EXCLUSIVE: Former Child Actress Quinn Cummings On Perils And Promise Of Home Schooling

Quinn Cummings, 45, was first discovered by her neighbor and famed cinematographer James Wong Howe, who embarked the native Angeleno in an eclectic and successful career in the entertainment industry. “The agent saw me and I think, in retrospect, the kids who worked at that point tended to fall into two categories: they were very pretty and shiny and perfect, or they were very quirky, quite overweight, or red-headed and freckled all the way up to the ears,” Cummings told Uinterview exclusively. “They were really distinctive looking. I just looked like a kid.” Cummings went on to be nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her supporting role in The Goodbye Girl (1977), as well as for several Young Artist Awards for her parts in TV series Family and Grandpa, Will You Run with Me? (1984).

But in recent years, Cummings has received notoriety primarily for her writing projects, including her first book, Notes From The Underwire: Adventures from My Awkward and Lovely Life (2009), and her popular blog, The QC Report, about her personal experience as a modern career-mom. “I was home with my daughter, she was about four. And because of the way the world works, a lot of my friends moved out of town, so I was writing e-mails to people saying here’s what’s going on, here’s a stupid thing I did, here’s something funny the kid said. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I will start putting this in a neutral space, and then when anybody wants to check in with me, they can’,” Cummings said, adding that she didn’t realize the blog was being read by anybody until Newsweek named it Blog of the Week. “But it’s still to me a venue through which I can talk to my friends, telling them stupid stuff that I’ve done. Luckily, I do a lot of stupid stuff.”

Cummings’ latest venture and second book, The Year of Learning Dangerously, chronicles her adventures while homeschooling daughter Alice. “We were slightly unusual for families that were homeschooling, in that there was no terrible driving incident,” Cummings explained. “[But] I realized, with a sinking heart, that I had given birth to me. You just want your child to be better than you, and there I had one who was me in elementary school, just coasting along, doing the bare minimum and not learning how to learn,” Cummings continued. “So why did we homeschool? We were greedy.”