For a group of four New York friends, the past ten years have been defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated to believe that they and their generation would conquer the world, they nonetheless left high-powered jobs to stay at home with their babies. What was intended as a temporary time-out has turned into a decade. Now at forty, with their kids growing up, Amy, Jill, Roberta and Karen wake up to a life and a future that is not what they intended. Illicit affairs, money problems, issues with children and husbands all rear their heads, and the friends wonder if it's time for a change...
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In her latest novel, Wolitzer (The Wife; etc.) takes a close look at the opt out generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood. When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts. Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise? Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women's liberation and equality. Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters' crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before. Wolitzer's novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women's (and men's) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purpose. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"What comes after chick-lit? Mum-lit, perhaps - but tales of hyper-active kids, moribund marriages and the career opportunities that got away will seldom match Wolitzer's wit, bite and schmaltz-free sympathy" Independent "This one shouldn't be only for chicks. It's for everyone. It asks far-reaching questions about the place of women in society and within the family unit, but it asks also whether life has been fair to men" Daily Telegraph "The latest novel from the excellent Meg Wolitzer presents four New York mothers emerging from a decade in babyland... a wonderful study of muddy equivocation, a hilarious yet compassionate examination of the primordial slime and the modern woman" Guardian "Terrific... Wolitzer's novels have always been exemplars of the motto that the personal is political... [Offers] many pleasing, surprising contrasts" The Times "It made me think about a woman's eternal problem of balancing the love she has for her children with what to do when they finally leave home. A serious, meaty read" Essentials
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
63 of 70 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
...there sure was an awful lot of whining going on. I wasn't particularly "taken" by most of the characters, self-involved women (and some men), living mainly on New York City's Upper East and West Sides. The main character, Amy, had a lawyer-husband and a 10 year old son. She had stopped working as a lawyer when her son was born and seemed to miss working, but not enough to stop whining about it and go back to work. Her mother was a proto-feminist, based in Toronto. Other characters, mothers of sons who attended an elite day school, drifted through the story.
Amy's closest friend from college - the daughter of a suicide - had left Manhattan for a leafy suburb in either New Jersey or New York, with her husband and adopted daughter from Russia. The daughter was not quite "with-it" and the mother felt little emotional connection with the child.
I kept waiting for the parents to have an "aha" moment and take the kid to be tested. Nope, didn't happen til the end.
Other friends had other "issues". I basically wanted to slap them all and say "quit whining and do something".
I would advise not investing a great deal of time or money in this book. If you haven't already bought it, wait til it's out in trade paper or borrow it from the library.
Amy's closest friend from college - the daughter of a suicide - had left Manhattan for a leafy suburb in either New Jersey or New York, with her husband and adopted daughter from Russia. The daughter was not quite "with-it" and the mother felt little emotional connection with the child.
I kept waiting for the parents to have an "aha" moment and take the kid to be tested. Nope, didn't happen til the end.
Other friends had other "issues". I basically wanted to slap them all and say "quit whining and do something".
I would advise not investing a great deal of time or money in this book. If you haven't already bought it, wait til it's out in trade paper or borrow it from the library.
82 of 95 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
It's been a while since I've reviewed anything on Amazon but I just wanted to say how much I loved this book. I devoured it in a weekend and found myself stopping my husband in whatever he was doing to read him random bits and snippets, mostly because Meg Wolitzer so perfectly summed up so many of the sentiments I myself had felt during the years I stayed home with my kids.
For example, there's a passage near the beginning where one of the characters talks about picking up a newspaper like the New YOrk Times and reading yet another profile of a high-powered women who "does it all." And Meg Wolitzer writes (I'm paraphrasing) that 'she wished there was something like an asterisk at the end of the article which referred you to a box at the bottom of the page which explained the backstory, what the real deal was.' And that's EXACTLY how I felt the whole time I was trying to juggle life in the foreign service with raising little kids and being pregnant. Everytime I caught a glimmer of someone who somehow or other effortlessly did it all, you'd start to talk to them and they'd say something like "Well, actually it was easy. You see, my mother had recently retired and she was widowed so she moved to Botswana for eight years and watched my kids for me while I climbed up through the ranks to become Ambassador" or "Well, actually they're my stepchildren. My husband is actually forty years older than I am, so by the time I became a "mom", the kids had already graduated from college" or something.
There are just these little MOMENTS throughout the book where I found myself exclaiming "yes, yes. she really understands. I'm not alone. I'm not crazy." Another example -- she describes the insecure mom picking up the child at school and the child is in first grade and the mom finds herself checking out all the books the other kids are reading, trying to figure out if her child is where she should be in her reading. It's like we all do these things but never admit them, and then Meg Wolitzer comes along and writes this book -- and you realize it's not just you.
