It is a hot July day in Philadelphia, and PW is standing on the stoop of Jennifer Weiner's row house, waiting for her to answer the door.
"Tracy!"
We look up, thinking that the author is calling from an upstairs window to get our attention to throw down the key to the front door. Unlikely for a bestselling novelist to use this kind of an arrangement with an interviewer this way, but there could be some perfectly good reason. She could be changing her baby—she could have a problem with her lock. Anyway, Weiner's novels and her funny, narrative Web log about her life invite this intimacy, the notion that we could be part of some small mishap.
At the third call, we whirl around to see a young woman striding up the street, smiling and waving, pushing a stroller. She is wearing cool sunglasses and blue jeans, and she looks a lot like a character in her latest novel, Little Earthquakes (just published by Atria), which explores the seismic changes that having babies brings into the lives of four Philadelphia women.
At 34 years old, Weiner is around the middle of that interval that stretches from the early 20s to the late 30s, when all women look young but visibly striving—for love, for success, for marriage and family. This is the age of chick—and chic—lit, the age when women—or at least the hippest, best educated, most glamorously employed big city subset—tend to get judged by their accessories, by the presence of backpacks or briefcases, babies or small dogs.
Weiner, who has been widely proclaimed to be among the best and brightest American practitioner of chick lit since the 2001 publication of Good in Bed, is a bit out of breath when she reaches us. She apologizes for being a minute or two late, explaining that she had been at the hospital where her father-in-law is about to have emergency heart bypass surgery. We express concern and wonder if we should come back another day. No, she assures us, it's a good thing that we scheduled an interview for this day because otherwise she would have been back at her summer house on Cape Cod, and she wouldn't have been here to go to the hospital. Telling us that she has all afternoon, she introduces us to adorable, curly-haired Lucy Jane, her daughter, and to her mother-in-law, a well-dressed woman walking beside her. This is not the zany little struggle with a lock like we imagined, but it does crack open the door on Weiner; what comes through is sensitivity and strength. At that very instant, Weiner is not in such a jolly mood, but she is extending what feels like kindness rather than just professionalism. A former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, she is putting herself in our place.
Weiner ushers us into her house, leading us from the living room in the front to the dining room and kitchen in the back. She even swings open the refrigerator door, and for a woman who has written so well and so sensuously about food in all of her novels, there isn't much there.
"Well, this is it," she says, holding out her arms.
She tells us that she has read a previous PW Innovators feature and is certain that we will not be describing her house as immaculate and beautifully decorated, as Laura Lippman's was described. There are toys piled in the corner of the living room; no art work pops out at us. In fact, the house is cozy in exactly the same way the row house belonging to Becky, a chubby, witty chef, was described in Little Earthquakes. It looks a bit haphazard, yet it feels safe.
After she settles Lucy Jane into a high chair in the dining area, Weiner comes to sit in the sofa opposite ours. Lucy Jane, who is supposed to be eating lunch with her grandmother, continues to look at us with interest.
"Can you say backpack, Lucy?" calls Weiner.
"Bah pah," says Lucy.
"Good. Can you say bug bite?"
"Buh bite," says Lucy.
"Lucy, is there a fan?"
Lucy examines the ceiling then looks at her mom, shaking her head no.
"No fan," repeats Weiner, explaining that the house in Cape Cod has a fan.
This doting mother is also a young author who has about a million and a half copies of her novels in print in a very short time. She has been published in 33 countries, most recently Bulgaria and mainland China, and her 2002 bestseller In Her Shoes has become a motion picture directed by Curtis Hansen and starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine (it is scheduled for release in 2005). For all of that heady success, however, Weiner is a soft presence. This is not a reference to her being overweight, which has been a theme in every one of her books. She is soft in the sense that she is easy to be with. She allows herself to be vulnerable, in the moment. There isn't that big gulf that often exists between reporter and subject.
Strange as it sounds, Weiner reminds us of a bit of wisdom we once heard ascribed to the Tao Te Ching—that the softest thing in the world can overcome the hardest. In all of Weiner's novels, love and humor allow her characters to overcome the harshest turns, the hardest feelings. In person, we sense this flowing, ongoing strength, this ability to absorb what is happening to her and turn it into a funny, insightful, sometimes heartbreaking tale. She tells us that she loves to come up with the happiest possible endings for her characters, endings that are unabashedly about love and self-acceptance. It strikes us that this power she has to transform her experience by writing about it—this way of being relentless like a river in her dedication to her craft—is the secret to her happy ending.
