PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS
Novelist takes timely look at feminism, including its fault lines
The Female Persuasion Meg Wolitzer Penguin Random House Canada
For U.S. novelist Meg Wolitzer, there was an inevitability in her decision to walk in last year’s Women’s March on Washington, one of many that day across the U.S. and around the world. It just seemed the right thing to do.
“It was such a powerful day,” Wolitzer says. Talking about it now, she’s clearly affected by the memory of being part of that historic event. “Even then, I knew I would always think about that day. It was very moving to me not to be alone in my feelings.”
At the time, she was in the final stages of a new novel covering four decades of the feminist revolution — fortuitous timing, one might say. But there was no way Wolitzer could have known back then that the publication of her novel The Female Persuasion would also coincide so dramatically with the formidable arrival of the #MeToo movement. Indeed, the 58-yearold writer, a frequent presence on The New York Times bestseller list, gently disclaims any special prescience on her part despite Time magazine’s suggestion that she has shrewdly played “the woman’s card.”
“It’s true that this book is landing at a moment when the issues it discusses happen to be more widely discussed in the world,” she says. “But these are not new issues. I’ve been thinking about them for a long time, and I started writing this book a few years ago. But yes, it is landing at this strange time.”
Wolitzer’s own deep-rooted feminism is not rose-coloured. The Female Persuasion offers a panoramic view of social history, but the players on Wolitzer’s fictional stage don’t give us unblemished perfection. Indeed, one key character, introduced to us as a feminist icon, proves to have feet of clay as she compromises her own principles for what she believes is a greater good.
“Imperfection is my specialty,” Wolitzer says robustly. “People aren’t superheroes, not even people who are charismatic leaders. You try very hard not to write a tract, not to write a treatise. This isn’t a book about how women betray each other, but there are betrayals because people are human.”
One betrayal involves the fate of an ordinary letter. Wolitzer, an author able to conjure suspense out of the most unlikely situations, wasn’t initially sure what would happen with the letter, but she relished the opportunity to keep readers on tenterhooks until she made up her mind.
“Novelists are kind of like a lesser god,” she says, teasingly. “They have powers they can use, and I like that!”
Early readers have been playing guessing games about possible real-life inspirations for key characters. A feminist icon named Faith Frank, still charismatic and elegant at 63, is one of the most powerfully drawn people in the novel — but no, she is definitely not based on the legendary Gloria Steinem, although some readers insist she is.
“There is only one Gloria Steinem,” Wolitzer says firmly. “But I want to live in a world in which there are a lot of famous feminists, so I decided to create another one. Faith is a powerful, charismatic, sexy figure — and my own invention.”
Wolitzer is also astonished that anyone might see Donald Trump in the character of a chauvinistic tycoon who plays a surprising role in Faith’s drive to power.
“Trump?” she says with a laugh. “Oh boy — I wouldn’t dream of putting him in a book. I wouldn’t want to. But in a novel that’s trying to deal with power, you’re going to see certain types of behaviour that will be familiar.”
Early in the novel, Wolitzer provides Faith with a zinger of a speech in which she says she keeps meeting young women who say: “I’m not a feminist, but …” Then Faith explains what they’re really saying: “I don’t call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure, I want to have a fair and good life. I don’t want to be held back because I’m a woman.”
That speech has a dramatic effect on a young female student named Greer. She could be a poster child for #MeToo: She has been groped by a frat boy and found herself helpless to do anything about it; she dislikes her college; she is soured on her world. And then Faith enters her life, offering an escape from a dreaded future. Greer ends up as a speechwriter for a woman she worships.
“Greer is complicated and unlikable in some ways,” Wolitzer says. She’s searching for something and doesn’t quite know what it is.”
As the novel moves back and forth in time, other important players emerge. There’s Greer’s boyfriend Cory — “he’s very smart and funny and dear and also wants meaning in his life in a different way.”
And there’s best friend Zee, who is gay and driven by a burning social conscience and an idea of service rather than fame.
“I wanted to write about female power — who has it, who wants it,” Wolitzer says, adding she also wanted to examine manifestations of that power, “some celebritydriven, others more quiet.”
She was also seized by the idea of writing about a seasoned veteran of the feminist wars showing a younger woman the way, while also acknowledging the fault lines in both.
And for Wolitzer, who started exploring the female experience with her very first novel, Sleepwalking, written while she was still an undergraduate, even the rockiest of roads can be worth travelling.
“The way can be harder for women, depending on when they live and what they’re trying to do, on how they live and where they live — all that, along with the obstacles that come up like sexual harassment,” she says.
“But I realized early on that if this was going to work as a book, the ideas couldn’t be bigger than the characters. They really needed to live in this membrane I’d created.”