Even if Jonathan Franzen dislikes Jennifer Weiner’s work, he might approve of her memoir

“Years ago, an interviewer asked the writer Grace Paley whether she considered her novels political. Paley, I imagined, gave her interlocutor a long and level stare before answering, ‘I write about women. So, yes.’

Nobody’s ever once asked me whether I consider my novels political. And I can see why: they come with pink covers, adorned with shoes and women’s body parts; their tone tends toward the breezy, and they always have happy endings, because I think real life gives real people enough sad ones. But if someone ever were to ask the question, I would point out that, in my books, it’s fat women getting the guy, getting the great job, getting the big success, getting all of it, sometimes, at once. Are my books political? I give plus-size women happy endings. And, in today’s America, that is a political, even a radical, act.”

— “Appetites”

Slap on a teaser like “Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing” and it appears that even if the title is a sub-optimal Hungry Heart (one might have expected better from an author whose novels all have snappy monikers, beginning with her first, the smartly titled Good in Bed), I shall be attracted to said book like the veritable moth to flame. Of course, memoirs of writers are my current favourite genre anyway and Jennifer Weiner has been on my radar ever since the row with Jonathan Franzen resounded across half the world and reached us here. This seemed like the perfect book, a memoir-ish narrative, structured much like Ann Patchett’s This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, to begin reading her.

Wait, who is Jennifer Weiner?

A best-selling American novelist, with around five million copies of her books in print, Jennifer Weiner introduced the “plus-sized heroine” to the world of chick-lit, with her phenomenally successful debut Good in Bed, which was translated into several languages and spent almost a year on the New York Times bestseller list. While she humorously charts the genealogy of this first book in Hungry Heart (in the essay called “My Girls”), we learn how a celebrity literary agent had taken on the book only to demand that the heroine lose at least fifty pounds since “the fat girl having sex” scenes were “grossing” her out. In an act of stupendous courage, Weiner stuck to her guns and fired said celebrity literary agent. Good in Bed retained its unapologetically “big” protagonist Cannie Shapiro and went on to achieve the sort of success (beginning with a two-book deal for $550,000) that fiction writers dream about.

Weiner followed it up with In Her Shoes, a novel about two sisters, that was turned into a film with Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz. And while the film did not do too well at the box office, it marked the silver screen debut of Weiner’s ninety-year-old Nanna as a charming “extra”:

“Different writers have, I imagine, different reactions the day the phone rings and it’s someone – a publisher, an agent, a manager, or in my case, my brother-slash-manager – saying, ‘They’re going to turn your book into a movie.’ Some writers probably think of the money or the acclaim, or how a film will secure their place in the canon or on the bestseller list. Some might dream of themselves in the audience at the Oscars, or walking the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere, or becoming BFFs with the stars. I had a different dream. What I wanted – all I wanted – was to be, for once in my life, the number one grandchild, at the top of the great-grandkid heap, secure in my Nanna’s affection.”

The Franzen affair

“This is a great time to be an American CEO, a tough time to be the CEO’s lowest paid worker. A great time to be Wal Mart, a tough time to be in Wal Mart’s way, a great time to be an incumbent extremist, a tough time to be a moderate challenger...outstanding to manage a pension fund, lousy to rely on one; better than ever to be bestselling, harder than ever to be mid-list.”

— Jonathan Franzen, “The Discomfort Zone”

Eleven extremely popular novels, one volume of short stories and one children’s book – not to mention countless features and essays – later, what gets Weiner’s goat is the partial treatment meted out to supremely successful women writers of popular fiction (while male writers of pop fic are lionised via claims that thrillers and science fiction are for everyone while romance is purely for women).

“The Times is the holy grail for most writers. Being reviewed in the paper means you’ve really, truly made it – or at least, that’s how it felt to me. But even before I was a writer, back when I was just a reader, I knew that a book like mine wasn’t the paper’s normal fare. Music critics at the paper wrote about opera and Top 40; TV critics covered sitcoms as well as PBS’s twelve-part series on slavery; restaurant critics reviewed Per Se and the under-twenty-five-dollar-a-head ethnic eateries in the boroughs. Every day, in every section, the paper made an effort to be broad and inclusive, to recognise that its readers weren’t all rich or male or even New Yorkers. Then I’d open up the Sunday paper and a version of the Paris Review would land in my lap. The book critics mostly ignored popular fiction and stuck to capital-L Literature…unless they were reviewing the popular fiction that men read.

