Meg Wolitzer with E.C. Murray

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Uncoupling, and The Wife, which was made into the film starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. Meg taught creative writing at the  Iowa's Writers' Workshop, Skidmore College, Stony Brook Southampton, and was a guest artist at the Princeton Atelier at Princeton University. She currently co-directs a year-long, non-credit novel-writing program called BookEnds, at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, and hosts the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts.

   Thank you for agreeing to this interview. I imagine I feel the way you did working with Glenn Close when she starred in The Wife, the film based on your book – excited, thrilled, honored.

Let’s dive in:

1.)   You once said, “people say ‘write what you know’, but really, ‘write what obsesses you.’” What obsesses you and how does that find itself in your books?

I think it changes from novel to novel. Before I began writing The Wife I had been thinking about male power and female complicity. When I came to write The Interestings I had been thinking about what happens to talent over time. Novels are a great receptacle for one’s obsessions and preoccupations. 

2.)   What inspires you?

Other people’s novels certainly do. The use of language in them, the way a writer saw something in particular and described it differently from the way anyone else would have.

3.)   You once wrote, the best advice you were given was from her college teacher, Mary Gordon: “Only write what’s important,” which to her means “write what is important to you.” What is most important to you to write about?

For me, novels give a glimpse into what it’s like to be someone else, to have another life. It’s important to me to show who my characters really are, and to look deeply––and then try to look even more deeply––at them and the world they live in.

4.)   “I often think that the fiction I love to read is about time, the passage of time.” Quoted from your interview with your mother. What do you mean by that?

I am someone who is often interested in how a whole life gets lived, and how people turn out. That requires time passing. I’m moved by the patterns that get repeated across a life, or even within generations in a family, and I’ve tried to explore some of that in my work.

5.)   What are the rewards of writing for you, both emotionally and concretely?

I feel very lucky to get to do what I love best, and what I’ve wanted to do since I was young. I also feel grateful to have a novelist mother, Hilma Wolitzer, who has taught me so much. Talking about writing with my mother is a true reward.

6.)   What is the hardest part about creating a character so believable that a reader feels they know him or her intimately?

I suppose one hard part is making the dialogue sound right, and absolutely true to who the character is. That involves deeply knowing that wholly invented person. 

7.)   We ask this in every interview: do you have any other advice for aspiring writers?

I would tell them to read other people’s writing that excites them. Sometimes this involves re-reading a book they loved a long time ago. A connection, or-reconnection, with another writer’s work can be thrilling, even if your own writing is entirely different.

Thank you so much, Meg. Wishing you the best. https://megwolitzer.com/