Meg Wolitzer
| Meg Wolitzer | |
|---|---|
 Wolitzer at the 2011 Texas Book Festival, Austin | |
| Born |
May 28, 1959 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Occupation | novelist, Essayist |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Notable works | The Ten-Year Nap, The Uncoupling, The Interestings |
| Website | |
|
megwolitzer | |
Meg Wolitzer (born May 28, 1959) is an American writer, best known for The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, The Uncoupling, and The Interestings. She currently works as an instructor in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Life and career
Wolitzer was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Hilma Wolitzer (née Liebman), also a novelist, and Morton Wolitzer, a psychologist.[1] She was raised Jewish.[2] Wolitzer studied creative writing at Smith College and graduated from Brown University in 1981. She wrote her first novel, Sleepwalking, a story of three college girls obsessed with poetry and death, while still an undergraduate; it was published in 1982.[3] Her following books include Hidden Pictures (1986), This Is Your Life (1988), Surrender, Dorothy (1998), The Wife (2003), The Position (2005), The Ten-Year Nap (2008), The Uncoupling (2011), and The Interestings (2013). Her short story "Tea at the House" was featured in 1998's Best American Short Stories collection. Her novel for younger readers, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, was published in 2011.
She also co-authored, with Jesse Green, a book of cryptic crosswords: Nutcrackers: Devilishly Addictive Mind Twisters for the Insatiably Verbivorous (1991), and has written about the relative difficulty women writers face in gaining critical acclaim.[4]
She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, Skidmore College, and, most recently, was a guest artist at Princeton University. Over the past decade she has also taught at both Stony Brook Southampton's MFA in Creative Writing program and the Southampton Writers Conference and the Florence Writers Workshop.[5] Two films have been based on her work; This Is My Life, scripted and directed by Nora Ephron, and the 2006 made for television movie, Surrender, Dorothy.
The Uncoupling was the subject of the first coast-to-coast virtual book club discussion, via Skype.[6]
Wolitzer was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Syosset, on Long Island. She lives in New York with her husband Richard Panek, also a writer, and two sons.
Reviews
- "Here are three words that land with a thunk: gender, writing and identity. Yet in The Wife, Meg Wolitzer has fashioned a light-stepping, streamlined novel from just these dolorous, bitter-sounding themes. Maybe that's because she's set them all smoldering: rage might be the signature emotion of the powerless, but in Wolitzer's hands, rage is also very funny."[7]
- "At this point in her career, Meg Wolitzer deserves to be a household name. Every few years she turns out a sparkling novel that manages to bring the shine back to big, tarnished issues of gender politics, such as women's pull between work and family, or the role of sexuality in family dynamics."[8]
- "[The Interestings'] inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” and Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Marriage Plot.” “The Interestings” is warm, all-American and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly and undeniably a novel of ideas." [9]
Works
Novels
- Sleepwalking (1982)
- Hidden Pictures (1986)
- This Is Your Life (1988)
- Surrender, Dorothy (1998)
- The Wife (2003)
- The Position (2005)
- The Ten-Year Nap (2008)
- The Uncoupling (2011)
- The Interestings (2013)
- Belzhar (2014)
References
- ↑ http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3070500145/wolitzer-hilma-1930.html
- ↑ http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/137367/q-and-a-meg-wolitzer-on-sex-suburbs-and-the-wo/
- ↑ "Writing About Women Who Are Soccer Moms Without Soccer". New York Times. March 25, 2008. Retrieved September 4, 2011.
- ↑ Meg Wolitzer (March 30, 2012). "The Second Shelf". New York Times. Retrieved April 29, 2013.
- ↑ http://www.stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/cwl/people.html
- ↑ "New chapter begins for book clubs as author takes discussion online". Edmonton Journal. September 4, 2011. Retrieved September 4, 2011.
- ↑ Claire Dederer (April 20, 2003). "http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/books/in-the-shadow-of-the-big-boys.html?ref=megwolitzer". New York Times. Retrieved September 4, 2011. External link in
|title=(help) - ↑ Heller McAlpin (April 10, 2011). "The Uncoupling (Review)". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved September 4, 2011.
- ↑ Liesl Schillinger (April 19, 2013). "The Interestings (Review)". New York Times. Retrieved April 26, 2013.
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