"Jen writes books that are ultimately about self-acceptance," says Joanna Pulcini, Weiner's agent, by phone several days later. "She creates characters with significant flaws, characters we wouldn't necessarily look up to and whom then she redeems in interesting ways. She shows us the goodness in them. I've been asked why her books are so successful in Hollywood. [In addition to the Fox 2000 production of In Her Shoes, Good in Bed is in development for an HBO series and Universal has optioned Little Earthquakes.] I think it's the characters Jen creates. It might sound like a cliché, but she writes them in a way that is true."
"What is the source of her confidence and her success?" Pulcini continues. "Jen is a very loving, caring, giving person and she loves what she does. She loves to write. She loves to laugh. She loves people, and in her writing she shows us how even unlikely people can find the love and goodness in themselves and in the world."
Hot Nuts
"You should say 'hot nuts' with confidence!" Weiner says to the waiter who puts a saucer of hot nuts down on our table.
We are at a Mexican restaurant for lunch. PW invites Weiner to order since she knows the menu, assuring her we can always order more if we want.
"My mother always said that to us when we were growing up," she said. "But we never did. Did you ever?"
We promise her that we mean it, and ask her what it's like to be living a life that is very close to the happy ending she wrote in Good In Bed—the marriage, the baby, the career success.
"Well, nothing is perfect, " she tells us. "Nothing is as good as it looks on the outside. My mom always told me that. She said you can never know what is really going on in somebody else's marriage or in somebody else's house. I am really lucky, but that doesn't mean that I'm not still dealing with a lot things that a lot of new mothers deal with in terms of balance, in terms of feeling overwhelmed sometimes or bewildered or sad or worried.
"Life rolls along and success can sometimes cause more problems than it fixes," she continues. "You pick up a lot more checks when your local newspaper prints your advance, I can tell you that."
We ask her if she feels like public property. We've recently read an account on her Web log of an excursion to buy new underwear.
"I don't so much feel like public property as I feel like I have a lot more friends than I ever knew about," she says. "People come up to me ask me about Lucy or how is Wendell my dog doing. I feel kind of popular, which is nice. It makes up for high school.
"It's very funny, there's a bit of revisionist history going on in my home town now," she continues. "I spoke at an event there about a year and a half ago and the mother of this boy who had just tormented me and hated me in high school introduced me. He was one of the really popular and good-looking boys. I don't even think I was allowed to make direct eye contact with him. Yet his mother went on and on about what close friends he and I were and about how she always knew I was special. It was kind of sad but it was kind of funny because the truth was that he would have rather died than speak to me then."
Weiner graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1991; she won that school's Academy of American Poets prize in 1990. She peppers her novels with poems by Larkin, Bishop, Rilke, cummings. In addition, the character of Maggie in In Her Shoes (soon to be played by Cameron Diaz) discovers poetry as part of her awakening. As we share a Mexican coffee, which is a silky, sumptuous chocolate dessert, we comment that both the poetry and humor are a very economical, elegant way of transforming sadness. We ask her how old she was when she realized that people thought she was funny.
"It's funny you should ask that," she quips. "My mom is moving, and as she was cleaning out her attic she found all my old report cards and she gave them to me. One of them from the first grade said, 'Jenny has a very mature sense of humor.' So maybe it started then. I grew up in a house where there were a lot of books and a lot of storytelling, so it started pretty early on."
Weiner also grew up in a house where there was a lot of pain, which intensified when her father, a psychiatrist, left when she was 16. She delves into this abandonment again and again in different ways in her books.
"I know it's a cliché to say that humor is a response to pain but I think it was true in my case. There was this quite tragic event that happened—this person wasn't there anymore, was showing no interest in being a father anymore. This wasn't, 'I've fallen in love with somebody else but I'm always going to be part of your life.' It was 'I'm out of here.'
"We were living in these upper-middle-class circumstances and suddenly there was not that income anymore. This person who had been saying, 'I'll pay for college,' was suddenly saying, 'Nahhh, there are other things I want to do with my money now.' "
Did that light the fire to succeed?
