Nanaville

Anna Quindlen, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling novelist, opens this memoir with a scene in her grandson's kitchen, surrounded by toddler debris and robotic nursery songs. Her grandson said "Nana," and she swelled with pride at her new name, only to realize he was asking for a banana. This comic moment introduces the book's central argument: grandparents are secondary characters in a grandchild's life, not leads. They provide "color, texture, history, mythology" (6), but parents are the bedrock. From this premise, Quindlen builds an extended reflection on what it means to inhabit the role of grandmother in a way that is loving, useful, and restrained. She coins the term "Nanaville" to describe not just the role but a state of mind, a territory she inhabits as self-appointed mayor.

The book traces Quindlen's journey from her grandson Arthur's birth through his toddler years and the announcement of a second grandchild. She was in a Baltimore hotel room when her eldest son, Quin, texted that his wife Lynn Feng's water had broken. Quindlen took the planned train home and waited with her second son, Christopher, until a second text arrived: Arthur had been born via emergency cesarean section. At the hospital, she saw a bundle with glossy black hair who looked "beautifully Chinese" (25), something her own grandfathers would have found astounding. In a moment of dark comedy, the unfamiliar obstetrician looked at the baby and said, "This baby looks Asian" (25-26), prompting a nurse to explain that the mother is Chinese. Lynn had not invited Quindlen into the delivery room, and though Quindlen was initially disappointed, she recognized the decision as correct. She cites a British preacher's adage as guiding wisdom for grandparent-parent relations: "Begin as you mean to go on" (30).

The true moment of becoming Nana arrived not at the hospital but later, during a diaper change while Arthur's exhausted parents rested. Quindlen looked at his face and fell irrevocably in love. The commitment was total, yet she had to temper the impulse to take charge. This tension between instinct and restraint becomes the book's recurring theme. During an overnight vigil when Arthur was still an infant, Quindlen placed him belly-down in bed when he would not settle in his cradle, violating current medical guidelines on back-sleeping. She lay awake for three hours watching him breathe, unable to risk leaving him unsupervised in that position. She recognized she was caring for "someone else's baby" and could not apply her old pragmatic instincts freely.

Because Arthur is raised bilingually by his Chinese-born mother and his Mandarin-fluent father, Quindlen and her husband, whom Arthur calls Pop, began studying Mandarin. The first sentence they learned was "Wo ai ni, sunzi," meaning "I love you, grandson" (41). Quindlen struggled with the language but saw the effort as "the linguistic equivalent of getting down on the floor to play with him at his own level" (45). After the lessons lapsed, Arthur returned from a trip to Hong Kong and asked Quindlen for milk in Chinese: "Niunai!" (49). Through this experience, Quindlen distinguishes motherhood from grandmotherhood. Motherhood, she writes, is "mainly a roundelay of Thou shalt, shalt, shalt" (46), while being Nana is "pretty much purely about desire" (46). She acknowledges her shortcomings, particularly the profanity she acquired during years in newspaper newsrooms, and recognizes that being a good grandparent requires bringing her best self.

Interspersed throughout the book are short vignette chapters titled "Small Moments," which capture specific scenes: sitting by a frog pond while Arthur orders her to catch a frog, reading Goodnight Moon from memory because she forgot her glasses, or watching Arthur discover his own shadow. These vignettes ground the book's broader reflections in concrete, sensory detail.

The book's pivotal lesson arrived when Arthur's parents decided to enroll him in a preschool-like childcare arrangement. Quindlen objected strenuously, and her son pushed back hard. The next morning, walking with her friend Susan Parent, a former teacher of her sons, Quindlen recounted the disagreement. After a long silence, Susan asked: "Did they ask you?" (92). The question became the defining commandment of Nanaville. Quindlen articulates two rules: "love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue" (93). She concedes that the preschool decision proved completely right; Arthur thrived there, running in to see his friends each morning.

Watching Quin become a father emerges as one of the book's deepest satisfactions. Quin had long said he would never have children because the job was too hard to do correctly and catastrophic to do wrong. Quindlen reveals she once felt the same way, having taken on responsibility for her siblings after their mother's death and having been influenced by Ellen Peck's The Baby Trap and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. She watched Quin transform from a precise, demanding person into a patient, joyful father. When she asked what surprised him most about fatherhood, Quin replied that it was "how much I love him in a way I've never loved anyone before" (73).

Quindlen contrasts grandparenting past and present. Her own grandparents never babysat, never got on the floor with children, and never expressed love directly. Visits were ritualistic, and love felt conditional. Baby-boomer grandparents, she argues, are simultaneously older and younger than their predecessors: older because delayed childbearing pushed first-time grandparenthood later, and younger because they are more active than the previous generation, who were "pre-gym, pre-Botox, pre-skinny jeans" (86). Quindlen was 64 when Arthur was born; her grandmother was 47 at her first grandchild. The daughter-in-law relationship, Quindlen argues, is the linchpin of grandparental access. Lynn belongs among "the great ones, who more or less roll with everything" (124). A key scene captures their trust: during an evening walk when toddler Arthur unraveled in the cranky pre-dinner hours, Quindlen drew alongside Lynn and held out her arms. Without hesitation, Lynn handed him over: "Give it a shot" (130).

Arthur also becomes a lens through which Quindlen examines America's multiracial present. In the year he was born, one in seven new babies in the country was multiracial or multiethnic. Strangers twice asked Quindlen, "Where did you get him?" (138) while she carried him in a sling. An acquaintance remarked, "Well, at least you won't have to worry about his math scores" (140), prompting Quindlen to note that even so-called positive stereotypes remain stereotypes. Her second son's wife is a Black Belizean woman, and the couple already thinks about conversations their future children may need regarding police interactions. Quindlen argues that grandparenting offers liberation from the assumptions parents reflexively impose on children, allowing her to simply wonder what Arthur will become.

Quindlen reflects on grandchildren as a form of continuity, writing, "When nanas die they leave grandchildren and perhaps a trace memory of being coddled, kissed, attended to, and loved" (120). She notes that becoming a grandparent is "totally under the control of others" (117-118) and acknowledges those who will never occupy the role, whether because their children choose not to have children or because biology prevents it. Near the book's close, she describes the announcement of a second grandchild, a girl, a sunnu in Mandarin. She knows from experience that the parents' hearts will expand effortlessly but their hands will struggle. She recalls stripping Arthur's nursery bare because safety guidelines dictated nothing in the crib but the baby. For the second child, she knows: no bumpers needed.

The book ends with an imagined scene set decades in the future. Quindlen, now over 80, sits in a rocker on the porch of the country house, deciding whether to stay or leave before her grown grandchildren arrive with friends for the weekend. She traces the familiar arc she has witnessed twice: children who loved the house, found it boring in adolescence, and circled back as young adults. She reflects that grandchildren think they have all the time in the world, while grandparents only wish they had. She decides to stay, making herself scarce but soaking up "that feeling of being part of something so much larger than myself" (162).