Mary Chapin-Carpenter
Caroline B. Cooney
Paula Danziger
David Diaz
Mem Fox
Kevin Henkes
William Joyce
Kathleen Krull
Han Nolan
Gary Paulsen

Interview by Alice Cary

Anna Quindlen has already won over thousands of fans with her best-selling novels, "Object Lessons" and "One True Thing," not to mention her Pulitzer Prize-winning "New York Times" columns. Later this year, moviegoers will be treated to Meryl Streep and William Hurt in the film version of "One True Thing." With all of these triumphs, however, Quindlen says that without a doubt, her latest novel, "Black and Blue" is her best yet.

Yet she is also the first to admit that "Black and Blue" -- about a battered woman who takes her ten-year-old son and flees her abusive husband -- is not easy to digest. Radio host Don Imus, for instance, recently called her and confessed that after reading the first sentence ("The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old"), he could go no further. Yes, Quindlen says, people may be surprised by the subject matter. "Over the years -- and not entirely with good reason, I might add --" she says, "I gained a reputation as a kind of cockeyed optimist. And I'm amazed by the extent to which early readers have managed to find some sort of optimistic resolution in this book despite the subject matter."

Readers going beyond that first sentence will be duly rewarded, because the story is skillfully told, suspenseful and filled with strong characters. Fran Benedetto, the heroine, doesn't come off as a victim. She's a nurse who enlists the help of a secretive organization to leave New York City and establish a brand-new identity and home for herself and her son in Florida.

"She's a very smart, together woman," Quindlen says of Fran. "You don't read about her and think poor, downtrodden person. She's very much a person you can imagine being a friend with. And being a good friend with. I think that's really important. There's a sense in which the book starts at the moment in which she refuses to be passive to anyone. . . . I admire her a lot."

On the other hand, Quindlen had to paint a careful portrait of the abusive husband, Bobby, a police officer. "Fran is pretty crazy about him," Quindlen says. "One of the things that I really did not want to do was to demonize him. Which is why he gets to say a lot of pretty interesting and smart things. . . . I think there will be charges that this book indulges in male-bashing, so I think it's really important to recognize that both the most horrible character in this book and the most wonderful character are men."

That latter character is Mike Riordan, a gym teacher in Florida who befriends both Robert and Fran and gradually takes a romantic interest in Fran.

What inspired Quindlen to tackle such a tough subject?

"I actually wanted to write a book about marriage," she says. "About how naive people are going into it, about what it really consists of, about how difficult and onerous it is. And also how increasingly we accept that men and women are very, very different psychologically, in the main, and yet we still yoke them together for life."

"I'm not proposing any alternative," adds the happily married mother of three, "because I think that it's the only thing that works, and it's the bedrock of all that most of us do. And so when I sat down to work on this book, it occurred to me that frequently the truths about human experience are found at the margins of human experience . . . . [So to write about] a marriage that was very, very bad in some way indeed seemed to me one of the obvious ways to explore it."

Quindlen does a convincing job of conveying the terror Fran feels while trying to establish a new life, yet the details sprang from her imagination. Nor is she aware that anyone she knows is in an abusive relationship, although she realizes that many spouses are secretive about the problem. "I've had some glancing contact with women in this situation as a reporter," she says, "but I think it's important to say that I didn't do any research for this book. I think because of my background [working for the "New York Times"], people assume that I spent six months in shelters talking to women who have been beaten up. That belies the fact that to some extent the violence in this book is a metaphor for something else. It's a metaphor for a complete lack of communication and understanding that sometimes takes place in a marriage."

Do organizations exist like the one that helps Fran escape to Florida and provides her with a new identity and apartment?

"I have no idea," Quindlen says.

Still, she is buoyed to note that when readers discuss "Black and Blue," they speak as though the characters are real. This was also the case when editors at Random House gathered to try to convince Quindlen to make some changes to the novel's ending.

"I knew exactly what was going to happen," she says. "The people in publishing were very disconcerted by [what happened.] There was a lot of back and forth about whether I would change it."

Not to give away the finale, but the author did agree to add one phone call to the last few pages, a call that she now deems "exactly right."

But not exactly happy, either.

"People are so invested in happy endings," Quindlen muses. "I think that's why people are so frequently disappointed in their own lives, because they've had a bellyful of happy endings in film and fiction and they don't quite understand why it doesn't happen that way. And I think good literary fiction mirrors real life and I certainly think that this book does."

One more thing that pleases the author has been the reaction of her sister, the manager of a Borders bookstore in San Diego. After finishing the novel, she called to say that she scoured it for autobiographical references, but ended up empty-handed.

"And I said, 'There aren't any,' " Quindlen replies. "Given that there's an overblown sense of how much autobiography was in 'Object Lessons' and 'One True Thing,' it's very satisfying for me to have written a book that's really completely imagined."

Even so, she predicts that some readers will assume the story is somehow true.

"There's a great irony," says the journalist-turned-novelist, "in the fact that people don't really seem to believe in fiction. And at the same time I was in the newspaper business for 25 years and we were constantly accused of making up the stuff that we wrote. I'm still trying to get my mind around that one."

Alice Cary has interviewed many writers for BookPage.