By Katie Scarvey
kscarvey@salisburypost.com
Syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson makes a living serving as the voice of reason for millions.”Ask Amy” fans are addicted to her down-to-earth advice, whether it’s based on simple logic or on a heartfelt commitment to human decency.
Now, thanks to her recent memoir, “The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them,” Dickinson’s devoted following can get a glimpse into what informs her world view.
The book certainly provides an abundance of clues.
When Dickinson was 12 years old, her father drove his pickup right out of his family’s life, leaving a wife, four children and a barn full of dairy cows. Dickinson looked on as their farm equipment was auctioned off.
Dickinson, 49, came across as reflective as she discussed the situation in a phone interview.
“When I look back, I’ve got to hand it to my mother. She really behaved as I think adults should behave when traumatic things happen. She didn’t fall apart in front of us, and she never spoke ill of him, if you can imagine.
“It wasn’t discussed very much. It was just accepted as a fact.”
A farm wife for years, Dickinson’s mother fought her way back to the surface, securing a job as a typist at Cornell University.
In the book, Dickinson poignantly describes her mother coming home exhausted after work, lying down on her bed, still wearing her coat and holding her purse across her stomach.
“I just need twenty minutes,” she’d say.
“I have tears in my eyes thinking about it,” Dickinson said.
The “old-fashioned, tweedy deans” she worked for at Cornell called her in after she’d been there five years or so and encouraged her to go back to school.
She paid attention, Dickinson said ó and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree, followed by an MFA. She then joined the ranks of her tweedy mentors as an instructor at Cornell.
Recognizing what a true opportunity looks like is a trait Dickinson believes she shares with her mother.
“I don’t think of myself as being aggressive,” she said, “but when an opportunity presents itself, I get it.”
Dickinson received her big opportunity in 2002. She’d sent a joking e-mail to an editor at the Chicago Tribune ó where she’d worked as a freelancer ó saying that she’d like Ann Landers’ old job. Shortly thereafter she was invited to apply.
She sat down immediately and crafted her responses to sample questions, submitting them within a few hours, even though she she was urged to take a full week to finish.
She got the job and started in the summer of 2003.
Dickinson said she receives several hundred e-mails a day and 20-50 pieces of paper mail.
Dickinson’s own trials have shaped her approach to people’s problems.
Her life was upended almost two decades ago when her television journalist husband asked for a divorce while they were living in London.
In “The Mighty Queens,” she tells the story of the time he first met her family. Her mother asked him to chop down a small tree in the front yard.
He performed about as well as you might expect from a guy brought up in Manhattan.
“I thought it was so charming,” Dickinson said. “I was well aware of how different we were. He was so sophisticated and so much of a city boy, very elegant and well-mannered.”
Ultimately though, “we could not overcome how different we were,” she said.
And so Dickinson found herself unwillingly following a well-established pattern in her family, in which divorce, she writes, runs “like an aggressive chromosome.”
After the breakup, Dickinson returned with her young daughter, Emily, to her tiny hometown of Freeville, N.Y., to lick her wounds and begin to figure out the rest of her life. Much of the book is devoted to the support she found there with the women her daughter dubbed The Mighty Queens.
Dickinson chronicles some of her post-divorce dating nightmares, including an evening with an architect ó who announced that he didn’t like her body.
The uncalled-for civility of her shell-shocked response still embarrasses her, she says.
“I hope we can still be friends,” she told him.
Don’t feel bad for Dickinson, though, who eventually reconnected with a man from Freeville she’d grown up with.
She and Bruno Schickel married last summer, and their wedding was covered by The New York Times.
“What a joy, to be a middle-aged woman, to find love and feel those feelings and to be mature enough to know how fleeting and precious it is,” she said.
Getting four extra daughters was a bonus for Dickinson.
“I’d always wanted to have more children in my life,” she said.
These days, she splits her time between Freeville and Chicago.
She’s focused on “trying to take good care of my mom and the other women in my life who need it,” she said.
“I can’t wait until spring, when Bruno and I can walk in the fields and we can get two more daughters graduated from high school, and I can dig in the garden. That’s what I think about.”
A theater project is also a “long-off goal” of hers.
But don’t worry; she doesn’t have plans to quit her gig as American’s favorite advice guru.
“I think I’m surprised at how much I still enjoy doing it,” she said. “Honestly, when I took the job I didn’t think I’d be able to sustain doing it for many years, but I still really enjoy it.”
And people are needing advice more than ever, especially as the economy spirals downward. Dickinson said she’s noticed recently that most of letters she’s getting are about financial hardship.
Her column, she said, “is a real barometer of what’s going on.”
She offered as an example a letter from a woman who had gotten engaged. She and her fiancé had planned for him to leave his job and move to her part of the country. The man, however, was nervous about quitting his job.
Dickinson said that while five years ago she wouldn’t have thought twice about advising them to follow their hearts, she could not in good conscience counsel the man to quit his job, given the current economy.
Dickinson deals with issues of technology that her predecessor Ann Landers never dreamed of.
“Technology has had a huge impact on the way we interact with each other,” said Dickinson, adding that she receives a lot of letters about simple etiquette ó like whether it’s OK to text at the table when you’re out to dinner with Grandma or questions about husbands and wives tracking one another’s cell phone usage.
“Technology has made it much quicker and easier for us to get into trouble with one another,” she said.
Some of the most troubling letters are from children who write “fretting about their parents’ behavior,” whether it’s drinking or fighting.
“Children shouldn’t have to worry about the adults in their lives, and sometimes I really can’t believe how self-centered parents can be.”
A nice change of pace from being the great and powerful Oz ó as she once jokingly described herself ó is sitting on the panel for National Public Radio’s popular game show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me.”
While her column is “a pretty serious pursuit,” “Wait Wait” allows her lighter side to emerge.
When she first started doing the show, she was disappointed when she didn’t win.
“Don’t you get it?” a producer asked her. “Paula Poundstone has been doing the show for years and has never won.”
Then it clicked that “the whole idea was to go down in flames, but funny,” she said.
Dickinson hasn’t flamed out with her column, although she occasionally gets taken to task for her answers.
“Fortunately, I haven’t yet made what I would consider a huge error, but readers have opportunities to take issue with my advice, and they frequently do.”
She tries not to stress too much about people’s problems. Ann Landers’ old editor gave some very valuable advice, she said.
He told her that Ann Landers ó or Eppie Lederer ó always said that the problems she dealt with in her column weren’t hers, that she had her own problems.
“I took that to be a very healthy way of differentiating,” Dickinson said.
Still, two years into doing the column, Dickinson said, she sought therapy. She made that decision partly because she wanted to be more educated about something she frequently recommends, but also because the column does sometimes weigh on her.
“I did need a place to talk about my own problems, which seemed so trivial,” she said.
Her therapy sessions led her to consider telling her own story ó which ultimately led to a two-book deal with Hyperion. Her next book, she said, will be a memoir focusing on her childhood.
“I was so dreamy, such a dreamy little kid, quite a character,” she said. “I give my parents credit for letting me be the way I was. When I look at parents trying to shoehorn their kids into being a version of this or that, I think, thank goodness my own family let me be who I was, and they got a kick out of me.”
One of her earliest memories, she says, was when she was about 3 1/2 years old and being put up on a chair at a holiday gathering.
“I sang ‘Hello Dolly’ like Louis Armstrong,” she said. “And I remember thinking, I’ve got them.”
And 40-odd years later, she’s got the rest of us, too. nnnDickinson will make an appearance at 3 p.m. next Sunday, Feb. 22, at Quail Ridge Books and Music, 3522 Wade Avenue in Raleigh.