Press: Private Affairs

A columnist for the home front

A man is divorced and only then learns how to be a father. A woman goes to work and worries about failing as a mother. A man and a woman attain the same professional pinnacle; she rejoices in surpassed expectations, he mourns fallen dreams. Everywhere Boston Globe Columnist Ellen Goodman turns, grownups are suffering growing pains, and so is she: "It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through."

Goodman's knowing explorations of change and its debilitating side effects have made her the sudden sensation of America's editorial pages. First syndicated in 1976, her twice-weekly column now appears in 207 papers, 45 of which have signed on this year. A collection of her pieces, Close to Home (Simon & Schuster; $9.95), was published last month. The book's 109 selections show Goodman at her evenhanded best, a cool stream of sanity flowing through a minefield of public and private quandaries. "The thinking woman's Erma Bombeck," says an editor at the Los Angeles Times. Observes Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship: "She's talking over the back fence to everybody in a very sophisticated, grownup way."

Goodman can raise a lump in the throat, writing movingly about a workaholic who dies at 51, a faded flower child of the '60s, or women who outlive their husbands. She can elicit a hearty chuckle by recounting how she lavished "time, money, attention and great expectations on four of the only all-male zucchini plants to exist in the memory of my county Agricultural Extension Service." Her feminism is sharp but not strident. When the Supreme Court limited state-financed abortions, she imagined Justice Lewis Powell "barefoot and pregnant" and offered him "a slightly salted wafer to appease his morning sickness."

Goodman describes herself as "a 38-year-old woman, mother, vegetable gardener, failed jogger and expert on only one subject: the ambivalence of life." Her extended family shares "not only an area code but also a zip code" near her native Boston, and rarely does a week go by when she doesn't see some relation or other. Divorced and the mother of an eleven-year-old daughter, she is at her most eloquent when tackling subjects close to home. "The pleasure of being a parent," she wrote last year, "is the extraordinary experience of having short people who hang around a while, who change you as they change, who push and prod and aggravate and thrill you and make life fuller."