Jennifer Weiner, New York Times bestselling author of 16 juicy, layered, courageous books, always knew she wanted to write a novel that followed her characters from birth to death.
She knew she wanted that book to be loosely based on her own life and the lives of the women she knew most intimately.
“I wanted to write about two sisters who start out as daughters and become mothers (or not), two women who begin their lives in one world, live through seismic changes, and end up in a very different place — a world that’s changed quickly in some regards, not fast enough in others,” she writes in the introduction to her new book, “Mrs. Everything,” her longest, and most ambitious to date.
“And I always knew that I wanted to write about a woman like my mother,” she continues, “who was born in the 1940s and came of age in the 1960s, who married a man, had children, got divorced, and ended up falling in love with a woman, watching same-sex marriage become legal, and living a life that would not have been possible 40 years ago.”
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, she knew it was time.
“It’s almost a response to that slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,'” Weiner told me Friday by phone. “I wanted to look at what America was like for women in the ’50s, in the ’60s, in the ’70s. Let’s look at all the expectations and restrictions and judgment that shaped women’s choices for so long. And let’s look at where we started and let’s look at where we’ve gotten and let’s look into the future and really ask ourselves, ‘Are things better? Are we more free? Do we have more choices? And what still needs to change?'”
“Mrs. Everything” is the story of Jo and Bethie Kaufman, two sisters who grow up in Detroit in the ’50s and ’60s. Their mother tries to keep their world small, like hers, but Jo and Bethie, each in quite different ways, bristle at the confinement.
Throughout the book, the sisters — Jo, especially — learn to measure their own needs against what the people in their lives want them to need. Occasionally they choose to prioritize their own longings and safety and self-worth. Often they don’t.
“Certainly not everyone shares these specific characters’ lives,” Weiner said. “Not everybody is gay and closeted. Not everybody is in an interracial marriage and deciding if she wants children and deciding she doesn’t. But the idea of having to weigh what you want and what’s going to make you happy against what the world expects from you and what makes other people happy, I think that’s totally universal.”
That tug — honoring your truth versus pleasing the world — is a theme woven throughout Weiner’s writing, both in her fiction and in her 2016 memoir, “Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing.” It’s inspired in part, she said, by the words of poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
“I’ve always believed in the power of words, the power of stories, the power of narratives to change the world,” she told me.
In researching “Mrs. Everything,” Weiner said, she spent hours and hours poring through magazines from the era in which Jo and Bethie and their mom would be seeking guidance on how to look, what to think, who to be.
“As a writer,” she said, “I want to get the details right. I want people to feel the shag carpet under their feet if I’m talking about the ’70s. I want people to smell the Giorgio perfume if I’m writing about the ’80s,” she said.
Old issues of Ladies’ Home Journal and Seventeen provided her context. Some of what she read surprised her.
“I expected it to be a lot of diet advice and how-to-keep-your-man advice and how-to-be-popular advice,” she said. “And there was some of that. But there was also, ‘Here’s how to go be an exchange student and live in Japan for 6 months.’ ‘We interviewed this young woman who dreamed of going to Broadway and she made the leap.’
“They were very quietly radical in a way,” she continued. “Certainly there was the diet stuff, there were the makeup tips. But also there was some nod toward, ‘You can have a happy, independent life that doesn’t depend on a boyfriend or a husband.'”
And as Jo and Bethie’s fictional stories remind us, girls and women reading those articles were likely weighing that potential against the expectations placed on them by their family, their friends, the culture at large.
Weiner was in her 20s when her mom, who had been divorced from Weiner’s dad for a decade, fell in love with a woman. It was the late ’90s. Marriage equality was more than a decade away. Matthew Shepard had just been beaten, tortured and left for dead for having the audacity to be gay.
“I remember being sort of worried for my mom,” Weiner said. “It was a very different time.”
“Mrs. Everything” begins in 1951 and ends in 2016. They were all very different times. The characters bear witness to all the turmoil and progress and setbacks therein. Weiner takes us inside their heads and their hearts as they do so.
Weiner’s books are often called “beach reads.” (Full disclosure: I read “Mrs. Everything” on a beach, during my kids’ spring break.) I asked her whether that label does her writing justice.
“I think a beach read can be any book you want to take with you,” she said. “I’m happy if people consider this a beach read. I wanted it to be funny. I wanted it to be sexy. I wanted it to be entertaining.”
It’s all that and more.
I’ll be in conversation with Jennifer Weiner at 7 p.m. June 20 at Venue SIX10, 610 S. Michigan Ave. Tickets are $42 and include a copy of “Mrs. Everything.”
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