Readers Place

Meg Wolitzer interview/review

Extract from:“you-reading-group”: http://www.you-reading-group.co.uk/

“The idea for ‘The Wife’ brewed and bubbled inside me for a long time before I wrote it. In a way, the gestation period lasted for most of my waking life. Since I was young, I was aware of power imbalances between men and women. The news on TV was always filled with the deep and reassuring drone of men talking and ruling nations and leading them to war.

Where were the women? Why did women seem to be on the sidelines, WATCHING the men? Even after the women’s movement took off and my own mother threw down her housewife’s rubber dish-gloves to become a novelist herself, I knew that men and women occupied very different places in the world.

Of course, as I got older and my vision of the situation became more nuanced, I realized that we’ve come a very long way. Women do write major novels, of course, and occasionally, very occasionally, they hold political power. The 1950’s—the repressive era in which a good part of ‘The Wife’ is set, is mercifully over. (Luckily, I never had to live through that time—I’m not old enough.) But the issues at the heart of my novel—Who holds power in a marriage? Can there be such a thing as a true partnership? Are women responsible for their own position in the world?—are all still relevant today.

I decided to set my book in the universe of novelists, because it was not only what I knew best, it also seemed like a perfect microcosm in which to let my themes emerge. Since I started writing, I’d noticed various trends: some heavily-reviewed books by men were hugely long, filled with just about everything the author was thinking about while he was writing, and were in some ways unreadable. But the reviewers (also male) were wowed by these mega-tomes. More the reviewers cried. I would read such books with skepticism, admiring and envying their muscularity, yet wondering why no one had gathered up the nerve to edit them…

Some heavily-reviewed books by women, however, were small and graceful affairs, weighing far less than the men’s, and filled perhaps with elegant short stories instead of cornucopias of facts and bluster. Why was this so? I wanted to know. Were women and men essentially different from each other? Was it hard-wired, or instilled into us through external forces? I really didn’t know, but the subject fascinated me, and I decided to make my own book out of it.

‘The Wife’ is a novel about a long and terrible marriage. It’s about men and women and their differences and similarities. It’s about envy and rage and how responsible we all are for the things we do. My characters, Joan and Joe Castleman, are locked in a long struggle over love and work, and while it’s a devastating struggle, I hope it’s very funny, too. I’m not a sociologist or political theorist; I’m a novelist. I don’t want to preach in my books; I simply want to tell a wickedly good story with humour and bite and characters you’ll remember. And if I can’t do that, well, I wouldn’t mind ruling a nation.”