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Dickinson, Amy
Date of birth:
Nov. 6, 1959–
Profession: Advice
columnist
Address:
"Ask Amy,"
Chicago Tribune,
TT500, 435 N.
Michigan Ave.,
Chicago, IL 60611 "My
first reaction was I wanted to go straight to bed and stay there. My
second reaction was, ‘I am the great and
powerful Oz!’ . . . ," Amy Dickinson joked
to Seth Mnookin for the MSNBC Web site,
speaking of her response to having become
an advice columnist for the Chicago
Tribune
in the summer of 2003. "I know who I am
and what I’m doing. And when I answer a
letter, I think I’m talking to just ‘Busted in
Baltimore,’ not the whole world. If you approach
anything that way you can do it. I also
don’t take myself that seriously, and I think
that helps." Dickinson’s column has received
considerable publicity, since she is filling the
space left vacant by the death of Eppie
Lederer, better known as Ann Landers—for
nearly 50 years the author of one of the
world’s most popular advice columns, with
syndication in 1,200 newspapers worldwide
and 90,000 daily readers. "Ask Amy: Advice
for the Real World by Amy Dickinson" currently
appears in 53 newspapers, among
them the Los
Angeles Times, Newsday,
the Seattle Times,
the Boston
Herald,
the Baltimore Sun,
the Charlotte
Observer, the Orlando
Sun
Times,
and the Philadelphia
Enquirer, in addition to
the Chicago
Tribune.
After the Tribune
chose her to succeed
Lederer, Dickinson told
reporters that her column would be more inclusive than
Lederer’s—in
particular, that it would devote more space to men’s
concerns—and
that her style would be different from her predecessor’s.
"My column
is a general advice column, as hers was, but I’d say
my responses to people
are probably edgier and a little funnier, lengthier
and contain more
reporting," she told Current
Biography. "I’m a
pretty avid consumer
of pop culture and am more likely to make a cultural
reference. I’m
also ‘in the trenches’ of raising a child as a
single parent and I draw on
my own experiences as a starting point in my
answers." Like Lederer,
Dickinson adopts a more serious attitude when writing
about complicated
or significant problems, and she often points readers
to books or
Web sites for further information.
The youngest of four children, Amy Dickinson was born
on November
6, 1959 on a dairy farm in Freeville, New York, a town
of 450 people
in the Finger Lakes district of the state. Both her
mother’s and her
father’s families have lived in the region, or in
New England, since
about the turn of the 17th century; her distant
relatives include the
19th-century poet Emily Dickinson. Her parents, Jane
Genung and
Charles Lee Dickinson, divorced after her father left
the family, when
Amy was 12. She and her siblings—her brother,
Charles, and sisters,
Rachel and Anne—continued to live on the farm with
their mother for
some time, but, having "lost all of our
livestock" and "auctioned off the
contents of the barn and all our equipment," as
Dickinson told Current
"Ann Landers
was a person of
her time, and
I’m a person
very much of
my time."
Biography,
they rented the land to neighbors; later, they sold it to relatives.
"It was really a hardscrabble life there and
eventually the farm
went the way of many small farms, out of
business," she told Rick Kogan
for the Chicago
Tribune (July 9, 2003).
Her mother got a job as
a typist at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York;
at age 50 she returned
to school, earning a master of fine arts degree at
Cornell and
becoming a teacher of writing there and then at Ithaca
College. She
is now retired and lives in Freeville. Dickinson has
said that her mother
is the person she most admires and the one to whom she
most often
turns for advice. Dickinson’s father is a beekeeper
and beehive inspector
in rural Pennsylvania.
Dickinson began college at Clark University, in
Worcester, Massachusetts,
in 1977; she completed her junior and senior years at
Georgetown
University, in Washington, D.C., where she earned a
B.A. degree
in English in 1981. Her college activities including
playing varsity field
hockey and singing in school choirs and chamber
groups; once, she
sang in a choir at a papal Mass in Washington.
("For a Presbyterian that
was quite a big deal," she told Current
Biography.) After she
graduated
Dickinson worked in a bicycle shop on Block Island,
Rhode Island, and
sang with a local rock band before returning to
Washington, where she
held a series of menial jobs and also worked as a
lounge singer in a bar.
Thanks to the intervention of two of the bar’s
patrons, she landed an
entry-level job at NBC-TV’s Washington bureau; she
worked first at
the news desk and then on the overnight shift as a
desk editor. While
there, she told Current
Biography, she impressed
the television anchor
Roger Mudd by answering a "newsroom trivia
question" about the musical
Paint Your Wagon.
