Meg Wolitzer, THE FEMALE PERSUASION
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[0:59]I'm thrilled to be interviewing Meg Woolitzer, the New York Times best-selling author of
[1:03]The Interesting, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking.
[1:09]She's also the author of The Young Adult Novel, Bellsar, and her latest book, The Female
[1:14]Persuasion, was an instant New York Times bestseller and was one of the most celebrated
[1:18]books of 2018.
[1:19]Nicole Kidman is signed on for the film adaptation, which is in the works.
[1:23]In fact, three movies have been made from Meg's books, including This is My Life, The Wife,
[1:27]and Surrender Dorothy.
[1:28]A former creative writing teacher at the University of Iowa, Writers Workshop, Prince
[1:32]and University, Skidmore College and Stony Brook Woolitzer currently lives in New York City
[1:37]with her husband.
[1:38]Hi, Meg.
[1:39]It's Zibi Owens, for a mom's don't have time to read books.
[1:41]Hi.
[1:42]How are you?
[1:43]I'm good.
[1:44]How are you?
[1:45]Very well.
[1:46]Thank you.
[1:47]Thanks for coming on my show.
[1:48]I really appreciate it.
[1:49]Sure.
[1:50]So I loved your book The Interestings.
[1:51]Even rereading it now.
[1:52]I mean, all those characters are just so lifelike.
[1:55]I could just feel myself like, Julie, that shy, awkward girl.
[1:58]It's feared in the woods camp on the outside of the group.
[2:02]He wrote so beautifully about that period of time.
[2:04]And I'm going to quote if you don't mind just to start us off when a cool camper asked
[2:08]Julie at the row of things to join the group.
[2:10]And you wrote that Julie has a look at her with a dumb dripping face, which she then
[2:15]quickly dried with a thin towel from home.
[2:18]Jacobson, her mother had written along the puckered edge in red laundry marker in a tentative
[2:22]hand that now seemed a little tragic.
[2:25]So that feeling of being an outsider.
[2:27]And you talked to me about that and how you included in many of your books.
[2:31]But let's start with The Interestings.
[2:32]Well, you know, I did go to summer camp when I was exactly Julie's age, which is a total
[2:39]coincidence.
[2:40]And I was, you know, I'm not her.
[2:44]Look, I'm really not her.
[2:45]And yet, of course, there are some overlaps.
[2:48]I didn't grow up in the household she grew up in.
[2:51]I grew up in a kind of more sophisticated household.
[2:54]My mother's a writer, my father is a psychologist, and we had a lot of books.
[2:59]So I had a sense of culture and the world, but I still hadn't jumped in yet.
[3:04]And that is definitely where we're, you know, more similar.
[3:08]Julie just had felt that she was growing up in a place where she just sort of had no understanding
[3:15]of the passions or excitements of the world, which included art and big friendships.
[3:20]So she goes to this camp and it all explodes for her to a lesser, but still powerful
[3:25]degree that did happen to me.
[3:27]And it happened in terms of sort of starting to kind of take myself a little bit seriously
[3:32]and have friends who took one another seriously and were fascinated by one another in ways
[3:37]that I do kind of have a little fun with and, you know, that they call themselves jokingly,
[3:42]but not entirely.
[3:43]So we didn't do that.
[3:46]And I didn't really have a group in that same way.
[3:49]But I definitely saw that time in my life as being like an open door.
[3:53]I just felt like I could so relate to that feeling when Julie said if she called her attention
[3:58]to herself, I'm moving in anyway.
[4:00]Someone might start to wonder why she was there and realized that she had no reason to
[4:04]be there.
[4:05]Right.
[4:06]It's such a painful moment back in that I have twins who are almost 12 and I'm like,
[4:11]I can't believe they have to go through this now.
[4:13]Everybody has to go through it.
[4:14]I know.
[4:15]I know.
[4:16]And the female persuasion and instant bestseller, which is so awesome.
[4:20]You bring back sort of that sense of wonder at being selected.
[4:24]So like Julie here, you have Greer who gets singled out by faith at what you call an
[4:29]undistinguished school and Southern Connecticut.
