Meg Wolitzer
Forfatter af The Interestings
Om forfatteren
Meg Wolitzer was born on Long Island, New York on May 28, 1959. She is the daughter of novelist Hilma Wolitzer. She studied creative writing at Smith College and graduated from Brown University in 1981. Her first novel, Sleepwalking, was published in 1982. Her other books include Hidden Pictures, vis mere This Is Your Life, Friends for Life, The Wife, The Position, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Uncoupling. Her short story Tea at the House was featured in 1998's Best American Short Stories collection. Her books This Is My Life and Surrender, Dorothy were adapted into films. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and Skidmore College and has written several Hollywood screenplays. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University. Her title, The Female Persuasion, made the bestseller list in 2018. (Bowker Author Biography) vis mindre
Image credit: 2018 National Book Festival By Avery Jensen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72641762
Serier
Værker af Meg Wolitzer
Tea at the House 1 eksemplar
Melissa Meyer 1 eksemplar
Dead Men Do Tell Tales 1 eksemplar
An Nachteule von Sternhai 1 eksemplar
Associated Works
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases (2020) — Bidragyder — 187 eksemplarer
Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do (2013) — Bidragyder — 182 eksemplarer
The Moth Presents Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible (2019) — Forord — 118 eksemplarer
Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That Are Used to Undermine… (2020) — Bidragyder — 71 eksemplarer
McSweeney's Issue 49 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern): Cover Stories (2017) — Bidragyder — 57 eksemplarer
Satte nøgleord på
Almen Viden
- Kanonisk navn
- Wolitzer, Meg
- Fødselsdato
- 1959-05-28
- Køn
- female
- Nationalitet
- USA (birth)
- Land (til kort)
- USA
- Fødested
- Long Island, New York, USA
- Bopæl
- New York, New York, USA
- Uddannelse
- Brown University (1981)
- Erhverv
- professor
writer - Relationer
- Wolitzer, Hilma (mother)
- Organisationer
- Columbia University
Stony Brook Southampton - Agent
- Suzanne Gluck (William Morris Agency)
Medlemmer
Anmeldelser
This was the first piece of work by Meg Wolitzer that I had ever read, and I found her writing style to be one of my favorite aspects of this book. It's very descriptive, readable, with just a little bit poetic prose. Hands down, I would read another one of Wolitzer's novels just for the writing.
That being said, I think this book was imbalanced. The plot, while interesting and made me want to read the book in the first place, did not really go anywhere. We have all these women who are "struck" by a spell of sorts, and afterwards no longer want to have sex or be touched by any men. This occurs after the local high school decides to perform the Greek comedy "Lysistrata"- a play where Grecian women go on a sex strike to prevent their husbands from going to war.
I felt as if too much time was spent on giving long backgrounds of each of the main women characters- their marriage, sexual partners, habits, etc...it just got a bit tedious and wasn't moving the plot forwards, especially given that the book is under 300 pages. By the time the climax of the book came around, nothing had truly happened yet.
Sure, people (both male and female) were affected, but it all felt very passive.
Additionally, the whole ending felt cheesy and just simply convenient.
Lastly, I think the characters could have been more lively. They were will written and unique and many of them interested me, but they just felt so FLAT. I liked a couple of them, but it was a very superficial like. Aside from family or sexual-based wants, we didn't get to know them very well.
It was a well-written but just okay read. I've heard some good reviews about Wolitzer's "The Interestings" and will probably read that next of her books, and hopefully there is more development there!… (mere)
That being said, I think this book was imbalanced. The plot, while interesting and made me want to read the book in the first place, did not really go anywhere. We have all these women who are "struck" by a spell of sorts, and afterwards no longer want to have sex or be touched by any men. This occurs after the local high school decides to perform the Greek comedy "Lysistrata"- a play where Grecian women go on a sex strike to prevent their husbands from going to war.
I felt as if too much time was spent on giving long backgrounds of each of the main women characters- their marriage, sexual partners, habits, etc...it just got a bit tedious and wasn't moving the plot forwards, especially given that the book is under 300 pages. By the time the climax of the book came around, nothing had truly happened yet.
