Do I want to spend my diminished working hours writing or answering email? Now I have somebody read through them. If someone has something really important to tell me I write back. Otherwise they get the auto reply.
The idea you can tell a writer of a specific religion to stop writing about that religion is presumptuous.
I don't trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.
I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.
I also believe that if you're really a writer, you'll write, and that nobody could stop you.
I don't think any writer chooses what his or her work is called.
It's as if the fasion designers decided that once a woman hit a certain weight, she'd have no need for business suits, for skirts and blazers, for anything except glorified sweatsuits, and they tried to apologize for dressing us like overaged Teletubbies by silk-screening daisies on the tops.
She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.
...thinking that the world was like an orange, that I could split it open with my thumbnail and find a whole different world, the grown-up world, the secrets beneath the skin.
Head's all empty, I don't care,' he'd sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I'd force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I'd care.
I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
I think I'm much more comfortable talking about other books than my own!
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
You move forward because thats the way it works; thats the only place you can go.
But what we're really trapped by is perceptions. You think you need to lose weight for someone to love you. I think if I gain weight, no one will love me. What we really need is to just stop thinking of ourselves as bodies and start thinking of ourselves as people.
Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.
We dated in our early 20s, when we were working at the same newspaper. We broke up, got back together and broke up again. I wanted to get married and have kids, but he wasn't ready. So I married someone else, had my daughters and the marriage ended ... and there was Bill. He'd never gotten married and was finally, finally ready. We discovered that we were still each other's favorite people to talk to.
I can carry a tune with a three-note range. Once I'm out of that range, I'm in trouble.
If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.
I love it when people ask if Jennifer Weiner is a pen name. Um, if I wanted a pen name I could have done a LOT better than this!
If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?
I struggle with the fact that men's popular fiction is talked about differently. Books like mine don't get as many reviews and probably won't win any prizes, but they entertain the pants off of hundreds of thousands of women.
Many writers secretly long to be performers. You always get the 'if you weren't a writer' question. I would be a back-up singer, to stand in the back and go like 'do, do, do.
The difference between people who believe they have books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed persistence - the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day - the belief, even in the face of obstacles, that you've got something worth saying.
I think there are a lot of books about thin, attractive people having thin, attractive people's problems. I'm better set up to tell a different story.
Well, you can’t control what they do, but you can control how you respond to it…whether you allow it to drive you crazy, or occupy all of your thoughts, or whether you note what they’re doing, consider it, and make a conscious decision as to how much you’ll let it affect you
I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren't looking; your husband could lose his job; our baby could get sick or die.
Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.
Baby," groaned the guy-Ted? Tad?-something like that-and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the wall of the toilet stall.
Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.
Things happen, and you can't make them unhappen. You don't get do-overs, you can't roll back the clock, and the only thing you can change, and the only thing it does any good to worry about, is how you let them affect you.
This is motherhood for you,' said my own mother. 'Going through life with your heart outside your body.
I'm so glad that social media gives me a chance to do that, to celebrate books I love and help proselytize for books I love.
I think it has as much to do with honoring my own voice as it does with feeling a responsibility to my readers or my daughters.
As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did.
Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.
I don't like futons. They can't commit. I'm a bed! I'm a couch! I'm a bed! I'm a couch!
So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed.
Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest.
Right now women are using surrogates because they can't be pregnant. What worries me is the possibility that soon they'll use surrogates because they don't want to be pregnant.
The way I see it,” she began, “your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids.” She said “you kids” in precisely the same tone I would have used for “you infestation of cockroaches
Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.
Women are far and away the bigger consumers of fiction than men, but men are still far and away the more reviewed, the more critically esteemed, the more respected. That can get frustrating.
My publisher feels that my readers are loyal to the voice of my stories, the characters I'm creating.
Maybe it stems from my newspaper-reporting days, but I took notes the whole time - getting the call, how I felt. As soon as I put pen to paper, it became a story [Hunger Heart], not something happening to me but something I was recording.
This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me,” I said, through my tear-clogged throat. “I want you to know that.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse. Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father?? he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and meaning it.
I have the best divorce of anyone I've heard of.
Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can't survive...it's the thing that makes you better than you used to be.
He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn't love me anymore, and it's not the end of the world.
People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say,'
I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do- because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicyle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and hold them fully, and to nurture a new life. I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not -will not- break.
If you get the you-are-a-genius label, it can limit you. Because I'm not so scrutinized, I have more freedom. And that let's me write what I want.
I'm going to continue writing. I'll always be a storyteller. But I'm also taking time to enjoy my life.
I grew up with a feminist mom and the understanding that, as someone coming from a position of (relative) privilege, it was my job to speak up when things weren't fair.
I didn’t feel anything but a bone-deep weariness. Like I was suddenly a hundred years old, and I knew at that moment I would have to live a hundred more years, carrying my grief around like a backpack full of stones.
There's nothing wrong with keeping your mouth shut if you don't have anything nice to say.
I have these "pinch me" moments when I realize I got to be the thing I wanted to be growing up. I'm right where I belong.
My lazy, unfair assumption is that everything's easier when you're young and stunning. And maybe it is! But I'd like to see for myself.
Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.
... somehow I couldn't stop. I had turned into someone that I would have pitied in another life; someone who searched for signs, who analyzed patterns, who went over every word in a conversation looking for hidden meanings, secret signals, the subtext that said, Yes, I still love you, of course I still love you.
