Postpregnancy, Roberts plans to take a similar Zen-like approach to her career, though she was surprised at the reaction to a remark she made to Newsweek last summer about the impossibility of predicting her next move. “Everybody was like, ‘She's retiring!’ It was like the shot heard 'round the world,” she says. “I had a man come up to me in the market and say, ‘Oh please, don't tell me you are not going to make any more movies!’ It was so sweet. I said, ‘I'm not going anywhere.’”
She does say that from now on, in order for her to sign up for a film, “the script will have to blow me away. The babies will be a great factor, like anything that makes your life more interesting and more enjoyable. Scripts will have to continue to compete with the quality of my life.”
There are no piles of scripts in Roberts's hospital room today; only a few novels, including Kent Haruf's Plainsong, along with some knitting. She's currently finishing up a baby sweater but will soon stop making things for her kids, she says. “I am going to wait and see what they like.” She'll wait and see about everything else too. The one certainty is that as soon as she and Moder can, they'll fly back to their ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where Phinnaeus and Hazel will join their clan of eight dogs adopted from the pound.
“There's no real plan,” Roberts says. “We'll just go along like we always have. Except there will be more of us.”
