More Than Enough
More Than Enough
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Anna Quindlen on More Than Enough
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A question older than the plotBefore Quindlen had a story, she had a question about whether the people who form us are always the people we share blood with. The DNA test that sets the novel in motion is just the mechanism she found to force that question into the open.
Are our blood and heart the same thing? Are they sometimes separate? Are there times when they’re always separate? Those are some of the things that we have to think about when we think about who we love, who we care for, who has shaped us. [paraphrased from audio]
Polly’s mother, Mary Goodman, is the character who gave the novel its particular tension. Quindlen positioned her not as a villain but as a representative figure, a woman who looked at domesticity in the 1970s and made a hard exit into professional life while her children were still young. The novel’s real interest is in what Polly, now forty-one, does with that history.
She’s a kind of an avatar of a woman of my generation — she got married, she had children, she looked around, she thought, ‘Is that all there is?’ And her answer to that question was to then, even though she had young children, go to law school, do really well, become a law firm partner, and be elevated to a judgeship. [paraphrased from audio]
The title arrived last, pulled from a line Polly speaks to her brother Garrison near the novel’s close. Quindlen traced what drew her to it: the gap the phrase opens between meeting a standard and exceeding what anyone could have hoped for.
There’s a moment in the book where Polly says to her brother Garrison, ‘Oh, Gara, you’re so much more than enough.’ And there was something about that that sort of went to the heart of things. Enough is fine, but more than enough. Above and beyond. [paraphrased from audio]
That distinction, between sufficient and exceptional, between blood that merely connects and people who surpass what you thought connection could mean, is the architecture the rest of the novel is built around.
How she wrote it
First person, chosen on purposeWriting in Polly’s first-person voice imposed a precondition: Quindlen had to feel genuine warmth for her narrator before she could begin. That condition was met partly through profession. Her own formation as a writer ran through teachers she credits with shaping her, and putting Polly in a classroom deepened what she already felt for the character.
It’s very important for me when I’m writing a first-person novel that I feel a powerful affinity with the person telling the story, and I sure do with Polly. I think she’s great. [paraphrased from audio]
Every job Quindlen assigned to a character was a question in disguise. The sharpest version surfaces in a single exchange between Polly and Mark, where Polly complains that her mother is judgmental and Mark answers, simply, that her mother is a judge. The whole cast is built around the same provocation.
Certainly our professions shape us, but did we choose them in the first place because of the shape of our own characters? [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s structure follows the logic of a T.S. Eliot poem that Quindlen had in mind throughout: that we circle back to where we started, and the circling is itself the point. The last line, she said, returns Polly to her beginning.
The Eliot poem says essentially, we circle around and come back to where we started. And there’s a lot of that in this book, but the circling is what so much of life is about. [paraphrased from audio]
The infertility passages were the place where Quindlen felt she was asking the most of herself as a writer, reaching for an experience that was not directly hers. Her own entry point came through a months-long stint at an infusion center, where she received treatment for severe anemia while nearly every other patient around her was receiving chemotherapy. What she took from the experience was not the medical detail but the specific fury of a body that had turned against its owner.
You do always feel as a novelist as though you’re taking this leap of faith and maybe you’re leaping farther than you’re entitled to. And so to hear that you stuck the landing is a terrific feeling. [paraphrased from audio]
Quindlen has long separated the experience of sitting down to write from the confidence that anything worthwhile will emerge from it. This description of her daily process, from an interview about her earlier novel After Annie, captures a discipline that has carried across her fiction: the ritual of not writing, the persistent doubt, and the occasional reward that keeps her returning.
I wake up early most mornings, when it’s still dark, then I go through my various rituals of not writing... I sit down every time thinking that nothing good will come of this, and the only reason I keep doing it—other than the fact that it’s not what I do, it’s who I am—is because every once in a while something good does come.
The personal thread
Motherhood and loss, returned to againWhen Quindlen names the subjects that have driven her fiction across decades, she names two, and they are inseparable. The grief that runs through Polly’s story, grief for the mother she didn’t have and the child she cannot carry, sits squarely inside the territory Quindlen has staked out as her own.
Motherhood and loss. Those are my big two. Those are the ones that I think have made me think about my own life and the lives of my fictional characters over and over again.
Quindlen’s mother died young, and her own life has run more than three decades past that death. That arithmetic runs in the background of a novel about what a daughter owes a mother, and what a mother owes a daughter, across an entire adult life.
I’ve lived 33 years longer than my mother did. I’ve gotten so many experiences that she never got to have and would have loved, and that makes me really grateful.
On what the book is wrestling with
How long a grievance is entitled to lastThe novel keeps circling one problem that Quindlen refuses to resolve easily: at what point does a forty-one-year-old woman’s resentment toward her mother become something she chose to keep, rather than something that was done to her. Polly’s late conversation with Mary is where the book presses hardest on that question.
One of the most important moments for Polly in this novel is right at the very end when she has a conversation with her mother where she suddenly understands her in a way that she never has before. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel was conceived after Quindlen had spent enough years watching women carry an old story about what their life was supposed to be. Her argument, made through Polly, is that the moment a life looks smaller than expected is not necessarily the moment it actually is smaller.
All of us live with the disconnect between what we thought was going to happen and what did happen. And the thing that I think sometimes we lose sight of is at the moments when our life seems less than what we had come to expect, there’s always a possibility that in a year or ten years or twenty years, it will turn out to be much more. [paraphrased from audio]
Quindlen is careful to keep the novel from flattening into an argument that chosen family simply replaces biological family. Her own sense of loss, articulated across many years of interviews, points to why: absence does not resolve.
Grief can lose its sharp edges, loss never does. It’s the eternal presence of an absence.
What she wants us to sit with
The search has no retirement dateSelf-examination is usually assigned to adolescence in the culture around it, and Quindlen wanted to challenge that. Polly teaches teenage girls precisely because their unresolved questions keep her own visible. Quindlen, who was seventy-three when the novel was published, made her case from her own life.
Everyone I know is looking for themselves. We tend to silo that and think that that’s mainly the preserve of adolescence, or young people, but I’m 73 years old, and every day I’m looking for myself. If you stopped doing that, you stop being human, because there are constantly things that happen in your life, in your work, that make you have to reassess who you are and what you really care about. [paraphrased from audio]
The DNA test at the novel’s center could have been used to argue for blood’s primacy. Quindlen uses it to argue the opposite. She wants readers to leave the book having taken chosen bonds as seriously as inherited ones, and this is the sentence she arrives at when she names that argument directly.
I think that one of the great elements of progress in modern life is that we’ve come to understand that heart is as important as blood, and that sometimes, sometimes more important. [paraphrased from audio]
Polly still returns to where she started. The novel does not dissolve her biological family. What it asks is that readers hold open the possibility that the people who are truly foundational to a life are not always the ones who share its blood.