooks.com
- 7:30 a.m. Friday, March 14, The Commerce Club, 191 Peachtree St. N.E., Suite 400. Breakfast and program, $25 Atlanta Press Club members, $35 all others. 404-577-7377. atlantapressclub.org
Its title may be sprinkled with “bread crumbs,” but Anna Quindlen’s seventh novel has a lot of meat to it.
The story in “Still Life with Bread Crumbs” focuses on Rebecca Winter, a photographer who years earlier became well known for a single picture she had snapped late one night after a messy dinner party. That image landed on a poster, called (like the novel) “Still Life With Bread Crumbs,” and it became an iconic symbol of a woman’s lot in life.
Rebecca has exiled herself as the tale opens to a small, remote cabin somewhere north of her expensive and beloved Manhattan apartment. It’s largely a financial decision: If she rents out her city place and lives in this bare-bones cabin, she might be able to make ends meet. Soon after her arrival, she needs to hire roofer Jim Bates, a big guy with fair hair and pink skin who also happens to be way too young for her.
Why the “younger man” angle?
“Rebecca needed an ego boost,” Quindlen said in a recent email interview. “The truth is that people in their 40s and 60s feel more similar than different in their stage of life to me. But I had to think that having a guy somewhat younger interested in her would both flabbergast and secretly please Rebecca.”
Quindlen, whose previous novels include “One True Thing” and “Blessings,” will appear in Atlanta for two events.
Here are some other highlights from the interview:
Q: Good for you to dare to have a 60-year-old protagonist — who’s not the most glamorous woman to ever walk the earth. Why did you focus on a 60-year-old during a difficult year in her life?
A: Novelists are always on the hunt for conflict, and certainly finding yourself out of cash and prospects, as Rebecca does, is a recipe for that. But as important, I had learned while writing "Blessings" what a rich stew you could make from the life of an older protagonist. In that novel Lydia Blessing was in her 80s, and I quickly realized that within that one woman I had every stage of life: young girl, wife and mother, middle-age woman, older woman. It was like looking at the strata of the earth. The moment of diminishing possibilities in which Rebecca finds herself at the beginning in "Still Life With Bread Crumbs" seemed to suggest an older protagonist, but I wanted to revisit that kind of richness, and did.
Q: Why were you interested in telling a story about a woman who, after having known some fame, had fallen on comparatively hard times?
A: Fame is a tricky thing. People see you on the street, and if they recognize you, they assume you're prosperous. I run into people at parties here in New York City who are famous, but famous for something — a book, a movie, a high office they held years ago. I think that magnifies questions of identity: "But who am I now?" For Rebecca, it's even more strange and confusing, since she became famous for her work because of other people's projections and assessments of it.
Q: How did you come up with the idea that spun this plot and these characters into motion?
A: I started to think about the nature of art, and whether great art, or good art, is what you feel in your heart and mind, or what critics or fashion tell you it is. Would we think that Picasso or James Joyce were so great if it had not become conventional wisdom that this is so? And are Ford Madox Ford or Theodore Dreiser any less great because they've fallen out of fashion? Falling out of fashion interests me; so many of the writers I admire have. And eventually I came around to thinking about a woman who had fallen out of fashion and what that might mean to her day-to-day life. The rest followed as I imagined and invented, and then wrote.
Q: Is “Still Life” something that you might not have been able to write years ago, for whatever reason? Did you perhaps need to be closer to age 60?
A: It's hard to know how far outside your own experience you can write. I've inhabited two men pretty fully, Skip Cuddy in "Blessings" and Jim Bates in this novel, so clearly it's possible. Again, I felt I had a good handle on the end-of-life regrets that Lydia Blessing experiences even though I was nowhere near them in my own life. But I'm sure Rebecca was accessible to me partly because we are the same age and live in the same city.
Q: “Still Life” is filled with intriguing thoughts for the reader to reflect upon. For example: “There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic.” Which type are you?
A: I'm one of the most predictable people on the face of the planet. I make the bed before I have breakfast. I make dinner most nights, unless I'm alone, when I have a bowl of cereal and a bowl of ice cream. (Don't judge me!) My husband and I met when we were 18. Even if I had ever been exotic, I suspect the statute of limitations on that would have run out.
