Book Alert / The Ten Year Nap

The Ten Year Nap -- A Novel by Meg Wolitzer, Riverhead '08, $24.95, 351 pages, ISBN #1594489785.

Meg Wolitzer is no mere storyteller, although her eight novels prove she is adept at that. Unlike most novelists, she uses fiction narratives as a vehicle to deconstruct social issues of the day, such as the sexual revolution, feminism and  gender politics. In her latest, Wolitzer addresses the phenomenon of "I want to do it all" women, who opted out of the work force after a few years and how they then fare as full-time mothers.

In a brief interview, Wolitzer spoke of the forces that led her to write this book:

Q. The topic of educated women who opt out of the work force to stay home and be full-time mothers has been very much in the news in recent years. Why has this phenomenon happened, and why does it spark such controversy? And why did you decide to write a novel about it?

A. I don't think I would have been able to answer the question of "why" it happened in any way other than writing a novel about it. Fiction has always allowed me to explore a subject through the complicated lives of people, and to get a closer look at the issues at stake. The impulse to write about it came from the fact that I had begun to meet so many really nice and smart women around my age who no longer worked or thought of themselves as "ambitious." And that was a surprise to me. I wanted to understand the phenomenon, after seeing it in life and not just having learned about it abstractly in an article.

Q. You cut back at times to the 1950s, 60s and 70s to show how the mothers (and a few fathers) of your characters were formed. Are you surprised thata forty years after the beginning of the modern feminist movement -- which you describe as having been like "an electrical current" -- some women are making the choices they are?

A. I grew up reading Ms. Magazine and being part of a consciousness-raising group in high school. Now that was an experience. We were all confident we would do something big with our lives. Our mothers had given us self-confidence. But I have really come to see that the idea of doing something "big" has an element of self-aggrandizement to it, though maybe healthy self-aggrandizement. I think we sometimes meant "big," as in: would other people be impressed? And that seems to me now a shallow way to make choices. The point really becomes, instead, about giving your life purpose. But I didn't understand this then.