Meg Wolitzer's new novel is an epic exploration of friendship, coming-of-age, talent and success. And I began to be a little different and to sort of think of myself differently. "You have no idea what it took to get this made. If someone had a deadline and there was a vomiting child, the non-deadline person was hands on. And as a writer, she was also allowed to get 11 not 10 books out of the local library, which her daughter construed as a kind of celebrity. If you don't become really big? Like if you were an artist, instead of getting a job as a paralegal, maybe your parents would give you money and you could go off and rent the cottage of a friend in Maine and you could really write a novel there. You know, I walked around carrying novels with the titles facing out so everyone would see what I was reading.
Erin Collazo Miller is a freelance book critic whose work has appeared regularly in the Orlando Sentinel. Did you have any camp or teenage experiences that were as forming as Spirit in the Woods? Wolitzer joins NPR's Rachel Martin to talk about the convergence of talent and luck, envy-inducing gremlins and her own experiences at summer camp. And I feel that I really got that attitude from my mother.
"I went off to a summer camp and became immediately pretentious and all that. But for her [Jules], acting is a kind of way into feeling, is a kind of way into personhood, into being who she ultimately will be. ", The Interestings, Wolitzer's ninth novel, is more ambitious than any she has written so far, tracking a group of friends from the moment they meet, at summer camp, up through the decades of their lives. Which in some ways it is.
And at the end of the summer, you know, going back home, as in my novel, it was like a tragic thing. These questions are designed to spark conversation and help your group go deeper into Wolitzer's novel. One place where Nora went, some studio person asked his girlfriend, 'You're a woman, what do you think?' How can friends navigate very different financial realities? Of course there's going to be a downslope because lives do get smaller. It's more unusual, as in Wolitzer's case, to see the matrilineal line. Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking.She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar.Wolitzer lives in New York City. It was hawked around the studios and, underpromoted and underinvested in, ultimately "tanked", she says, although it has a very loyal following (Lena Dunham recently picked it for a series of films she curated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). Wolitzer remembers coming to New York with no money in her 20s and being surprised as the lives of herself and her friends started to diverge. Are they as big as the secret Ash keeps from him? I had to write that on my forehead', 'Some books feel like the sorbet between courses' … Meg Wolitzer. Protagonists don't have to be likable, but it is a risk to make them this irritating.
"She is a girl from the suburbs who has been plopped in the middle of this camp and doesn't really have a sense of herself yet.
"And Ash says something like, 'The world will whittle her down, a mother never should.' "She's one of those kids — and I was one of those kids, so I feel that I have a little right to know something about it — who have a kind of small amount of talent in this field, acting. hide caption. Wolitzer remembers walking past a McDonald's with one of her sons when he was young and noticing the sign, Now Hiring. Nonetheless it was a good experience. In fact, the novel has many threads that book clubs might choose to discuss -- dreams & expectations, secrets, relationships and marriage are just a few. Spoiler Warning: These questions reveal details of the story. The novel cleverly skewers the structural advantages that enable some careers over others, when the raw material is roughly the same. How? Material rarely goes to waste. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian, Wolitzer wrote a piece for the New York Times, (Lena Dunham recently picked it for a series of films she curated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). Early in the novel, Wolitzer writes of Jules, "What if she'd said. She doesn't have — Jules — a big, big talent. I had to write that on my forehead and look in the mirror. She describes them as being like 'French movie stars, with a touch of something papal.'
Wolitzer has often written about the sacrifices made by ambitious women with families, or of women raising families alone. The questions that interest her – how families configure themselves and where identity resides when too many demands are made on it – are not uniquely "female" although she has, over the years, been sold very much as a women's writer. So it had a kind of nostalgic literary quality to it.". ", She, on the other hand, was identified early on as someone with talent. Ethan secretly loves Jules his whole life. We're really fortunate to live by our wits in this way, but when I go to people's houses and they say, 'This is my office,' and it's an oasis, my life has never looked like that. Are you talented if there's no product to go with it? Meg Wolitzer is the author of The Wife, The Position, The Ten-Year Nap and The Uncoupling. She lives in New York City. What did you think of Dennis and of his relationship with Jules? Wolitzer, whose mother was a writer and father a school psychologist, had a family who supported her aims, and after graduating from Brown University in 1981, she published her first novel, Sleepwalking, a year later.
On Jules, one of the six friends, and why she doesn't pursue her artistic dream. But 80 pages, you're not going to kill yourself. How did this secret change the course of his life? Either way, "You have to keep doing this; you have to keep writing.". The ordinariness of her story is, perversely, what makes it so interesting and also what makes her so irksome.
It was a useful example for Wolitzer, although not always an enticing reality. You make soups out of it."
Jules, her heroine in The Interestings, attempts and fails to become an actor, retrains as a therapist, and – in a piece of sly positioning – marries an ultrasound technician who has no desire to be anything other than what he is, to her alternating relief and exasperation. I'd see my mother in a bath robe sitting at the typewriter, which sounded like a blender, and I'd come home from school and she'd be in the same place. Do you think Goodman raped Cathy? It's a pretty ugly thing.
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