De Amerikaanse schrijfster Meg Wolitzer werd geboren op 28 mei 1959 in Brooklyn, New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Meg Wolitzer op dit blog.

Uit: The Wife

“He
looked over at me suddenly, watched my face, and said, “What’s the
matter? You look a little . . . something.” “No. It’s nothing,” I told
him. “Nothing worth talking about now, anyway,” and he accepted this as a
good-enough answer, returning to his plate of Tollhouse cookies, a
small belch puffing his cheeks out froglike, briefly. It was difficult
to disturb this man; he had everything he could possibly ever need. He
was Joseph Castleman, one of those men who own the world. You know the
type I mean: those advertisements for themselves, those sleepwalking
giants, roaming the earth and knocking over other men, women, furniture,
villages. Why should they care? They own everything, the seas and
mountains, the quivering volcanoes, the dainty, ruffling rivers. There
are many varieties of this kind of man: Joe was the writer version, a
short, wound-up, slack-bellied novelist who almost never slept, who
loved to consume ninny cheeses and whiskey and wine, all of which he
used as a vessel to carry the pills that kept his blood lipids from
congealing like yesterday’s pan drippings, who was as entertaining as
anyone I have ever known, who had no idea of how to take care of himself
or anyone else, and who derived much of his style from The Dylan Thomas
Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette. There he sat beside me on
Finnair flight 702, and whenever the brunette brought him something, he
took it from her, every single cookie and smokehouse-treated nut and
pair of spongy, throwaway slippers and steaming washcloth rolled
Torah-tight. If that luscious cookie-woman had stripped to her waist and
offered him one of her breasts, mashing the nipple into his mouth with
the assured authority of a La Leche commandant, he would have taken it,
no questions asked. As a rule, the men who own the world are
hyperactively sex-ual, though not necessarily with their wives. Back in
the 1960s, Joe and I leaped into beds all the time, occasionally even
during a lull at cocktail parties, barricading someone’s bedroom door
and then climbing a mountain of coats. People would come banging,
wanting their coats back, and we’d laugh and shush each other and try to
zip up and tuck in before letting them enter. We hadn’t had that in a
long time, though if you’d seen us here on this airplane heading for
Finland, you’d have assumed we were content, that we still touched each
other’s sluggish body parts at night. “Listen, you want an extra
pillow?” he asked me. “No, I hate those doll pillows,” I said. “Oh, and
don’t forget to stretch your legs like Dr. Krentz said.”

 

Meg Wolitzer (New York, 28 mei 1959)

De Amerikaanse schrijfster Meg Wolitzer werd geboren op 28 mei 1959 in Brooklyn, New York, als dochter van Hilma Wolitzer (geboren Liebman), ook een schrijfster, en Morton Wolitzer, een psycholoog. Ze werd Joods opgevoed en studeerde creatief schrijven aan het Smith College en studeerde in 1981 af aan de Brown University. Ze schreef haar eerste roman, “Sleepwalking”, toen zij nog een undergraduate was; het werd gepubliceerd in 1982. Zij publiceerde vervolgens “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 ) en “The Interestings” (2013). Haar korte verhaal “Tea at the House” werd opgenomen in de Best American Short Stories-Collection van 1998. Haar roman voor jongere lezers, “The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman”, verscheen in 2011. Wolitzer was ook co-auteur, met Jesse Green, van een boek met cryptische kruiswoordpuzzels: “Nutcrackers: Devilishly Addictive Mind Twisters for the Insatiably Verbivorous” (1991), en schreef over de relatieve moeilijkheid waarmee vrouwelijke schrijvers geconfronteerd worden bij het verkrijgen van lovende kritieken. Wolitzer doceerde creatief schrijven aan de Writers ‘Workshop van de University of Iowa, Skidmore College, en was recentelijk een gastschrijfster aan de Princeton University. In het afgelopen decennium heeft ze ook lesgegeven in het MFA-programma van Stony Brook Southampton in het Creative Writing-programma en de Southampton Writers Conference en de Florence Writers Workshop. Drie films zijn gebaseerd op haar werk; “This Is My Life”, geregisseerd door Nora Ephron, de in 2006 gemaakte televisievideo, “Surrender, Dorothy” en het drama “The Wife” uit 2017, met in de hoofdrol Glenn Close.

Uit: The Wife

“The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage, I could have said, but why ruin everything right now? Here we were in first-class splendor, tentatively separated from anxiety; there was no turbulence and the sky was bright, and somewhere among us, possibly, sat an air marshal in dull traveler’s disguise, perhaps picking at a little dish of oily nuts or captivated by the zombie prose of the in-flight magazine. Drinks had already been served before takeoff, and we were both frankly bombed, our mouths half open, our heads tipped back. Women in uniform carried baskets up and down the aisles like a sexualized fleet of Red Riding Hoods.
“Will you have some cookies, Mr. Castleman?” a brunette asked him, leaning over with a pair of tongs, and as her breasts slid forward and then withdrew, I could see the ancient mechanism of arousal start to whir like a knife sharpener inside him, a sight I’ve witnessed thousands of times over all these decades. “Mrs. Castleman?” the woman asked me then, in afterthought, but I declined. I didn’t want her cookies, or anything else.
We were on our way to the end of the marriage, heading toward the moment when I would finally get to yank the two-pronged plug from its holes, to turn away from the husband I’d lived with year after year. We were on our way to Helsinki, Finland, a place no one ever thinks about unless they’re listening to Sibelius, or lying on the hot, wet slats of a sauna, or eating a bowl of reindeer. Cookies had been distributed, drinks decanted, and all around me, video screens had been arched and tilted. No one on this plane was fixated on death right now, the way we’d all been earlier, when, wrapped in the trauma of the roar and the fuel-stink and the distant, braying chorus of Furies trapped inside the engines, an entire planeload of minds—Economy, Business Class, and The Chosen Few—came together as one and urged this plane into the air like an audience willing a psychic’s spoon to bend.
Of course, that spoon bent every single time, its tip drooping down like some top-heavy tulip. And though airplanes didn’t lift every single time, tonight this one did. Mothers handed out activity books and little plastic bags of Cheerios with dusty sediment at the bottom; businessmen opened laptops and waited for the stuttering screens to settle. If he was on board, the phantom air marshal ate and stretched and adjusted his gun beneath a staticky little square of Dynel blanket, and our plane rose in the sky until it hung suspended at the desired altitude, and finally I decided for certain that I would leave my husband. Definitely. For sure. One hundred percent. Our three children were gone, gone, gone, and there would be no changing my mind, no chickening out.”

Meg Wolitzer (New York, 28 mei 1959)