Author Jennifer Weiner gets intimate in memoir
Novelist full of candour, emotion in her crossover into personal essays
When Jennifer Weiner woke up on Nov. 9, the morning after Donald Trump won the U.S. election, she asked herself, “What am I doing?”
For a moment, the bestselling author — who has sold millions of copies of her 14 books, including Good in Bedand In Her Shoes, to devoted fans — thought about giving it all up.
“I’m writing novels, shouldn’t I be marching in the streets for the next four years?” Weiner questioned. But then she reasoned to herself: “Stories have power and stories make a difference.”
Weiner is disheartened that “there are a lot of people in America who seem to be OK with a really cruel, really vulgar, really angry kind of misogyny,” but it’s now fuelling her work. While some authors shy away from the word “activism,” she doesn’t have a problem. Weiner has always made it clear who she is writing for and why.
“I think about what I read in school and as an English major in college, and it was white guys, white guys, white guys, white guys. Occasionally they would throw you Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen, but mostly we learned . . . that male voices and male stories were what mattered,” she says.
“I’ve always been pretty outspoken about the idea of women’s stories mattering and being as important as the stories that men tell.”
From the onset of her career, Weiner, whose name became synonymous with the now out-of-fashion, often-derogatory term “chick lit” (referred to by marketing types these days as “commercial women’s fiction”), publicly fought those who mocked the genre’s glittery feminine covers and focus on “shoes and bags and husband-hunting,” as she writes in her new memoir, Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Reading.
The essay collection includes some of Weiner’s early writing, dating back to her first newsroom jobs after graduating from Princeton University, where she already showed editorial promise like one of her idols, the late Nora Ephron.
Despite her confidence and the fact that Weiner is far from a newbie when it comes to writing personal essays, she admits that the memoir felt a bit like walking on a tightrope.
“If you look down, if you start thinking too hard about who’s going to read this and what they’re going to think and what they’re going to say, you can just scare yourself into just total immobility,” she says.
Hungry Heart covers broad and intimate territory, including Weiner’s early school days as an introverted, book-loving outsider; boyfriends and babies; and her challenges with weight gain and loss. There are sharp, humorous memories about family trips gone wrong and she openly reveals how she has used her personal life — including breakups and her mother’s late in life coming out as a lesbian — as inspiration for her novels.
The book also covers some tough and emotional times. In particular, Weiner says her father’s addiction and subsequent death was difficult to put on the page, but she felt she needed to push through for her readers.
“Even though it was hard and it was dark and it was no place I wanted to go, I thought I can’t be the only one that something like this has happened to,” she says. “I think that shame is such a big issue for women.”
Breaking that cycle of shame has always motivated Weiner, whose protagonists could never fit into a size 2, or enjoy poster-perfect boyfriends or families.
“I think that so many of us have been told that we need to feel ashamed of the way we look or the way we sound or what we want or how our lives have been,” she says. “I thought, if I tell this story and somebody feels less ashamed and less alone, I will have done my job.”