Every Last One-The Illusion of Safety

March 17, 2011

Anna Quindlen’s novel Every Last One explores the moment when safety–the whole illusion of safety–is pulled out from under a family and a community.

In the interview below, Quindlen discusses writing, reading (including her own favorite authors), winning the Pulitzer Prize, how she became a novelist, why she began writing nonfiction first as an Op-Ed columnist, and what happened in the national furor over being uninvited from a university commencement address.

Reading, she remarks here, is transgressive. How, you ask? Take a listen!

 

And if you’ve read or are reading Every Last One, let us know what you think.

Tell us your favorite passages.

What is this novel teaching you about the craft of storytelling?

And what insights do you learn from Anna Quindlen herself, speaking below….

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Comments

Comments

  1. Fiona Prine says:
    March 17, 2011 at 8:42 pm

    Testing. I just wrote several hundred words which would not post and have disappeared.

  2. Jen Strange says:
    March 17, 2011 at 9:59 pm

    This is what stood out to me:

    “It’s about the kind of cracks in the bedrock of most families . . . and it’s about that moment when one of the cracks opens up into a chasm . . . This is a book about being blind-sided by life.” I have been in that moment, and she does know how to capture the depth. (I have read One True Thing.)

    “There’s a perception that I write about issues . . . but the truth is, issues are just things that happen to people in sufficent numbers for us to pay attention.” Yes.

    “Reading is the way you get past the big lies” and “Reading allows us to be bigger than our own experiences.” So, so true. That is why I have always devoured books like they were my favorite food. :)

    - jen

  3. Fiona Prine says:
    March 18, 2011 at 9:47 pm

    I have published my comments on Blackboard

  4. CLARKEJenifer says:
    November 9, 2011 at 2:51 pm

    Some time before, I needed to buy a car for my business but I didn’t have enough money and couldn’t buy anything. Thank God my comrade proposed to get the loans from creditors. So, I acted so and used to be happy with my short term loan.

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BLUE HOLE BACK HOME Chosen as Common Book, Classroom Text, Book Club Selection and Summer Reading

Blue Hole Back Home is being used in universities, high schools and community settings to spur discussions on American culture, history and diversity. The novel was selected, for example, as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University's first-year students, who met in small groups to consider issues of courage, reconciliation and social transformation.
Want to know more about how Blue Hole Back Home might function in your academic, book club or community setting? On this site, you can SEE A TV INTERVIEW about how one high school is using the novel, watch a brief TRAILER with audio from the first chapter, and read more information under the Books-Fiction pull down menu above. You'll also find entries related to Blue Hole--including hearing the music behind the book-- on Joy's blog at bottom right of this page.

Colleges, high schools, book clubs and community groups, we welcome you to contact the author about a possible visit--in-person, if possible, or Skype.

And WATCH FOR REGULAR GIVEAWAYS of Blue Hole, as well as Joy's other books, through the blog attached to this site.

TANGLED MERCY-a sequel to BLUE HOLE BACK HOME-and the first novel in the Charleston series

Before Jami Riggs learns—the day of her mother’s funeral—that she is inheriting a collapsing 19th-century inn at the southernmost tip of Charleston, South Carolina, she’d never intended to live outside the Appalachian mountains or to speak to her long-estranged father ever again. Knowing nothing of inn-keeping or of This Old House renovations and still in the midst of graduate studies in history, Jami sees no point in accepting the gift—which, it quickly appears, comes with all sorts of secrets and strings attached. But when old family friend Shelby Lenoir Maynard, back briefly on Pisgah Ridge for the funeral, offers to travel down to the Carolina Low Country with her, Jami surprises herself at how quickly she falls for Charleston’s charm and its quirky, colorful people. As she struggles to bring the inn—and her own life—back from rot and neglect, Jami stumbles on a series of disturbing discoveries, including a possible murder. When more “accidents” begin to occur, including the disappearance of an African-American toddler in whom a wealthy white matriarch has taken a peculiar interest, Jami suspects she has at her history-savvy fingertips old stories with new clues to the truth. If only she can sort out the bad guys from the good.

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