Page 39 - Publishers_Weekly

Observing

the

Culture
Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, ©nina subin
The Female Persuasion,

takes on women’s power
and determination in
the 21st century

BY MICHELE FILGATE

here are ambitious people, and
there are people who define
ambition. Meg Wolitzer—
whose 10th novel, The Female
T Persuasion, will be published by
Riverhead in April—is in the second category. Her
first novel, Sleepwalking (Random House, 1982),
was written on a typewriter while she was still an
undergraduate. (She graduated from Brown uni-
versity in 1981.)
A lot has changed since Sleepwalking was pub-
lished. Back then, “you really could imagine your-
self with a high collar, sitting in a lidded glass
window,” Wolitzer says, sitting on the couch in
her book-filled Upper West Side apartment. “I just
gave a presentation at the Mount [Edith Wharton’s
home], and we went on a tour and saw her library.
There’s a photograph of her with her two dogs on
her shoulders. They looked like they were a part of
her clothes. The idea of imagining yourself sitting
with a pen as the night dies, writing, that whole
thing has fallen away.”
What hasn’t vanished, however, is a hunger
from readers for stories that they can lose themselves in. Wolitzer entertainment,” Wolitzer says. “They are very, very different.
writes big, immersive novels (she describes her ideal reading We all want to write the kind of book that we want to read. If
experience as wanting to be “marinated in the book”) that tackle you put in the things that you are thinking about and create
themes she can’t stop thinking about through compelling char- characters who feel like they could live—at least for me, that’s
acters. “Pleasure is a word I think about a lot, as opposed to the way I want to write.”

WWW .PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 37