[4:31]And Greer thinks maybe like it's her hair that's attracted faith to her.
[4:35]But then she thinks that it's because faith felt sorry for 18, I'm quoting again for 18
[4:39]year old Greer who was hot-faced and inarticulate that night or maybe faith was automatically
[4:45]generous and attentive around young people who were uncomfortable in the world.
[4:49]So I felt like that was the similar kind of thing of the like, why me, why do you pick
[4:53]me phenomenon?
[4:55]I think, yeah, that idea of being chosen and having your life open up to you is something
[5:00]that I could write a number of books about in different ways.
[5:03]But what's really different in the female persuasion is that it's really an intergenerational
[5:07]story.
[5:08]It's a story not about friendship, but about being seen by someone you admire and having
[5:14]your life open up because of that.
[5:16]I guess there are all these different ways to sort of take what you have and then all
[5:19]of a sudden throw you into some new setting.
[5:23]I mean, it's really neat how you do that in these different ways already.
[5:26]Thank you.
[5:27]So your mother, you mentioned she used a writer and I actually read what you posted on
[5:31]Mother's Day, the essay she wrote called Today, A Woman with Man at the Sea Remarket.
[5:35]Yes.
[5:36]Yes.
[5:37]I mean, it was the first thing she ever published.
[5:38]It was a short story in the old Saturday evening post in 1966.
[5:44]And she's amazing.
[5:45]I mean, really, my mother is just, she's got it.
[5:47]She's 89 and she's just a genius and I learned so much from her and she's a wonderful
[5:52]writer.
[5:53]He said somewhere that the paper wrote a headline about her is something like Housewife
[5:57]turned novelist or something.
[5:59]And she's joked that it was like she was Clark Kent going into a phone booth becoming
[6:03]Superman, like, whoa, a housewife turned into a novelist, how is that possible?
[6:07]As condescension toward women, I took very much note of, and I think it really did affect
[6:13]to some degree my novel, The Wife that I wrote in 2003, so which was made into a film
[6:19]this year.
[6:20]But I've been thinking about all of this for a very, very long time and it appears in
[6:24]different ways in my different books, I think.
[6:27]In the annotated version of The Wife for PBS NewsHour, you wrote that my sense of writing
[6:32]in first person has been that if you're going to write a novel from this perspective,
[6:36]the voice needs to be distinctive, Jones Inger and Tarte depictions of Joe definitely
[6:40]interested me and seem best served by an eye voice.
[6:43]Had I written the book in third person, as I often have done before, I suspect Jones
[6:47]Strong Feelings might have been a bit diluted in the telling.
[6:51]So what made you choose the third person for the female persuasion?
[6:55]How did you pick for each of your books?
[6:56]Well, I kind of felt that with the female persuasion, I definitely know that Greer is the
[7:03]anchor of the book, just as in the interesting jewels who's called Julie at the beginning
[7:08]is the anchor of the book, but we do go into Ethan's point of view and other points of view.
[7:13]I really, really wanted to go into the mind of this older woman feminist from a different
[7:20]generation too.
[7:22]Those were the two, I knew I wanted to go into both of their minds and I didn't want
[7:25]to do different first person stories, that wasn't the way this was going to be.
[7:30]So with that in mind, because also in both cases of those books, the interesting and
[7:35]the female persuasion, they go through a lot of period of time, a long period of time, and
[7:40]they have different characters, to me, the best vehicle was third person.
[7:46]So it's more in a case by case basis.
[7:48]Like do you decide that at the beginning or do you start with your story?
[7:51]I start with an idea of what I want to write about in the case of the female persuasion.
[7:56]It was what happens to power, female power, and what about the person you might meet
[8:01]who sees something in you and changes your life, also making meaning in the world and misogyny.
[8:08]All of these things were kind of swirling and I just start writing and I saw this young
[8:12]woman at college and she has this experience where she's groped by a fret brother at
[8:17]a party and she doesn't know is this thing that happened to be legitimate or should I
[8:21]just suck it up?
