Jennifer Weiner is a graduate of Princeton's creative writing
program, where she studied fiction under the guidance of Joyce Carol Oates
and Toni Morrison. But the class that she cites as most important to her was
John McPhee's course on the art of nonfiction narrative (a class she shared
with novelist Akhil
Sharma). "I graduated in 1991," she recalls, "and I'd won some prizes for
my creative writing, and I think I was brimming with ambition and
pretension in equal measure." As much as she dreamed of writing fiction
fulltime, she knew that it was not a practical financial decision. McPhee
steered her towards a soluton. "He suggested to me that I get a job with a
newspaper in another part of the country, write every day, learn to work on
deadline, listen to different kinds of people, experience a lot of different
things, and then I'd find out if I was really a writer or not. So that was what I
did."
She continued to her work on her fiction, and had short stories published in
Seventeen and Redbook. She also spent a great deal of time on a novel-length
project she first started in college. But it was only three years ago that she
started her debut novel, Good in Bed, which introduces readers to the
lovably smart, sarcastic Candace "Cannie" Shapiro. Cannie's a zaftig Philadelphia
journalist in her late twenties who opens up a woman's magazine one day to
find out that her ex-boyfriend's written a column about "loving a larger
woman" filled with details about their relationship. It kicks off a crazy year's
worth of personal upheaval with a cast that includes Cannie's family, her
bitchy boss, a handsome doctor, and some movie stars. Now that the novel's out,
Weiner says, "the feeling of walking into a bookstore and seeing a stack of
your books is incredible. It's an incredible validation. All those things you
wrote that ended up in shoeboxes, all those rejection letters from the
Atlantic... I've gotten to be what I wanted to be when I grew up, and
that's a wonderful feeling." (You can keep track of the bookstores she's walked into by reading the tour diary at her offical website.)
RH: What got you started on Good in Bed?
JW: The revenge book! (laughs) I got dumped in 1998. I'd been
going out with this guy for a long time. I thought he was the one and he
wasn't. It ended up being one of those passive-aggressive things where he was
so awful to me that I ended up being the one to say, "OK, let's take a break
here," and he found another girlfriend ten minutes later, demonstrating a
speed and alacrity I rarely glimpsed during our years together.
So there I was, totally miserable and brokenhearted; I wanted him back and he
wanted no part of me. I wanted to write something in the voice that I had in
my head, the voice of this girl who'd been so hurt and brokenhearted. That
voice became the bones of Good in Bed.
RH: Apart from that basic setup, how autobiographical is the
novel?
JW: Cannie's voice is my voice, but nothing ever happened to me like
what happens to her in the novel. I certainly never had a guy write about me-
-thank God! That was about the worst thing I could imagine.
RH: Did you decide to just see where that voice took you, or did
you have an idea about what the story was going to be?
JW: I started with the voice, and I had an idea that somehow she was
going to get back with the guy, and it wasn't going to be good. Those were the
things I knew going into it... I knew that she'd see the guy again. I didn't
know she was going to get pregnant. I figured that out going on long walks,
thinking about what was going to happen to Cannie. And I knew I wanted a
happy ending, so it was largely a question of how I was going to get her there.
RH: You're very upfront about the way the book is inevitably
going to be compared to Bridget Jones's Diary, because it's a
novel about a young, single woman narrated in the first person.
There's a great line where Cannie basically acknowledges the
comparison and then moves on.
JW: I'm getting asked about Bridget everywhere I go; I don't think you
can be a young female novelist in 2001 and not get asked about that. Your
book is inevitably going to be compared to Bridget, only it's, say, more bitter,
or you're the black Bridget, or the big Bridget, which I've gotten a few
times.
The character of Cannie is a journalist, somebody who's been dealing with
words her whole life. She hates cliches, and she hates the notion that she is
one. So I liked giving her that moment where she could say, yeah, it's just like
Ally McBeal, just like Bridget Jones, so I could get it out of the way and tell the
story I wanted to tell.
RH: So you're writing the novel around your day job. How does
that work out?
