- penguin.com
Is there anybody else who gets excited when they hear Meg Wolitzer’s got a new book coming out? There are very few authors who write as well as she does about the lives of girls and women, particularly about the conflict between your responsibility to your family and doing what you want to do.
Wolitzer’s characters don’t get to go out in a grand, 19th-century, throwing-themselves-on-the-train-tracks blaze of glory. Their plight is best illustrated, maybe, by the character in her last book, The Uncoupling, who just wants to be able to go to the bathroom without her husband yelling for something or one of her toddler sons climbing all over her.
Is it unfair that this preoccupation with women’s lives has led to Wolitzer being classified as a “women’s author”? Wolitzer answered that question pretty well in an essay in the New York Times Book Review last year. It’s worth noting, though, that, as a result of that essay, the cover of her latest, The Interestings, isn’t coded as a lady book, with a soft-focus picture of some part of a woman’s body or a pair of heels or a cup of tea or some girly prop like that. Instead, it’s done up in multicolor stripes, as if to say, “Dudes, you can read this on the train too, without shame!”
