From the Vault…Jennifer Weiner

Q&A with Jennifer Weiner

This Q&A first appeared in The Hoopla in July 2014. It was a rare exclusive as Weiner only agreed to interviews if the journalist involved demonstrated serious intent in their questions.

Perhaps it was a sign of the times. This interview coincided with an interesting period in Weiner’s life. A 2014 New Yorker profile called her an “unlikely feminist enforcer” and celebrated her “lively public discussion about the reception and consumption of fiction written by women.” By this time, the multi-million copy bestselling author had already engaged in a public stoush with Jonathon Franzen over literary snobbery and taken on Jeffery Eugenides and other male writers both in social media and in print. It coincided with the growing conversation about how women’s writing was under-represented in literary pages, not to mention, undervalued. In America, an organisation called VIDA was tallying the statistics on the number of books reviewed and written by women. The Stella Prize conducted a similar undertaking in Australia.

Fast forward to today and Weiner continues to write bestselling novels, as well as fantastic essays on all sorts of social issues, not to mention her witty and pointed social media commentary. I urge everyone to check out Weiner’s website here where you can read, amongst other things, her excellent advice on writing. This New Yorker magazine article is also well worth a read. Enjoy!

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Read any of her eleven American bestsellers and you’d swear that Jennifer Weiner has been hiding out in your house—jotting down notes on your private existence, poking into your cupboards and digging around the glove box of your car. The words her characters sprout as they suffer the slings and arrows of their personal misfortunes are straight out of half a dozen or more conversations you have shared about work, motherhood, parents, marriage, best friends and siblings. Another words, if there were such a genre as “suburban zeitgeist”, Jennifer Weiner defines it—this woman is intimate with the stuff of women’s lives.

All Fall Down, her latest New York Times bestseller is such a story. Having it all and collapsing under the weight of her own expectations, Allison Weiss turns to prescription pills to medicate her existence. As her addiction worsens, and her efforts to feed it and hide it become frantic, she risks losing everything she values. Of course, being Jennifer Weiner, the novel turns on a fulcrum of humour that only serves to make her points all the sharper.

In an Australian exclusive, Jennifer Weiner shares with The Hoopla her thoughts on writing a book on suburban addiction, the burden of expectation and the modern dilemma of having it all.

What prompted you to write a story about prescription drug addiction?

I wanted to address the specific problem of addiction because it’s so widespread, because it affects so many women, and because I’ve had some experience with it in my life. More than just writing about an addict, though, I wanted to consider the bigger question of authentic happiness. Here’s a woman who looks like she has everything she’s supposed to want, and yet it’s not enough, and she develops unhealthy habits for coping with the stress of day-to-day life. Whether women turn to pills, or wine, or exercising obsessively or staying online for hours, the idea of being unable to handle what life throws at you is something that resonates with so many (too many!) women. I spoke to an addiction counselor who told me something that really stuck with me, which is that pills, or booze, or whatever you’re abusing, is just a symptom. The real problem is that addicts never learned to deal with their feelings. I think that’s true for a lot of us—even the ones whose lives look great from the outside.

Your novels seem to have the knack of tapping into the suburban zeitgeist. Where do you find your inspiration for your female characters?

Inspiration is everywhere! On Twitter, in the playground at my daughters’ school, on reality TV shows, in my own family…it’s really just a question of keeping my eyes and ears open, and paying attention to the world, from the front page of the paper to the gossip at the local coffee shop.

At one point in All Fall Down, Allison is telling her BFF Janet, who is now a housewife but used to be a hot shot lawyer, “in three or five or eight years things would come around right and we would find ourselves again the smart, vital women we’d once been.” Is this disconnect you find commonly with your female audience?

Yes! I feel like there’s an idea—a fantasy, really—of what being married and being a mother is supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to feel, and the reality of the experience is often very different. We see soft-focus photographs of celebrities holding their (beautiful, sleeping) newborns in the pages of the tabloids, and women waltzing out of the hospital two days after giving birth wearing their skinny jeans, and six-figure weddings when reality stars get hitched. What we don’t see or hear a lot about is the quotidian realities that make up marriage and motherhood.

I remember feeling completely undone after my first daughter arrived. Like a lot of smart, high-achieving women who’d waited ‘til their thirties to give birth, I had plans for days about how everything from the delivery itself (no drugs!) to my parenting (no sitters!) was going to unfold. Then the reality of my oldest daughter arrived, and it was nothing like what I’d imagined, in spite of all the books I’d read, all the research and fantasizing I’d done. The delivery was nothing like what I’d planned for or dreamed of. I struggled to breast-feed (and, of course, I’d promised myself I would nurse her until her first birthday). I felt lonely and overwhelmed and nothing like one of those gorgeous, perfectly made-up, soft-focus moms in People…and I think that what I felt is very common.