[8:22]Was it an assault or face goes hot?
[8:25]She doesn't know and she needs to find out how to think about it from this famous feminist
[8:30]who's like three steps down and fame from Gloria Steinem who comes to speak at her college,
[8:34]who was famous in the 70s and that's how the characters and the story kind of unrolled.
[8:39]I didn't really know where it was going to go.
[8:41]Do you outline any of your but like do you outline anything or like when you start a book?
[8:45]What is your like what does your desk look like?
[8:47]Tell me a little more about the process.
[8:50]Well, I start writing just knowing only what I said and I'll write about 80 pages and
[8:55]I say 80 pages because that's enough so that you can feel you've accomplished something
[8:59]but it's not so much that if you end up putting it aside because you don't really know
[9:02]what to do with it after 80 pages you're not going to feel like your life has been ruined.
[9:07]And then I start to look at not what I wanted to do but what in fact I ended up actually
[9:12]doing and I think there's often a really big difference between the grandiose fantasy
[9:16]of the first draft of the first attempt and what you end up doing and that's the point
[9:21]at which I do start to make something of what I kind of call an emotional outline.
[9:25]It's not really that plot base but it does sort of include very important things like
[9:31]this is the chapter where she feels alone and I then start to look at it and I think that
[9:36]for me outlines are kind of like epipens.
[9:39]You may never know but it's good to know that you have them and I always see it that way.
[9:43]I only sometimes will look at that outline.
[9:46]I have epipens all over my house and I outline everything I do so maybe I don't know.
[9:52]That sounds like a good plan.
[9:54]That's the kind of person I have.
[9:56]I read by the way in this New York magazine article.
[10:00]on you that you play competitive Scrabble.
[10:02]And I thought that was just the coolest.
[10:03]I am like obsessed with Scrabble.
[10:05]And then I ended up ordering yours.
[10:07]The board you recommended at the same time
[10:09]are acrylic board you mentioned in the article.
[10:11]So thank you for improving my home.
[10:13]Travel is so great.
[10:15]I actually wrote a middle grade book for young readers
[10:18]called the fingertips of Dunkin' Dorffman
[10:19]about kids who play competitive Scrabble.
[10:22]And it has some Scrabble wordplay
[10:24]to solving a kind of mystery of identity
[10:27]in the book, just saying without giving too much
[10:29]the way, but you can see that I love Scrabble so much.
[10:32]I, yeah, all right, you know, I'll write a couple of paragraphs.
[10:36]And then when I, you know, that I can't go any further
[10:38]without having a little sorbet between courses
[10:41]that Sorbet will take the form of a Scrabble game online.
[10:44]And I really, I find it gets me thinking about language,
[10:47]the beauty of language, the way letters can jump around
[10:51]how nimble they are.
[10:52]And I'm so bad at numbers.
[10:54]Like any number, if you put in front of me,
[10:56]it's sort of terrible that I am this way.
[10:58]I mean, I grew up before, you know,
[11:01]the encouragement of girls in STEM fields.
[11:03]But, you know, I just, letters and words are it for me.
[11:08]I used to create crossword puzzles with Jesse Green,
[11:11]who's now one of the theater critics for the New York Times.
[11:14]But we, I just love words.
[11:16]I just love wordplay.
[11:18]When I was in business school,
[11:19]someone talked about being a writer as starting a company,
[11:23]but the product you're putting out is words.
[11:27]And I feel like you're just the consummate producer of words
[11:31]if you want to look at it that way.
[11:32]Awesome.
[11:33]I'll take that.
[11:35]I'll take that.
[11:37]Did you always want to be an author?
[11:39]Like tell me about how you got into this field
[11:40]to begin with?
[11:41]Well, because my mother is a writer, as you know,
[11:44]she was very, very encouraging to me from a very early age.
[11:47]And I would run home and want to show her short stories
[11:49]that I'd written at school.
[11:50]And she was always very receptive to them.
[11:53]So I love writing.
[11:54]It was very important to me to write.
[11:55]It was my favorite thing to do.
