Tayari's Blog: Summer Reading: The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

Posted by TayariJones on July 1, 2005 10:58 PM
Filed under Bookshelf

I just got finished reading The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer. It was very, very good. I can say that it really shook me. Just thinking about it puts me in a fragile emotional space. I have to say that I don't know how interesting it will be for the general population.. but maybe I am underestimating folks? But it was really gripping to read as a writer, as it is a novel about the writer's life.

The plot: While a famous writer is on the way to Europe to receive an important award, his wife decides to leave him. The real-time of the story is only about three days, but the narration (hers) takes us through the course of the marraige. They couple meet when he is her writing teacher at Smith. He leaves his wife and baby for her and the rest is history. (I am using this cliche deliberately. Read the book to see what I mean.)

What I loved about it was the way that the story and the characters haunted me. I was creeped out by the depiction of the traveling writer circuit, the famous writer circuit. One of the more girpping scence was the scene in which a visiting woman writer who is talented, but not pretty, tells another young woman writer not to try for a career as an author.

I spend a lot of time, personally, thinking about being a black writer. But The Wife really highlighted teh gendered side of things.

And besides the idiological matter, the book is gripping in its plot and heartbreaking in its emotional weight.

I went to the library and got an other one of Meg Wolitzer's books, Surrender, Dorothy.

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There are 1 comments on "Summer Reading: The Wife by Meg Wolitzer". If you'd like to leave a comment, click here to jump down to the comments entry form.

Comment #1, by danyel

I was stunned by "the Wife." Meg took it there. A lot of people saw the end coming, but I didn't. I was zapped. FLOORED. And the portrait of the marriage, well ... it was staggering. Bleak, and honest, and bitter. She's a super-thorough writer. As you said, it's very much a book about a woman's side of things (during another era). I do wonder though, how much of what goes on in "the Wife," goes on as we speak, be the couple white, Latin, Asian, black, mixed, whatever.

Let me know how your library book read goes.

July 6, 2005 10:39 AM

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