Sure, people (both male and female) were affected, but it all felt very passive.
Additionally, the whole ending felt cheesy and just simply convenient.
Lastly, I think the characters could have been more lively. They were will written and unique and many of them interested me, but they just felt so FLAT. I liked a couple of them, but it was a very superficial like. Aside from family or sexual-based wants, we didn't get to know them very well.
It was a well-written but just okay read. I've heard some good reviews about Wolitzer's "The Interestings" and will probably read that next of her books, and hopefully there is more development there!… (mere)
As one might guess from the title, this smart, sometimes witty, novel is about gender politics, but it is much more than that. Also featuring into the story are explorations of corporate corruption, friendship, love, loss, hero worship, and the interesting and sometimes difficult interplay of different generations and cultures in the feminist community. A timely, well-developed novel, although occasionally pedantic and preachy — hence four stars rather than five. Still a worthwhile read.
3.5 stars really. Engaging and a time machine of the late 70s through the Great Recession but needed an editor to crisp up the stories. Biggest disappointment was the Goodman storyline which had such promise to be interesting and fizzled.
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Statistikker
- Værker
- 26
- Also by
- 10
- Medlemmer
- 9,980
- Popularitet
- #2,385
- Vurdering
- 3.5
- Anmeldelser
- 582
- ISBN
- 256
- Sprog
- 10
- Udvalgt
- 10
SO MUCH PLOT.
Six young people spend a summer at camp together, and go on to live interconnected but wildly different lives. Some end in tragedy, some in muted success, others somewhere in between. Wollitzer's prose swirls in a chronologically confused but always comprehensible manner from the 1970s to the end of the 2000s. Her characters all inhabit comfortably bourgeois lives (theatre director, psychologist, and so on) and face bourgeois problems with their parents, marriages, and children. It's all reasonable. But...
SO MUCH PLOT.
To be fair, there are lots of people who love plot. They gag for it. The kind of people who devour daytime soap operas or read fantasy novels. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm realising as I age that it's not for me. Plot is wonderful. It can be very engaging in, for instance, a classic mystery novel. But I have my threshold, and Wollitzer reached it before chapter 5. The novel rarely breaks for a moment of atmosphere, colour, or nuance. It's all meetings, conversations, and swift life changes.
Look, it is not a reviewer's job to disagree with what an author chose to do. It's to assess whether they did it successfully. And my problem with the torrential cascades of plot is simply that it deprives us of the most basic of literary adages: "show, don't tell". That's not always good advice, but here it may have been. A fortysomething man who was a stud in his teens has lost his charisma, but doesn't realise it. How do we know? Because the narrative voice tells us. And fair enough, too; there's no time for us to realise it from character or situation, because any given scene only takes one or two pages. There's too much plot, and not enough time. Characters fall in love, fall apart, have depressive episodes, deal with children with disabilities or other crises, soar to the height of their career unexpectedly, change jobs, lament their past life, unintentionally cause divorces, commit alleged rape, are weirdly groomed by older musicians, discover themselves, doubt themselves. Veering between timelines is a clever technique, but it just contributes to Wollitzer's need to keep updating us with chronologies and details that leave us panting with exhaustion. In other words:
SO MUCH PLOT.
Conversely, despite this being a chunky book with lots of plot, dialogue rarely packs a punch. Conversations are functional, people speak just like the rest of us do, and concerns are rarely elevated to literary levels. War and Peace it ain't. Moreso, there's an argument to be made that aside from Jules, the central character, no-one really changes that much. They remain types, and we never dig down.
While I felt an indescribable angst while reading the final chapter, in which unsurprisingly Jules meditates on life, loss, age, and change, I'm not even sure it was because of the author. It was just that inevitable yearning that we all feel when confronted with thoughts of our own past and that endless question of what we have gained with age, but what we have lost. It was empathy by default that I was feeling.
I continue to wish that I could have appreciated this more.… (mere)