I really hope this book gets people talking -- especially the dialogue between the main character and her earnest Canadian feminist mother who can't understand how the women's movement could have ended up at this point. This is just a great book!
For example, there's a passage near the beginning where one of the characters talks about picking up a newspaper like the New YOrk Times and reading yet another profile of a high-powered women who "does it all." And Meg Wolitzer writes (I'm paraphrasing) that 'she wished there was something like an asterisk at the end of the article which referred you to a box at the bottom of the page which explained the backstory, what the real deal was.' And that's EXACTLY how I felt the whole time I was trying to juggle life in the foreign service with raising little kids and being pregnant. Everytime I caught a glimmer of someone who somehow or other effortlessly did it all, you'd start to talk to them and they'd say something like "Well, actually it was easy. You see, my mother had recently retired and she was widowed so she moved to Botswana for eight years and watched my kids for me while I climbed up through the ranks to become Ambassador" or "Well, actually they're my stepchildren. My husband is actually forty years older than I am, so by the time I became a "mom", the kids had already graduated from college" or something.
There are just these little MOMENTS throughout the book where I found myself exclaiming "yes, yes. she really understands. I'm not alone. I'm not crazy." Another example -- she describes the insecure mom picking up the child at school and the child is in first grade and the mom finds herself checking out all the books the other kids are reading, trying to figure out if her child is where she should be in her reading. It's like we all do these things but never admit them, and then Meg Wolitzer comes along and writes this book -- and you realize it's not just you.
I really hope this book gets people talking -- especially the dialogue between the main character and her earnest Canadian feminist mother who can't understand how the women's movement could have ended up at this point. This is just a great book!
54 of 64 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I bought this book yesterday after hearing the author on NPR with Terry Gross and seeing the profile of her in the New York Times and was up most of the night (and half of the morning) finishing this unbelievably good novel up, though i was a little teed off my bookstore didn't have the book until yesterday (publishers, what is the matter with you?). Wolitzer has everything you want in a writer -- it's like having a conversation with an unbelievably perceptive, wickedly amusing, but also on the inside serious person. And this novel takes a hard and entirely convincing look at the issues and the dilemmas facing women today. should they work or not work? is a woman's role to take care of her kids and can you "have it all" and if you do, does that mean something has to be sacrificed (your marriage, your relationship with your kids, your work?). i have never seen a book tackle something like this before in such a believable way (and i'm a guy, so this isn't really a topic that should interest me much, but I see it in my wife and in just about every woman i know and work with). so all in all she (wolitzer) has managed to carry off something pretty impossible in my opinion -- a page turner that's also a wonderful, beautifully written read. how often can you say that about a book? 5 stars all the way.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible book
Hated all the characters in this book. They whined a lot but never did anything to change their dissatisfaction. Read more
Published 1 month ago by KVK
2.0 out of 5 stars
not recommended
Very dull. This book almost put me in a ten year nap. I thought it would be insightful look into these women's lives but it was not.
Published 2 months ago by Adrienne Martin
1.0 out of 5 stars
Awful
This book was terrible. I don't know how it got published. The women were caricatures and no one talked the way they do in real life. Even the weather didn't match reality. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Meg
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Real and Riveting!
i'm surprised to read some of the negative reviews of this book. i just re-read it for the 2nd time and it's just SO good... Read more
Published 17 months ago by beach mom
4.0 out of 5 stars
This story rings so true
This may not be the best book for everyone. I do feel Meg Wolitzer's story of many "stay at home" constant inner dialogue rings so true. A terrific choice for book clubbers... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Missy J
3.0 out of 5 stars
a good read
This book by Meg Wolitzer is about a group of women who have gotten married and about ten years later after children etc.. begin to wonder what happened. Read more
Published 21 months ago by J. Robert Ewbank
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stepping Off the Mommy Track
My favorite subset of chick lit is smart chick lit. That's chick lit with really good writing and insightful observations about the way we live now. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Deborah Burstyn
1.0 out of 5 stars
Great topic. Poorly written.
I haven't seen another fiction work on this topic which I think is why the author got so much hype. My book club read it, but the characters were so poorly written - whiney,... Read more
Published on February 13, 2011 by Heidaroni
1.0 out of 5 stars
Snoozefest - recommended for insomniacs. This is the cure.
I love when a character draws me into their world and allows me to switch places with my own reality. Read more
Published on January 26, 2011 by Christine
1.0 out of 5 stars
waste of time
worst book I have ever tried to read. It was a book club choice, I got more than halfway done and could not get myself to keep going. Read more
Published on January 23, 2011 by femc1980
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