Author One on One with Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner
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Jodi Picoult Photo Credit: Adam Bouska
Jennifer Weiner Photo Credit: Andrea Cipriani Mecchi
1. All Fall Down has all the hallmarks of a Jennifer Weiner
book, but is a departure, too—it addresses the very serious topic
of addiction to painkillers. What made you want to explore this
subject, and how do you imagine your readers will react?
I wanted to write about addiction because I know—along with
anyone who reads the papers, or People magazine—that it’s a huge
problem for women. Like most people out there, I’ve had the
experience of seeing friends and loved ones go through it. More
than that, though, addiction interested me as a symptomatic
problem. When you talk to therapists and counselors, they’ll tell
you that addicts don’t have a problem with alcohol or pills, but
a problem with feelings. They don’t know y ways to handle
their emotions, which is why they end up in trouble with pills,
or pot, or gambling, or shopping. I wanted to write about a woman
who’s an addict but, more than that, a woman who can’t handle her
feelings, a woman who’s gotten what looks like a happy ending,
but doesn’t feel happy at all.
I think people come to my books for laughs, and I don’t want
this book to feel like an after-school special. My hope is that
I’ve told something very sad and very real, but in the voice of a
character who is funny and self-deprecating, even as she’s
sliding down the rabbit hole.
2. Allison’s slide into addiction, and her stint in rehab—as
well as the characters populating rehab—rang painfully true. You
must have done a boatload of research on addiction. Tell me a few
things that we’d be surprised to know, which you learned during
your research.
What surprised me most isn’t how women get their pills, but how
little progress there’s been in terms of how to help addicts. We
have rehab and….rehab. If you go to rehab and relapse, you’ll be
sent back for more rehab (even if it didn’t work the first time,
or first six times). And rehabs aren’t always tightly regulated,
there aren’t standards that mandate things like how much time
patients spend being treated by therapists, as sed to watched
over by the “recovery coaches” like the ones Allison meets.
Finally, there’s a gender issue, where the “normal” addict is
male, and a woman is an exception.
I hope things do get better. I hope there will be more options
for recovery, options that acknowledge that all addicts have
things in common, but there are important differences, too. I
hope we can have a conversation about what happens when the help
doesn’t help. After doing all this research, it was frustrating
to see what happened after a Philip Seymour Hoffman or a Cory
Monteith died, and social media would explode with people saying,
“Get help! Get help! Don’t be afraid to get help!” Well, these
two men GOT help. We need to talk about why rehab is failing, and
how it can get better.
3. You’ve been quite wonderfully outspoken about the inequity
between men and women in publishing. In what ways have things
changed for the better? What room is there still for improvement?
Hey, you too, sister!
Things have improved. The New York Times Book Review has a woman
at the helm, and the number of women on its pages, as subjects
and authors of reviews, has gotten much better. Even places like
Harper’s and The Atlantic, whose ratios have remained abysmal
ever since you and I started talking about #franzenfreude and
VIDA started counting, are at least aware that there’s a problem,
even if they don’t seem particularly invested in solving it.
I’d love to see more places include more women. I’d love it even
more if the “literary” writers who get profiled in the Times—in
large part because of the efforts of their bestselling sisters
—did not immediately turn around and t “unserious” books by
women, just to make triply sure we all know that they belong in
the boys’ club of quality literary writers.
4. One of the things I love best about you is that you use your
powers for good—namely, you constantly champion the writing of
those starting out in publishing. Pick three unsung heroes in
publishing, and tell us why we should be reading their work.
I love this question! Love. This. Question.
Roxane Gay’s work is getting a fair a of attention, but if
it were me I’d be putting her on the front page of the New York
Times Book Review, inviting her on “The Daily Show” and making
her books required reading for college freshman. In six months,
she’s published a devastating, brilliant novel, An Untamed State,
about a woman who’s kipped in Haiti, and a trenchant, funny,
wise essay collection called Bad Feminist that takes on
everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to online dating to weight
and desire and how men and women are in the world.
Michelle Huneven is another writer who, if the playing field
were more level, would get the attention of a Franzen or a
Eugenides. She writes beautiful sentences, and she tells stories
about dysfunctional families, fraught love affairs, and unusual
relationships.
On the commercial-fiction front, I’d give you Tabitha King. She
is—let’s get it out of the way—married to Stephen, which means
that she’ll forever exist in his shadow, but she is a wonderful
writer—funny and sly and observant and wise about people. In
particular, I’d recommend Pearl and One on One.
5. You and I both went to Princeton—I’m (ahem) four years older.
So: what’s the craziest thing you ever did on campus?
The craziest thing I ever did at Princeton, honestly, was try to
change it. When I started, in 1987, two of the eating clubs were
still all-male. Only a handful of women had spoken up about it,
even filing a lawsuit, and they were dismissed as belligerent
feminist cranks. My friends and I turned it into an issue again,
but were able to get much broader support and show that it wasn’t
just a handful of malcontents who wanted all facets of the
Princeton experience available to everyone who went there. We had
male alums of the clubs marching with us, carrying s asking
why their daughters couldn’t join. We had professors and
administrators joining the demonstrations. Eventually, we had a
rally that attracted about 500 people…and when the clubs held
their votes, they both voted, voluntarily, to admit women. It was
huge—one of the triumphs of my life at that point. I find myself
thinking a lot about it now, in terms of the push for more
inclusive book reviews, when people start saying, “Oh, she’s only
in this for herself,” or “she just wants the Times to pay
attention to her books,” because, when my friends and I were
pushing for Tiger Inn and Ivy to admit women, it wasn’t because I
wanted to join either place. I wanted them to admit women because
it was the right thing to do, the same way I want the Times to
review more women, and acknowledge women’s commercial
fiction—it’s the right thing to do.