"I think it did because I remember every semester in college you go to register for classes and you would get pulled out of line if your parents hadn't paid. I remember every goddamned semester I had to go to the financial aid office and say, 'I don't know where he is and he owes my mom alimony and I don't know what's going on but somebody is going to pay for this.' That somebody wound up being my mother and me. I remember thinking I don't want my life to be like this. I don't want to have to depend on anybody else for my security, financial or otherwise. I knew that before I had a baby I was going to have money in the bank. My baby is never going through that. She can get degrees until she's 50 if she wants to and it's going to be paid for."
Weiner maintains that having an unhappy childhood, feeling like an outsider or wondering why your parents marriage didn't work, can make a kid grow up to be a better writer.
"It's very human to want to belong and to want to be included in the 'in' group and if you don't feel like you are and you're smart, I think you spend a lot of time thinking, 'Why don't I fit in?' like that's the central mystery of your life. Or, 'Why doesn't my father want to be a father anymore?' I think wondering about these things can make you angry and I think it can make you ambitious and I think it can make you want to talk honestly about a lot of things that just get sort of glossed over in polite company. So yes, having an unhappy childhood was a blessing for me as a writer, although it didn't help me at the time. Still, I would complain about stuff and my mother would say, 'It's material, Jen. It's all material.' "
And when does what you write stop being chick lit?
"Here's the thing," she explains. "I respect that bookselling is a business and you have to think about how your book functions in the marketplace and how they're going to label it and package it and sell it. From a literary and feminist standpoint, I think that that label minimizes the work that women writers do and the lives that women lead. I think it's an easy shorthand to say, 'Oh stupid silly chick lit, let's ignore it or let's not review it seriously or let's act like there's nothing substantive going on in these books.' I remember that I was the subject of a profile in a major newspaper and the reporter was perfectly lovely and had read my book and asked really good questions and then I read the article and the lead sentence was something like 'Jennifer Weiner's book pits fat women against thin ones.' I e-mailed the reporter and asked, 'Why did you write that? I know you read my book.' And she wrote back and said that her editor wanted to make things more interesting... they wanted to add some drama. I just know that this is not happening to Jonathan Safran Foer."
Through the Roof
Some time later, we meet with Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, and ask her how she knew that Weiner was going to break out of the pack and become a force to be reckoned with. Atria has published all three of Weiner's books.
"We wondered if the second novel would be as good as the first, which we won at auction and which we were thrilled with," she says. "We felt it was even better. We knew her career was going to be moving forward and we were determined to sell more books. Now, we're shipping double on this book what we did on the last, which is double what we shipped on the first. We really want it to go through the roof for her."
We ask Curr, who is trim and chic and sits facing us in a flannel-upholstered chair in a sleek modern office, what she personally thinks of the term chick lit, and especially what happens when a chick lit author writes about having babies. Is the term "hen lit" being bandied about?
"I don't let anyone use that word [hen] here," says Curr, shaking her head with disapproval. "I think it's cutesy and demeaning, this labeling. I think the new book is beyond categories. Jennifer has now becomes her own category."
Back at Jennifer Weiner's house, curly-haired Lucy Jane leads us up narrow back stairs to see her lemonade yellow room. We remember a reference to a baby's room in this color of Good In Bed. Weiner and her daughter settle in a rocking chair in the corner and she explains that "there is no cover on the changing table because we had a situation last night."
Then Lucy Jane toddles into her parents' bedroom and we follow. It is painted a deep celestial blue and there is a pretty old-fashioned chandelier. Weiner tells us that the paint and the light fixture had come in the course of a major renovation but, like Lucy Jane's room, just like the row house occupied by the young chef and her doctor husband in Little Earthquakes, they have the feeling of being hand-picked, a labor of love. Weiner points out a bookcase, divided down the middle. We note Stephen King on her side, and she adds that she regards Pearl by Tabitha King to be one of the best and most underrated novels she has read. Her husband Adam's side of the bookshelf includes the wildly praised Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
"I told Adam that it is not infinite," Weiner tells us. "I told him that he should take it back to the bookstore and point out that it very clearly does come to an end and to get his money back." Weiner takes Lucy Jane's tiny hand and lets herself be led back downstairs. Following behind them, we reflect that Weiner's work is suffused with the understanding that all kinds of supposedly enduring things—childhood, families—turn out to be finite and precious, but that she has mastered happy endings.