[11:57]I used to make up short stories and a serial novel
[12:00]on the way to school.
[12:01]And I had a serial novel about the heirs
[12:03]to the craft cheese fortune.
[12:06]You can see that I never published that one.
[12:08]And there's a good reason for it.
[12:10]But I didn't want to be a writer from an early age.
[12:12]Yeah, absolutely.
[12:13]And what do you think, aside from having a mother
[12:15]to show you the ropes a little or to role model for you?
[12:18]Like what do you think allowed you to, I mean,
[12:20]there are lots of people who grow up wanting to be authors.
[12:23]And aside from talent, was there anything else
[12:25]do you feel like differentiated your journey
[12:27]to make you into the best-selling author?
[12:30]I don't know.
[12:30]I read a lot.
[12:32]I've always read a lot.
[12:33]And I think that all writers do.
[12:36]But I had such a desire to do it.
[12:39]I mean, I'd be doing it anyway, even if they didn't pay me.
[12:42]So it was kind of like a full-time thing
[12:45]for a long time anyway, in some way.
[12:47]I would, in college, I wrote my first novel.
[12:50]And I would sneak away from class, sorry mom and dad,
[12:54]who paid for that education.
[12:55]But I did get a lot out of it.
[12:56]I would really sneak away from class
[12:59]because there wasn't that much to differentiate
[13:02]the stuff coming in that I was reading.
[13:04]And my desire to put stuff out,
[13:06]they all came from sort of the same source,
[13:08]which isn't to say that my work was in the same category
[13:12]as the stuff I was reading.
[13:13]But just the act of generating was really connected
[13:17]to the act of taking in.
[13:19]So it was very exciting to me to do both.
[13:22]Excellent.
[13:23]What about having the difference between your mom
[13:27]being a writer way back in her day versus now?
[13:31]Do you think that experiences allow women writers
[13:34]to flourish more?
[13:35]Or I mean, obviously it was harder back then.
[13:37]But like how does she contrast her experience to yours?
[13:40]I'm just so interested in that dynamic.
[13:42]It was very, very different.
[13:44]She had parents who did not encourage her
[13:46]to be a writer who didn't think she even should go to college.
[13:49]That it wasn't important for a girl to go to college.
[13:51]So she didn't have a college education.
[13:53]She took a couple of college classes here and there
[13:56]and some art classes.
[13:57]But she's really pretty much an auto-didact.
[13:59]Whereas I had a mother who was like my full-time fiction
[14:05]butler.
[14:07]May I see your short story, Meg?
[14:09]Margaret back then.
[14:10]That was just incredible.
[14:12]And when I got older, she would show me her work.
[14:14]So we almost had, it wasn't even
[14:15]what she was like, I'm joking about my fiction butler.
[14:19]It was more that we almost created like a little writing
[14:22]workshop within the house when we were both working on things.
[14:25]And I think we both were so happy to have that.
[14:28]And look, that's an unusual situation
[14:30]even today to have a parent or someone else
[14:34]in the family who is writing.
[14:36]But things have changed.
[14:38]It's still an ongoing battle and struggle
[14:41]to have women's voices count in the same way that men's do.
[14:44]I definitely know that that's true.
[14:46]Who gets heard, who gets authority?
[14:48]I mean, we have a president who, you know,
[14:51]being speaking in a loudish voice and saying insulting things
[14:55]to women didn't stop and from getting to be where he is.
[15:00]And I think that it's a long and ongoing path.
[15:05]And writers need to just write the books they want to write
[15:10]and put them out there and never stop speaking.
[15:13]And what has it been like for you having your novels adapted?
[15:16]Like, what was it like having the wife adapted and going
[15:19]to see it and being at the Oscars that whole situation?
[15:21]Well, it was incredible.
[15:23]I mean, somebody said to me in an interview once,
[15:25]because I had an earlier book made into the film,
[15:27]This is My Life, which is the first film
[15:28]nor ever undirected.
[15:30]And somebody asked me in an interview,
[15:31]aren't you afraid of what they're going to do to your book?
