Sliding doors. We’ve all slid in and out of one that led to one future versus another. And we look back. We all do. It’s unavoidable. No matter how truly happy we are, there’s always that element of WHAT IF. From a very young age, we’re forced to make choices. Some are easier than others. Some we wonder about all of our lives. Some we have daily reminders about that stare us in the eye. Others we think about every now and then when a flashback of a time long ago returns in the shape of a memory, or in our dreams.
I’ve been carrying around The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer for a few weeks. Okay, maybe a few months. I was going through a reading dry spell and was finding it hard to concentrate, particularly on this nearly 500-page book. But I have read and loved Wolitzer’s work, most recently The Wife, which I read for book club, and was looking forward to this book yet wasn’t reading. Last week at the pool, someone asked me about it and I had hardly made a dent, embarrassingly. I asked if she’d read it, to which she replied: “I’m afraid to read it. I might start thinking about the roads I didn’t take. And I don’t want to.”
This was a book I wanted very much to read. So why wasn’t I? Judy Blume loves it. Jeffrey Eugenides loves it. Oprah’s O Magazine recently included the title on a list of five books we, as in women, need to read before our next birthdays (yes, I still have my subscription – I haven’t given up on the Queen of Talk yet).
Flash forward to a long plane ride to Colorado. Just me, the book and time, which I don’t get a lot of at home. And I dived in…feet first. Determined yet knowing I was in for a treat. And a personal one, much like The Ten Year Nap, another Wolitzer novel, that I read during a break from work when the kids were in pre-school. It was another book about the choices we make that impact our lives, that one about motherhood in particular, and I remember not being able to put it down while in the throes of my own decisions about returning to an office and needing to come to terms with the decision I had made to stay at home.
The Interestings is about a group of teenagers who meet at an arts sleep away camp in the 1970s, build an unbreakable bond and continue through life with one another as integral parts 0f their universe. We watch them grow up and see how the choices they make impact their futures and how their pasts determine much of what happens later in life. Some of them fall in love with each other…either from a distance, in real life or keep their feelings within and never end up with the person they could or should have ended up with. They achieve different levels of wealth, which the less wealthier part of the group has to come to terms with, while the wealthier part of the group makes every effort not to let the money weaken their friendships. The book also deals with marriage, birth, death, aging and it really zeroes on the decisions we make that can lead to success or failure.
And it also deals with feminism, particularly the evolution of women’s career and relationship trajectories over the last 30 years. The female characters are smart and educated and each takes certain paths based on their career goals. Jules, the protagonist, sets out to become an actress after being applauded for her skills at camp, but she ends up as a struggling therapist married to a sonogram technician, living paycheck to paycheck. Her best friend, Ash, becomes a theater director who works specifically in bringing women’s issues to the stage, yet depends on her wealthy husband for financial support and takes time out to raise her autistic son. One of their former friends from the Interestings at camp, Cathy, actually goes on to get her MBA and is quite successful financially but due to an event that happens early in their lives, one that actually impacts every member of the group, she is never truly happy, despite her wealth.
So the novel explores the question: what really makes us happy? We watch as the characters struggle to find happiness and Wolitzer takes us on the most interesting ride along with all of her characters. It all takes place mainly in NYC, the city I lived in for many years so it was easy to relate to the part of the book that takes place in the character’s lives as 20-somethings, when they are exploring life and identity. As a mother, a wife, a working woman, an arts professional who has struggled with my own career choices, and as a person with dark secrets about my own family and past, I found this book gripping. There is a lot to be learned about ourselves in her writing. Wolitzer is a master of storytelling and a master of using story structure and plot twists to get inside her characters. As events unfold, and choices are made, the story takes turns you would never expect.
And so it goes. Which of the characters are truly happy at the end of the book? Some settle for what they have, some long for more, some live a very different way than ever expected, just like we all do in real life. But as Jules, states at the very end of the book which could very well be her meaning of life.
“And didn’t it always go like that — body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”
After reading this book, I actually feel like I have met Ethan, Ash, Jonah, Jules and Goodman, the core of the group called the Interestings. And that is a skill for any author to master.
Disclosure: This is NOT a sponsored post. Pick up a copy of the book today. Seriously.
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Great story – it takes you through life as a teenager up to middle age and all that happens in between those years. Its a clear look at how friendships actually continue even when their individual lives go into various directions. It’s very relatable, touching and well written.