Meg Wolitzer examines women and power in prescient tale
When Meg Wolitzer was in the first grade, she would recite stories to her teacher who would patiently write them down for the fledgling writer.
At age 11, Wolitzer sold her first story — about a cereal-box top contest gone awry — to a kids’ magazine. “I think this teacher knew I liked to write and in giving me the freedom to do that led me to believe I had something to say later on,” Wolitzer says. “It’s someone seeing something in you, delighting in it, giving of themselves and letting you see where it can go.”
Wolitzer’s literary career continued to be shaped by other women, like her mother, novelist Hilma Wolitzer, who saved all her daughter’s early stories. There was her dear friend, Nora Ephron, who directed the adaptation of Wolitzer’s 1992 novel “This Is
My Life.”
“Nora was so encouraging to me, as she was to so many people,” says
Wolitzer. “It meant a lot but at the time, I didn’t think about it [as a mentorship], and I don’t think she did either. But looking back, she certainly made me want to take my work further.”
The New York–based writer wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but three years ago when she started writing her engaging new novel, “The Female Persuasion” — a followup to the 2013 bestseller “The Interestings” — she had arrived at a certain point in her life. She describes the feeling like standing on a rock, balanced between needing supporters like Ephron, and becoming a mentor herself. “I had aged into a moment where I found myself wanting to do extra things for people who are working very hard,” says Wolitzer, who is now 58. “I was naturally offering advice in a new way, and some of it was modelled, without evening knowing it, on the way people spoke to me when I was young.”
“The Female Persuasion” follows shy but ambitious freshman Greer Kadetsky, who simmers with quiet rage after a frat boy goes unpunished for sexually assaulting her at a party. When Greer’s new friend, a politically astute queer woman named Zee, drags her to a lecture by the feminist icon Faith Frank — a charismatic leader who falls somewhere between Gloria Steinem and Sheryl Sandberg — the trajectory of Greer’s life changes overnight. After college, Greer is hired to work at Faith’s charitable foundation and becomes so obsessed over her new career and mentor that she betrays Zee, who quips: “I think there are two kinds of feminists. The famous ones, and everyone else.”
Although “The Female Persuasion’s” prescience in the current political climate is startlingly sharp, Wolitzer has been thinking about women and power for years. It showed up in her 2003 novel, “The Wife,” about a woman who decides to finally leave her famous-author husband, and in an oft-cited essay she wrote for the New York Times in 2012 dissecting how men’s and women’s literature are not treated equally.