In 1983 she moved to New York City, where
the New
Yorker hired her as a
receptionist. She left that job when
Mudd hired her as an associate producer for NBC in New
York. In that
position she helped to produce stories for several
short-lived newsmagazine
shows, among other assignments.
In 1986 Dickinson married the CBS News correspondent
Anthony
Mason. The following year she moved with him to
London, England,
where, in 1988, their daughter, Emily, was born. The
couple divorced
in 1990, and the next year Dickinson moved with her
daughter to
Washington, D.C., where she took a temporary job at
National Public
Radio (NPR), filling in for an employee who was on
maternity leave.
In time she secured a part-time job at NPR as a
commentaries editor
and producer. In 1996 she started writing and
producing stories for the
NPR weekday program All
Things Considered and
writing a weekly
column for the American Online Web site’s news
channel. Meanwhile,
she had established herself as a freelance writer; her
pieces appeared
in the Washington
Post, Esquire,
Allure,
and Vanity Fair,
among other
publications, and she wrote several commentaries for
the TV series
CBS Sunday Morning.
She also worked as a substitute nursery-school
teacher and as a Sunday-school teacher
("experiences which I cherish,"
she told Current
Biography). In 1999 the
Washington bureau chief of
Time magazine,
who had heard several of her stories on NPR, hired
her to write a column about family life. The column
appeared for more
than two years.
In her pieces for Time,
in addition to describing aspects of her life
as a single parent and experiences with her large
extended family,
Dickinson frequently offered advice. She wrote of the
importance of
maintaining good relationships with all the
grandparents of one’s child,
even when no longer involved with the child’s other
parent; counseled
parents on raising children who appreciate the value
of money; and
recommended that people who are planning to get
married find out
first about the family, friends, and future plans of
those they intend to
wed. Other topics she covered were ways to help
children deal with
death; the problems parents face due to a lack of
affordable, quality
child care; video games that do not contain excessive
violence; the Million
Mom March for gun control; ways to persuade children
to do
chores; eating disorders among boys; and lessons in
table manners for
children. She sometimes angered her readers with her
advice, as in a
2000 column in which she defended the idea of a co-ed
sleepover party
for teenagers, provided the party is held in one large
room; she wrote
that teens would be less likely to engage in sexual
behavior if they
lacked privacy. Dickinson’s employment at Time
ended after the
September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and the
Pentagon.
During the next months, because of the worsening
economy, she found
freelance jobs scarce.
Soon after Esther "Eppie" Lederer died, on
July 22, 2002, editors
at the Chicago
Tribune began the search
for another writer to offer solutions
to readers’ problems. Dickinson, who had done some
freelance
writing for the paper, commented jokingly in an E-mail
message to one
of the paper’s editors that she would love to have
such a job; a month
later she was invited to try out for the post. Along
with nine other candidates,
she was sent sample questions by E-mail and given a
week to answer
them. "It was so fun, I got started and really
enjoyed it, and I emailed
back literally within two or three hours," she
told Mnookin.
"[The editor] told me to take the full week, but
I said no, this is it, this
is my answer, if you want me, I’m right here on the
page. . . . I knew
to do the job I’d have to work very quickly, and I
feel like that’s one
of my assets." She told Current
Biography, "The
moment I answered
those questions, I knew that I could do the job and
that I wanted to
do the job." As reported by the New
York Post (July 9, 2003,
on-line),
the Tribune
editor Ann Marie
Lipinski said that Dickinson quickly distinguished
herself from her competitors: "Amy just kept
answering
questions with tremendous common sense, some from the
head, some
from the heart and that, combined with her reporting
skills, to me,
made a very potent candidate." As soon as she was
offered the job,
Dickinson telephoned a Freeville diner where she knew
her mother
and a dozen other members of her family were having
breakfast. The
family "were all quite sunned, I assure
you," she told Current
Biography.
The daily column "Ask Amy: Advice for the Real
World by Amy
Dickinson" debuted in the Chicago
Tribune on July 20, 2003
and was
picked up for syndication by Tribune Media Services on
September 1
of that year. "I am tremendously excited by this
opportunity but the
other night I had a dream about being buried under
envelopes," she
said, as reported by Kogan. "And I worry about
trying to fill Eppie
Lederer’s pumps. She was really skilled at taking
the national pulse,
and her column over the years reflected the hopes,
dreams, fears and
concerns of the great wide majority of the American
public. . . . I really
want my column to reflect this moment in time and to
give people
a place to turn for a humane hearing of their problems
and to offer accurate
and helpful advice."