JW: Well, I'd go in to the Inquirer and write my column, or do
some reporting on a story, or write about Survivor; it feels like I spent
all my time writing about Survivor for a while. Then I'd go to the gym,
go home, have dinner, and then sit at the computer. I'd try to spend an hour
most nights. Thursdays I usually didn't write because I'd be watching my TV
shows, and then I'd try to spend a long stretch on Saturday or Sunday and
work stuff out.
The good news about a life in newspapers is that you learn to write pretty fast.
Even when newspaper people write fiction, I don't think we sit there and go,
"Oh, what's the exact turn of phrase to use here?" or "I can't write today! My
muse has not spoken!" You don't have those luxuries at the newspaper, and
unless you're really pretentious, you don't give them to yourself in your
fiction.
RH: What's the reaction like among your colleagues?
JW: After they got through trying to figure out who Gabby was...
(laughs) they've been pretty good about it. If you were a kindergarten
teacher who'd written a novel, everybody would be thrilled for you, because
it'd be such a wonderful thing and not something every kindergarten teacher
aspires to. But a journalist can wander into some different reactions, because a
lot of journalists want to be novelists. So in addition to the good wishes, you get
a lot of questions about who's your agent, how did this happen, when did you
do this? Maybe a couple people that are not nice about it. But for the most part,
I have wonderful coworkers who've been great and who are really happy for
me.
RH: Cannie ends up selling her script to Hollywood. Have you
heard anything from the studios?
JW: Oh, my goodness! That's a long, sad story, I'm afraid. When the book
was being, there were a couple publishing houses interested in it. There was a
lot of buzz, as my agent would say. So I started getting calls from Hollywood
people. At first they only heard the bare bones of the story, and they were all
excited, but then they actually read the book, so they became less excited.
They'd call and say, "The size of the heroine is a problem for us." Evidently,
Hollywood believes that real people don't want to go to the movies and see
people who look like them.
One agent called me to tell me how much she loved the book, how much it
spoke to her, but that she didn't think any actress would be willing to gain
weight to play the part of Cannie. But they're doing wonderful things with
digital effects these days, she said. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry; I
think I did both. And I kept looking for a film agent. I ended up with a guy
who specializes in "difficult" material. He's Dorothy Allison's film agent, for
example.
RH: I can just imagine them saying, "If only you'd written the
part for somebody ten years older, we could cast Camryn
Manheim..."
JW: Right. Apparently she's the only large woman in all of Hollywood.
Don't get me wrong, I love her, I think she's spectacular. But it's so frustrating
to hear that she's the only name anybody can think of for the part. It's like if
Angela Bassett were the only black actress in Hollywood, and I was a young
black woman who'd written a book with a protagonist too young for her to
play.
I truly believe that while they're telling me there's nobody big enough to play
Cannie, they're telling young actresses to lose weight because there aren't
any parts for them. I just feel very strongly that somewhere between those
two extremes, there must be some intersection where I'll be able to find my
Cannie.
RH: Bridget Jones keeps moaning about her weight, but when
you see Renee Zwelleger in the film...well, my reaction was, "She's
not so big."
JW: Right, she's normal. But because our culture is what it is, even
women who are normal-sized feel like elephants; the message is that you're
never thin enough, never pretty enough, never good enough.
RH: One of my favorite scenes is the nurse's attempt to lecture
the women in the weight-loss program about calories, a speech
they've all heard before.
JW: Right, portion control, blah blah blah. Any woman who's been on a
diet, which is basically any woman at all, knows this stuff. It's not like they're
teaching rocket science. Weight loss is an incredibly difficult thing to do and
incredibly difficult to maintain, and I think it's aggravating to a lot of people
that doctors will tell them to go on a diet, when they know that diets don't work
for 95% of the people who go on them. If you had cancer, they wouldn't tell
you to do something that hasn't worked for 95% of the people, but that's what
they do with people trying to lose weight, because they haven't been able to
figure out anything better. I'll get off my soapbox now.
RH: Part of your motivation was to run with the voice that was
in your head after getting dumped. Was there any degree of wish
fulfillment in shaping the storyline?
