The Mighty Quinn

SPOTLIGHT

Sally Quinn has settled in. Her season of frenetic fame as the spark plug of The Washington Post's "Style" section and the inevitably public romance with her then boss and now husband, Ben Bradlee, have culminated in the summer of her content. This month, Happy Endings, her second novel (and third book), will be published by Simon and Schuster. And this past September, the general's daughter presided over an elaborate, weekend-long birthday party for Bradlee at their Maryland estate. Tom Brokaw, Art Buchwald, Al Gore, and Lauren Bacall were among the 250 friends and family who gathered at Porto Bello to fish, sail, dance, and pay tribute. The sharp-tongued observer who once delighted in her ability to epater les bureaucrates is "very at peace with herself" these days, say her friends. And if Happy Endings—which picks up the story she began in her 1986 best-seller, Regrets Only—is a roman a clef, it may provide the key to one source of that mellowing: Sally and Ben's nine-yearold son, Quinn, who has battled a serious congenital heart problem. For all the journalistic, political, and romantic plot twists, the book's most deeply felt scenes are those between a mother and her stricken child. Happy Endings goes beyond the world of brittle power plays, to lay bare matters of the heart.