Thoughts 
by Anna Quindlen, Random House Trade 2012, 205 pages
Challenge: What’s in a Name: Celebration category
Genre/Theme: Essays, Family and Motherhood, Aging, Feminism
Type/Source: Tradeback / Second Hand Bookstore Purchase
What It’s About: Anna shares her thoughts on aging. She is so insightful and hopeful.
“At age 60 I find myself poised between the inevitable and the possible, the things I know and understand and the things I hope to learn and perhaps unravel. But it’s still a bit of a mystery, the yet to come, with that greatest of all mysteries, mortality, at its very end.”
Thoughts: She talks a lot about family and her place in the progression of time. Also her timing into the American workforce balanced with the progression of the women’s movement. And, considerate of being thankful that she lived past the age her mother died, and in the realization of how much her mother missed by dying young, and also the perspective of how her mother’s death impacted her appreciation of life ongoing. I was especially thankful and admiring of her essay on religion.
Rating: I don’t think I was cognizant of her use of the the title in the text, nor do I think she ever mentioned pie. Five slices of pie because I love her. And the cover makes me happy.
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Care's Books and Pie 
Agree. I love her, too. Special dispensation to Anna Quindlen for a five-star review despite the lack of pie.
I don’t blame her for keeping a cake theme since, the title.
I loved this book, too, and have both the hardcover and audio. Would love to listen to it again… Quindlen is the best!
AND! I just bought Still Life with Bread Crumbs. The year of AQ!
I loved this when I read it in 2016. Just looked at my review, and one of the quotes I shared did include the title phrase. Here you go:
“Many of us have come to a surprising conclusion about this moment in our lives. No, it’s not that there are weird freckly spots on the back of our hands, although there are, or that construction guys don’t make smutty comments as we pass, although they don’t. It’s that we’ve done a pretty good job of becoming ourselves, and that this is, in so many ways, the time of our lives. As Carly Simon once sang, ‘These are the good old days.’ Lots of candles, plenty of cake. I wouldn’t be twenty-five again on a bet, or even forty. And when I say this to a group of women at lunch, everyone around the table nods. Many of us find ourselves exhilarated, galvanized, at the very least older and wiser.”
Thanks! I recall a hazy memory of that mention now that you provide it. 😀