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Interview by Ann M. Shayne
She keeps her blouses sorted from white to black.
She can open a drawer in the dark and know what she'll be pulling out.
The kitchen spices are alphabetized.
She is, in her own words, "perhaps a little on the anal retentive side."
You may think you know where your bank records are. And you may have a giant file labeled "Insurance." But as Pfeffer writes, "If you had a medical emergency, could you quickly find your health history and information about your insurance coverage? Do you have a record of your bank and credit card accounts in one convenient place? What are the birthdates and Social Security numbers of all your famly members? Would your baby-sitter know who to contact in an emergency if you couldn't be reached? Do you have an itemized list of your valuable property? When did your pets last get their shots?" Yikes, who knows?
This straightforward collection of forms is all it takes to make sense of your records. Medical, household, personal, and financial information are all covered. If you're a habitually messy soul, The Essential Home Record Book will set you on track. If you're a model of order, Pfeffer's book serves as an easy-to-access digest of all that beautiful filing you've done.
Meeting Pfeffer, you sense that she's an orderly person. She may greet you at the door in her stocking feet, but you won't find baskets of laundry on the living room floor. Her house, which she shares with husband Phil Pfeffer, president of Random House, and her youngest of three sons, is what one might call spacious. And tidy. Very tidy.
Curled up on a blue brocade sofa, Pfeffer is amazingly serene considering the schedule she keeps: commuting between Nashville and New York City several times a month to be with her husband, volunteering in a serious way with numerous local and national nonprofit organizations, and keeping track of her three sons (the eldest, living in Brussels, is about to move to Paris, and Pfeffer is planning a visit to help him get settled -- "I can pack for two weeks in Europe with one carry-on," she laughs). How did she find time to compile a book?
"Well, it kind of fell in my lap," she says. It never crossed her mind to write a book; with a background in banking, she never dreamed of writing the novel that so many fantasize about. It began with a seminar she presented at a local bank. Six weeks before the meeting, she discovered to her chagrin that she wouldn't be able to zip into a bookstore and buy the book she needed for the seminar; it didn't exist. "I mean, after 20 years in the book business {her husband was CEO and Chairman of the Board of Ingram Distribution Inc. before Random House}, I thought there was a book for everything." She went to work creating her forms.
Getting the book published was a piece of cake, thanks to some fortunate timing. As it happened, her husband was to give a speech to a group of book publishers -- shooting fish in a barrel, really. He started his speech joking that for the first time, "I have a book" to pitch. One of the two manuscripts he had with him ended up in the hands of Bob Diforio, who soon became her agent.
Now that the book is done, Pfeffer sees all sorts of uses for it. Each member of an extended family should fill out a copy, because some of the most confusing times can come when a faraway family member falls ill or dies.
And, she points out with a smile, the book makes a wonderful gift for realtors, insurance agents, and private banking staffs to provide to their clients.
Ever the perfectionist, Pfeffer points out that the book really needed to be published with three-ring binder holes already drilled, so that the pages could be easily removed. She suggests that readers punch their copies of the book -- her own copy of her book is kept in a tidy white binder.
It fills a person with tidiness envy to see how well Pamela Pfeffer keeps the many cogs of her life turning. Of course, order is relative. As Pfeffer says, "My mother thinks I'm a slob."
Clean up your act. . . and win $250!
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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