[15:33]And I thought about it.
[15:35]And I said, well, my book's on the shelf.
[15:37]Nothing's going to change that.
[15:39]So I've kind of felt like if you admire the stuff
[15:42]that the people who want to do the adaptation have done
[15:45]and you feel that they are really earnest and desiring
[15:48]to do something new and exciting with your work,
[15:51]you can sort of say to them, go do it.
[15:53]And it's not going to affect your book.
[15:57]But I was very, very fortunate to have such wonderful actors
[16:01]in Jonathan Price and, of course, Glenn Close,
[16:03]playing the title character and the title role.
[16:07]And that was a very exciting experience.
[16:09]The Oscars was tremendous.
[16:11]The scale was so big.
[16:13]And I learned that there's an open bar at the Oscars
[16:15]who knew, you know, you don't see anything like that
[16:17]when you're watching, I did every other year.
[16:20]It was very exciting.
[16:21]Sad when she didn't win, but beautiful and exciting
[16:24]all along.
[16:25]And honored to be nominated.
[16:26]Oh, yeah, goodness, that's it.
[16:29]Are you working on another book now?
[16:31]Yes, I am.
[16:32]And I'm just sort of more the beginning of it.
[16:34]So I don't really know how I would describe it yet.
[16:37]But it definitely has to do with family to some degree.
[16:40]And I'm really pretty interested in that.
[16:43]You know, the female persuasion really
[16:45]is about an intergenerational relationship
[16:47]between a mentor and a protege, as well as a boyfriend
[16:50]and girlfriend and friendship.
[16:52]And the interesting was about friendships
[16:54]and the wife was about a marriage.
[16:55]This one looks at a family.
[16:57]And what happens when you grow up?
[16:59]What does your family look like?
[17:01]That's fascinating.
[17:02]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors out there?
[17:06]I do, but it's going to cost you extra.
[17:08]Yeah, I guess one of the things I would say
[17:11]is that to not be hard on yourself
[17:14]when things aren't going as you plan,
[17:16]I mean, I used to feel that way hard on myself
[17:19]when I wouldn't have a good writing day.
[17:21]It isn't that every day doesn't count.
[17:23]How's that for double negative?
[17:25]But every day does count.
[17:26]But I think we sometimes use days in different ways
[17:30]than we imagined so that I might,
[17:32]if it's not going well, I might read something
[17:34]that I feel the writer was really excited about
[17:36]when he or she was writing it.
[17:38]And that is a different experience
[17:40]from generating something new.
[17:42]But it might help you locate that excitement
[17:44]in your own work, that feeling of love
[17:46]that you first felt when you began writing it.
[17:48]And what about advice for someone feeling like jewels
[17:52]or grit on the outside looking in,
[17:55]not just as a 12 year old or a college student,
[17:57]but anyone who's sort of carrying that feeling around
[18:00]that you portray so well in your books?
[18:02]Well, I think that sometimes we feel that way,
[18:04]but to remember that everybody does feel that way.
[18:07]And if everybody feels that way,
[18:09]and who are the ultimate insiders,
[18:11]it's just such a part of life to feel that way.
[18:14]And so much look, fiction is about often being an outsider.
[18:18]So at the very worst, you can use it in your work
[18:21]regardless of what your work is,
[18:23]if you're an artist, you can certainly use it.
[18:25]But I guess to understand that we think about ourselves
[18:28]much more than other people think of us
[18:31]and this notion of being an outsider
[18:33]sometimes isn't really accurate.
[18:34]But if you can explore it as a writer,
[18:36]you can see it from all different angles.
[18:38]Excellent.
[18:39]Well, thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[18:41]Don't have time to read books
[18:42]and sharing your experience with the listeners.
[18:45]Oh, thank you for having me.
[18:47]It seems like a wonderful, wonderful thing
[18:49]that you're doing.
[18:50]I really appreciate it.
[18:51]Oh, thanks.
[18:52]All right, take care.
[18:53]Yeah, you too.
[18:54]Bye-bye.
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[19:10]Don't have time to read books.
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