JW: There's so many things that I wish I had said that I got to put in the
book. And there's a bit of wish fulfillment, too. I've gotten taken to task for it
by some reviewers, who say, oh, this could never happen, reacting to the part
of the story where Cannie sells her screenplay, gets lots of money, makes
famous friends... When I sold the book, it was a hundred times more amazing
than what I had imagined happening to Cannie. It really is like that for those
couple days. You're the star of the universe, you've done this fabulous thing
and everybody wants to be near you.
I gave Cannie my "three in the morning" voice, the things that I think of at
three in the morning that I wish I had said to people a week ago, and now it's
way too late to do anything about it. The scene where Cannie finally confronts
Bruce and says, "You're never going to finish your dissertation and you're
always going to live in New Jersey..." I was particularly proud of that one,
even though it wouldn't have been that spot on for the inspiration behind
Bruce.
RH: He's probably cringing these days...
JW: I don't know what he's doing. We don't talk. We didn't have a nice,
cordial breakup. You can have the breakup where you wish only the best for
him, or the one where you wish his limbs would fall off and his skin would
blister... So I have no idea what he's thinking, and since I got all the friends
when we split, nobody's really talking to him, so we just don't know.
I should also say that my ex may be the inspiration for Bruce, but the
character is a lot worse, a lot drippier, than he ever was. For the purposes of
fiction, I had to exaggerate every awful thing and then give him some extra
flaws, too. It's not a real person anymore, as Simon and Schuster's lawyers will
be glad to hear me say.
RH: What were some of the hardest parts of the book for you to
write?
JW: It was too long. I think I had "first novel disease," where you try to
put everything you've ever thought of, every funny line and quirky
observation, in there, and I had to cut about a hundred pages out of the
manuscript. But working in newspapers makes you a bit more dispassionate
about that--if you find out that it's too long and you have to cut it, then that's
what you do.
The stuff about the father was hard. Even though circumstances with my
father are very different, the way it felt was very much the same, so it was
painful to revisit some of those feelings, and I wound up having to write those
scenes somewhere else. I didn't want to be home when I wrote them.
RH: Out of the stuff you had to cut, was there anything you
especially miss?
JW: The fantasy stripper scene in Vegas. (pause) OK, I'm kidding,
there wasn't a fantasy stripper scene. But there had been more going on
between Cannie and Adrian, the movie star she meets in Hollywood, in earlier
drafts. It was just a little implausible, given that she was already pregnant, and
the story was getting long, plus how many wonderful things could happen to
Cannie in two weeks?
But I think Adrian's going to come back. A lot of characters from Good in
Bed will probably show up in the book I'm writing now. It's not a direct
sequel, because Cannie's happy at the end, which is great for her but bad for
me. Happy people don't want to do anything, they just want to sit there being
happy and you can't really write about them anymore. But the book takes
place in the same fictive Philadelphia, and we get to find out what's happened
to some of those characters.
RH: Who are some of your favorite writers?
JW: I love Susan Isaacs. I love John Irving, Peter Straub, Stephen King,
Nicholas Christopher, and Wally Lamb. I'm reading the new Rosellen Brown
right now, Half a Heart. Francine Prose is amazing. I like Andrew Vachss
a lot; it's not the kind of writing I could do, but he's great at it.
RH: So after years of being the interviewer, what's it like to be
facing the questions now?
JW: It is terrifying, and I think every journalist should have to go
through it. You feel like you're putting your life into somebody else's hands. I
cringe at some of the mean things I've said about other people's books now,
and I want to find the people who reviewed my book and shake them, tell them,
"You didn't read it right? Why are you being so mean to me? What did I ever do
to you?" But at the end of the day, it's the price of being published, and I
wouldn't trade being published for anything.
RH: And you've gotten your own happy ending, too.
JW: I got the guy! (chuckles) I wanted to give the book a happy
ending because I genuinely didn't know if I'd ever had one. I broke up with
that guy, then I dated somebody else and that wasn't working out, for different
but equally vexing reasons. I met Adam after I finished the book. He was the
first person to read the whole thing, and I remember him calling me at work
or emailing me to tell me how much he loved it, and I'd always ask him what
page he was on, so I'd be able to know exactly what page he was at when he
decided I was too much of a freak to ever see me again. But he stuck with it, and
we're getting married in October. I didn't have enough going on this year
with the book tour and buying a house, so now I'm planning a wedding, too.
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