In America, you can’t even buy codeine without a script. Do you think changing the access to drugs will prevent systemic abuse or do you think the problem lies before that, in expectations of women by society and the pressure we put on ourselves?

Here’s the truth: people with a certain level of education, in a certain socio-economic class, with a certain amount of money, are always going to be able to get what they want, whether that’s guns or drugs or a safe abortion. We can declare war on drugs, we can change the rules and regulations, add waiting periods, whatever. If you’re wealthy, if you present yourself a certain way, if you know how to work the system, you’ll get what you want (in Allison’s case, she’s able to get it via legal prescriptions from her doctors). So no, I don’t think changing the access to drugs will make any difference, other than punishing the people down the food chain in the drug trade, the ones who are already being disproportionately punished and jailed. We need to take a giant step back and take a big-picture look at why people abuse drugs if we hope to make any real change.

One of the things that is fascinating about Allison’s journey to recovery is the self denial. She sits in her first AA meeting and is horrified to be grouped with the impoverished, unwashed junkies and alcoholics. Do you think there is a real issue here—that white middle class tertiary educated people have a different language and self-belief about their addiction?

Addiction counselors tell people to look for the similarities, not the differences, and, certainly, Allison, even with her high bottom, has plenty in common with the people she dismisses as low-life junkies. However, I do think it can be incredibly off-putting for an educated, financially comfortable, high-functioning addict to walk into a meeting filled with people who are living very different lives…and it can be easy for her to say, “I can’t possibly be a real addict, I’m nothing like these people!” I do believe that there’s room to address the ways an addict’s specifics might be different, even if the generalities of the disease are exactly the same whether you’re a rich lady scamming your doctor for pain pills or a poor teenager living in an abandoned building turning tricks for meth or heroin.

One of Allison’s underlying issues is that whilst her husband Dave’s career prospects are declining in the old media, her career in the new media as a social commentator and blogger is taking off. How common do you find it that the woman taking on the mantle of main breadwinner causes real ruptures in their relationships?

In this day and age, forty years after “Free to Be…You and Me” told boys and girls that they could be anything they wanted, you think we’d be long past the point where it mattered which partner brought home the bacon and which fried it up in the pan. What I’ve found is that old double standards and beliefs about gender die long, slow, painful deaths. Many men still believe that it’s their job to provide for their families, and feel completely lost, even emasculated, if their wife makes more money. Many women believe it’s the man’s duty to provide, and feel similarly unmoored and unhappy when they realize that they’re the ones paying the bills. We can argue that men are hard-wired to provide and that women are hard-wired to be cared for, or that maybe it’s just going to take more time and more imagination before we get to the point where everyone’s okay with a wife out-earning her husband. I think it’s still an issue for lots and lots of people.

Allison raises the spectre of the “ultimate female transgression, the Sin of Bad Motherhood.” How much do you think this plays out in real life and accounts for the hidden addictions of women?

My suspicion is that the fear of being a bad mother is one of the things that gets women in trouble with addiction in the first place. It’s the ultimate transgression; it’s the thing that’s the hardest to admit to doing, or feeling—like you don’t love your children the way a ‘real’ mother does; that you’re not as good as your mother/your sister/the woman next door. There’s a certain kind of language around mommies who drink (not mommies who use pills—not yet—but part of me worries that it’s coming). We joke about Chardonnay in sippie cups, and whether it’s Wine O’Clock yet. I could go on Twitter right now and in five minutes come back with some version of my kids are making me crazy, when can I pour my first glass?

The trouble with treating it like a joke means that it starts feeling okay, or excusable, or not so bad.

Of course, when a mother becomes an addict, her children are usually the first people to suffer. Even if, as Allison thinks, she’s not passing out in front of her daughter or waking up in a puddle of her own puke, she’s less present than she should be.

What’s the feedback been from the public and media in the US to the themes raised in All Fall Down—are you pariah or champion? And, is this where the discussion ends for you or can readers expect your next novel to follow along dark themes?

There are people for whom I’ll always be a pariah because I talk about gender and genre and the way women’s books are covered, or ignored, by the mainstream media. Lots of people don’t want to hear that, or decide that I’m picking on better writers because I’m jealous, and could care less what my actual books are actually about. However, All Fall Down has gotten some of the best reviews of my career, and I’ve heard from people in recovery that it captures the details of addiction in a population we don’t hear much about. I’m proud of it! Although it’s been interesting to hear from critics who find this book so much darker or grittier than my previous work. I think that all of my books have gone to some dark places, all of them have dealt with big issues, whether it’s weight or parental estrangement or sibling rivalry or having a best friend walk out of your life. Growing up, my mother would tell me, “it’s all material…” And I learned by example and experience that laughter makes everything better. My plan is to continue to take on important issues, but view them through the lens of characters who have a sense of humor—which, not coincidentally, is the way I try to live my life!