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The Coulter family argy-bargy was friendly but intense, and formative. "For a younger girl with two older brothers, you've got to learn to mix it up, stand up for yourself," says Merrill Kinstler, 41, a stock trader and close friend. "Older brothers are not going to cut you any slack. If you say something stupid, you figure, next time, I'm going to be better at it." Kinstler, an ex-Democrat who speaks with Coulter virtually every day, describes her as "a cat who thinks she's a dog. She's very much a woman, but she likes ... mixing it up in what I think is a very guy way. Let's put it this way. I have never heard from her, and I know I never will, the following two words: I'm offended."
Indeed, Coulter can be almost as acerbic with herself and her family as she is with liberals. "Because I'm a cranky conservative," Coulter has written, "the world simply reinforces my prejudices on a daily basis." Even her dear mother isn't exempt from her raillery. Last year Nell Coulter learned she had ovarian cancer. She underwent surgery last fall and has had regular chemotherapy this year. She says Ann has taken her to every appointment and remembered every detail for the doctors. But it's not Ann's nature to sound weepy; among her greatest fears--boredom, irrelevance, getting caught on a plane without a nicotine patch--is sentimentalism. For weeks, as we talked for this story, she wouldn't go on the record about her mom's cancer--she half-jokingly said any humanizing detail might slow attacks from liberals, which help sell books. When she finally relented and said I could call her mother, she matter-of-factly told me to do so before the following Wednesday. "She gets the chemo on Wednesday, and once the chemo sets in"--Coulter began to laugh--"for the first week, she gets a little daft from the chemo ... Whenever I call them [her parents], it rings. It rings. It rings. The phone picks up. 'Wait a minute. I have to take my hearing aid out.' 'Find the phone that works.' It's pandemonium calling old people!" Coulter often speaks with great affection for her parents, and she said this with a light, you-know-how-it-is tone. But there's no mistaking: this is a person who will say anything, even when the camera is off.
Coulter got on the honor roll as a kid, fenced and played lacrosse, went to Ramones and Grateful Dead shows (dozens of Dead shows--drug free, she claims). She grew up in a Reagan household and began to explore conservatism on her own at Cornell. There she discovered both liberals, who made her more conservative, and feckless conservatives in the "cigar-smoking, martini-drinking, oh-I-get-drunk-all-the-time libertarian mode," who made her more socially conservative. But there was a twist. In 1984, in an article for the conservative Cornell Review, Coulter attacked its editor for writing, "Statistics are like bikinis: what they show is important, but what they conceal is vital." "The message is clear," Coulter responded in her article. "The vital parts are the breasts and the vagina, so go get her." I was surprised to find that the piece made a standard feminist argument against pornography (an "atrocity" in which women are "exploited" and "dehumanized"). Its opening lines are: "Conservatives have a difficult time with women. For that matter, all men do."