Just as galling as what looked, to me, like straight-up sexism was the paper’s church-and-state separation of its daily and Sunday critics. The daily people weren’t allowed to talk about what they were reviewing with their Book Review counterparts, which meant that you could read a mixed-to-positive review of a literary novel on Thursday, then a mixed-to-positive review of the same book, by a different critic, in the Sunday section.

Sexism in mainstream media, is, of course, a large and complicated issue. But what makes it all more compelling is the fact of social media overturning many of the handed down prejudices. Weiner goes on to say:

“In previous decades, a writer who disapproved of the Gray Lady’s policies would have had to content herself with muttering imprecations to her spouse, her mom, her friends, her dog. But in the brave new world of social media, that same writer could hit Twitter and broadcast her displeasure to the world.”

In 2010, Weiner took to Twitter and protested the wall-to-wall coverage given to Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (which, as it happens, I am extremely partial to) and coined the term #Franzenfreude to denote this peculiar phenomenon. Subsequently she went on to become one of the most outspoken critics of the Western media’s obsession with “white, male literary darling(s)” – these words are not hers but those of writer Jodi Picoult’s, who is similarly marginalised by the rarefied literary ivory towers despite her fabulous global success.

Weiner, predictably, has been accused by Franzen (though this sentiment has been echoed by others too) of “freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias.” The New Yorker ran a long, ultimately empathetic profile of Weiner’s, headlined “Written Off”, and in it Rebecca Mead notes:

“Franzen recently published an essay in the Guardian in which he decried the effect of social media on the practice of serious literature; he made a reference to ‘Jennifer Weiner-ish self-promotion.’ Weiner says that her reaction was ‘eighty per cent indignation and twenty per cent Holy shit, Jonathan Franzen knows who I am.’ It was kind of thrilling, in a pathetic way.’ For a while, she changed her Twitter bio to ‘Engaging in Jennifer Weiner-ish self-promotion.’”

Weiner, as you have guessed by now, is terrifically popular on Twitter. Like most of her clever, quippy heroines, her signature wit and her disarming style make her a perfect “influencer” on social media: she can turn out a series of apposite tweets or a smartly argued blog post on something controversial or mass culture-y in the time it would take her more literary peers to switch on their computer. However, to get a far more intimate glimpse of who Jennifer Weiner really is, beyond the glamour and pace of her novels, and the pithy cleverness, and ultimately, the ennui of Twitter, Hungry Heart is the answer.

Hungry Heart

Twenty-nine essays, a few long and exquisitely detailed, a few crisp listicles, old articles, and tweet collections, together tell the story of Jennifer Weiner’s life thus far, beginning with the memorable lines:

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

It is a truth universally acknowledged among writers that an unhappy childhood is the greatest gift a parent can provide. What’s less discussed is how many of us would return the gift, if only we could...

...when I think of my parents, the poem that comes to mind is I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds. The poem begins with the narrator watching her parents, who are young and beautiful, in college, as they fall in love:

They are about to graduate, they are about to get married
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

But then they do.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it – she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die.
Stop. Don’t do it. She’s the wrong woman. He’s the wrong man.

My parents met in college, and the story of how was always one of my favourites.”

Growing up in the idyllic if non-Jewish environment of Simsbury, Connecticut, Weiner’s early childhood was a textbook version of happy, with a doctor father and teacher mother and three siblings. It all began to unravel over the next decade as her struggles with weight rendered her invisible – and deeply anguished – in her high school and the neighbourhood. And by the time Weiner went off to Princeton (more to please her father than herself since her first choice had been Smith College), the skein of the tapestry of her all-American happy family (the dysfunctionality of which is the subject of Franzen’s scintillating prose) had completely unravelled, and her father had left home for good with the wounding words, “I don’t want you to think of me as a father. Think of me as more of an uncle.”

A year later, he filed for bankruptcy, and Weiner was not allowed to register at college since her fees were yet unpaid. Eventually she and her mother took on a huge loan for the tuitions. A few years later, her mother came out of the closet, and this (the subject of “Renaissance Fran”) became yet another life-altering decision that Weiner and her siblings had to embrace.

Weiner’s Scarlet O’Haraesque spirit of survival is, perhaps, the chief draw of the narrative. Despite the agonies of the past and the agonies yet to come – inability to reach ideal weight, post-partum depression, the weight thing, divorce, weight, miscarriage – she is a sanguine, practical soul, with a Plan to manage her life.

To publish her first book by the time she was thirty was one of her life goals. (She missed it narrowly, but I suspect the success more than made up for it.) It makes for a highly readable memoir, sharp in its details, competent in craft, breezy and gentle in tone, and most compellingly honest in its enquiry. I suspect Jonathan Franzen might enjoy it too!

Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing, Jennifer Weiner, Atria Books.