Found, I told myself. Try to get found.
Is it still there?" I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, "Does it sound broken?
She hated the implied familiarity when customers requested things from her by name.
I'm not cut out to be a famous person; I can't do my hair and makeup well enough.
I'm not in charge of my life.
The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.
Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can, and you keep going.
I hope that's what I've taught my girls - to be fair, to recognize their own position and their own good fortune, to use their voices to make things better. Beyond that, I'd tell them just to be kind.
Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.
My book sales make 'real writers' possible.
Writing let me escape... It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew. And there was plenty to escape from.
If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.
I love it when people ask who my influences are... or what my favorite part of my last book was... or the last great book I read.
I get really starstruck and tongue tied when I'm around other writers and the conversation tends not to go well.
I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I'd have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they'd even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods
People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world...But you have to do what's right for you.
There's a part of me with every book that thinks, What would it have meant for me tohave had this book when I was a kid? I decided to create a book for girls like me. The Littlest Bigfoot is about bullying and body image and girls who don't fit in. It's like training wheels for my adult books - like Sex and the City, but with 12-year-olds.
Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.
I remember things like that...A lifetimes accredidation of unkindness, all of those little longering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets.
If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.
As the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and fall slid into winter, I realized one of the great truths about tragedy: You can dream of disappearing. You can wish for oblivion, for endless sleep or the escape of fiction, of walking into a river with your pockets full of stones, of letting the dark water close over your head. But if you've got kids, the web of the world holds you close and wraps you tight and keeps you from falling no matter how badly you think you want to fall.
Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.
The truth is, what I learned this year is that life is hard...Good people die for no reason. Little kids get sick. The people that are supposed to love you end up leaving.
There are a lot of women like me in the world, and we rarely get to see ourselves.
Addie, please." More tears dripped down her cheeks. "Don't be so hard." "Oh, please," I muttered...and that was as far as I got. 'You broke my heart' were the words that had risen to my mouth, but I couldn't say them. That was what you said to a boyfriend, a lover, not your best friend. She'd laugh. And I'd had enough of being laughed at. I'd worked hard to get to a place where it didn't happen anymore, where I didn't move through life like a walking target, where it was just me and my paints and brushes and my big empty bed every night. "You weren't a good friend," I said instead.
I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.
I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the patience not to strangle my mother-in-law, chop her into little pieces, and dump them down a sewer.
My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.
Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward because that's the way it works; that's the only place u can go. You keep going until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn.
There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.
I don't particularly like being angry about stuff. I'd rather hang out with my daughter and write my little books.
I like blogs. they're good times.
I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up-the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn’t.
And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.
They say - "they" being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times.
I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.
Every mother I've ever met, pretty much without exception, is doing the best job she can ever do.
I decided.. that I could go on being scared forever, that I could keep walking, that I could carry my rage around, hot and heavy in my chest forever. But maybe there was another way. You have everything you need, my mother had told me. And maybe all I needed was the courage to admit that what I needed was someone to lean on.
This is so much harder than I ever thought it would be...because the thing is, even if you're just working part-time, your boss is going to expect a full week's worth of work, no matter how understanding she is. That's just the nature of the working world-things have to get done, babies or not. And if you're like me-if you're like any woman who ever did well in school and did well at her job-you don't want to disappoint a boss. And you want to do a good job raising your baby...It's not like you think it's going to be
Hefty? I'd railed to Peter, waving the clipping for emphasis. Hefty? For the record 'Hefty' is a trash bag. I'm festively plump.
When an older writer tries to tell a younger writer through a review what kind of career she should be pursuing, it tends to speak to the reviewer's anxieties rather than the book itself.
I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you're not married or coupled up, whether you've been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.
There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.
Back in the day, when I was starting out, I'd get five or 10 emails and I'd respond to every one. But after my third or fourth book it got too time-consuming.
You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.
People say I'm not good at writing about men. My dad left when I was 16. Give me a break. I'm doing the best I can.
I went to Princeton, I minored in women's studies.
Stephen King writes mass fiction but gets reviewed by the New York Times and writes for the New Yorker. Critics say to me, "Shut up and enjoy your money," and I think, OK, I'll shut up and enjoy my money, but why does Stephen King get to enjoy his money and get reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review?
When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there... whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time.
When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.
I've learned a lot this year.. I learned that things don't always turn our the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I've learned that there are things that go wrong that don't always get fixed or get put back together the way they were before. I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.
If you put a pink cover on something, critics make a certain set of assumptions and may not even read the book. But my readers are happy with it.
They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.
I was lucky to receive help at the beginning of my career and now I want to help other writers as much as I can.
Whenever people with money have power over people with less money, you have the potential for exploitation.
I sometimes read about authors who say they require a perfectly silent room maintained at precisely 68 degrees, with trash bags taped over the windows and a white-noise machine in the corner to write, and I think, 'Who are these people, and do any of them have kids?
It's like if a young woman writes it, then it's chick lit. We don't care if she's slaying vampires or working as a nanny or living in Philadelphia. It's chick lit, so who cares? You know what we call what men write? Books.
I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.
I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.
My sense is that beautiful women are living in a different world than I am, and that it's a world with benefits but also drawbacks - like, you're on a ticking clock, because the day you stop being supermodel-beautiful is the day that everything the world has to offer you is no longer being offered.
I'd love to spend a day being supermodel beautiful.