Dickinson revealed that she had read the Ann Landers
column
while growing up. "Reading her column allowed me
to listen to the national
dialogue," she told Kogan. "People in
Dallas, Iowa City, Savannah,
Boston, Portland and upstate New York were worried
about the
Vietnam War and alcoholism and, oh, yes, meddling
mothers-in-law.
Sometimes her column was just really entertaining, but
reading that
there are strangers out there who shared problems and
concerns, that
was a tremendous value. Ann Landers was a person of
her time, and
I’m a person very much of my time."
In her first column Dickinson gave advice to a
gas-station clerk on
how to tell if a regular customer was interested in
him romantically,
then urged him not to undervalue himself because of
his unprestigious
job. She also recommended to the mother of a
20-year-old man with
no job or initiative that she charge him rent if he
moved back home,
and provided a teen with ways to tell whether or not a
boy had a crush
on her. A July 24 column advised a woman not to alter
a ring given to
her as a keepsake by her grandmother, and told a
long-married couple
trying to cope with the anger in their relationship to
seek marriage
counseling.
Dickinson has covered weightier topics in her column
as well. Her
August 6 column included a letter from a married man
who had had
an affair with a woman in his neighborhood and
believed that he, not
the woman’s husband, was the father of the woman’s
two-year-old son.
The writer of the letter, already a father, wanted to
have a hand in raising
the child. "You mention that you have a family,
yet don’t seem interested
in the effect this will have on them. In fact, you
seem more interested
in punishing this child’s mother and taking him from
the only father
he has known, than in being a father to the boy,"
Dickinson responded.
"That having been said, now that you’re in this
mess, you do
need to deal with it. If you are this boy’s father,
he needs to know soon;
there are emotional as well as genetic implications
here, and he is an
innocent party who deserves the truth." She urged
the man to get in
touch with a professional mediator with a background
in family law to
explore his options; to learn about paternity laws in
his state; and to talk
to the child’s mother to work out a solution
"that hopefully revolves
around the best interests of this child."
In her August 10 column, in response to a letter from
a widowed
78-year-old woman who complained about being left out
of family activities
and ignored because of her age, Dickinson chastised
her own
generation for failing to respect and value its
elders. "If we don’t start
listening to and learning from our elders, we’re
going to be the most
self-absorbed, demanding and difficult older
generation imaginable,"
Dickinson wrote. "So partly, I’d like to make a
plea for younger people
to spend less time yammering about their jobs and kids
and more time
listening to their older relatives and friends. But I
also would urge all
the elders out there who feel similarly frustrated to
please get together
with one another, form social clubs and book groups,
go on outings and
spend time volunteering or just watching videos
together. Don’t wait
for my generation to become less self-absorbed and
more respectful—
that’s going to take time, and you deserve to feel
honored and useful
right now." In her August 14 column she responded
to a letter from
a 32-year-old man who believed that he would be more
comfortable
living as a woman but was afraid to explore hormone
therapy or surgery
for fear of his family’s reaction. Dickinson
recommended that he read
the book She’s
Not There: A Life in Two Genders,
by Jennifer Finney
Boylan, and that he further research the issue and
seek a qualified therapist
to help him work through his feelings before
undergoing therapy,
as his friends had suggested. "Being transgender
doesn’t mean you’re
gay or straight," she wrote, addressing the man’s
confusion about his
sexuality. "Gender is often separate from sexual
orientation; but once
you work the gender thing out, your sexual orientation
might become
clearer. . . . What you must do is act now to try to
explore who you
really are so you can make your own informed
decisions."
"Amy is not only a terrific reporter but someone
with a common
sense approach to dealing with life and with life’s
questions," Anne Marie
Lipinski told Kogan. "She is also a delight to be
around. It is rare
to find people who on paper are the same as they are
in person. Amy
is just that and I think readers will immediately
sense it." Dickinson and
her daughter, Emily, live in Chicago. She has
described herself as a voracious
reader and passionate fan of old movies. She also
enjoys singing
and running along the shore of Lake Michigan. "My
favorite way to
start the day is to run along the Lake as the sun is
coming up," she told
Current Biography.
"I run toward the beautiful Chicago skyline and
still can’t believe how lucky I am to be here.
Sometimes I feel as if I’ve
come a very long way from where I started, but most of
the time I don’t.
I feel like exactly the same person I’ve always been—my
concerns and
my dreams and aspirations don’t seem to have changed
all that much."
—K.E.D.
SUGGESTED READING:
Chicago Tribune
Tempo p1 July 9,
2003, with photos
CNN (on-line) July
20, 2003
MSNBC (on-line)
July 9, 2003, with
photo
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