Marching into the mommy wars

Everyone has an opinion about stay-at-home mothers. With her new novel, Meg Wolitzer has just one agenda -- to tell the truth about their lives.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Books, Parenting, Feminism, Interviews, Motherhood, Lisa Belkin, Authors, Books Interviews, Rebecca Traister

April 3, 2008 | Signing up to be a combatant in the "mommy wars" is a ballsy move. For several years, journalists and cultural critics, including Lisa Belkin, Caitlin Flanagan, Linda Hirshman and Leslie Bennetts, have been locked in a snarling tussle over the political, personal and economic implications of professional women choosing to give up their jobs to parent full-time. The arguments are painful, rife with tension over class and gender inequity, and pinpoint tender issues of intellect, ambition, what it means to be a good parent, and what it means to be a good woman.

It may be something of a surprise that the newest foot soldier on the front lines is not a polemicist or an Op-Ed columnist. Meg Wolitzer is a novelist, author of previous critical successes such as "The Position" and "The Wife." Her new book, "The Ten-Year Nap," tells the story of a group of formerly high-achieving women who forsook their careers when they had children. Ten years later, as the book's title implies, these mothers are waking up, and realizing that they are bored, directionless, worried about money, and perhaps overinvested in the lives of their husbands, their children and their friends.

At their center is Amy Lamb, a former lawyer whose mother, a successful, and very happy, novelist, incessantly nudges her daughter about getting back to work. Amy considers returning to the law, but is crippled by the insecurity born of being out of the workforce, away from the technological innovations that have transformed her profession. Listless, with a 10-year-old who is no longer dependent on her, Amy becomes embroiled in the entanglements of another mother -- a working mother -- whom she meets at her son's prep school.

"The Ten-Year Nap" is an engrossing, juicy read about girlfriends, marriages, jealousies and money. But it's also an occasionally brutal dissection of the habits and hang-ups of a rarefied group of mega-mamas. Scenes in which someone breast-feeds another woman's child, or an anorexic stay-at-home mother devises a plan to launch a chain of SlimGyms for people with "eating differences," are hilarious but uncomfortable in their detailed apprehensions of what it means to find your artistic and professional ambitions rechanneled or derailed.

I recently sat down for an interview with Wolitzer, who insists that when it comes to the mommy wars, she's Switzerland.

You claim not to be taking sides in the mommy wars ...

Oh no, I would never.

But I can't help but feel that a book that begins with the sentence, "All around the country, women were waking up," is a pretty broad blow against those who have opted out.

Oh, you found me out! When I started writing "The Ten-Year Nap," I was judgmental of women I had known and liked, who had given up careers when their kids were born, and somehow 10 years had gone by and they weren't sure what they were doing. I thought to myself, "Why aren't they driven? Why aren't they guided by some singular purpose?"

But as I wrote and the characters became more complex, I thought, "Who am I to say?" I'm not writing a polemic. I really want to show what it's like for women who stop working. And that hasn't been done, as far as I could see, in fiction.

But there have been novels about working women, and about mothers.

Anytime you have intelligent women in a novel, they have jobs like "urban planner" or "architect." It's meant to show that they are smart. You never show them at that job, because that's too boring, but you have to give them a job to assure the reader that they're the kind of people the smart reader would like.

In fiction, stay-at-home moms have often been [subject to] mockery, and I think it's very sexist: the stay-at-home mother whose children are oversubscribed, who has reduced her entire brain to trivial things. I mention a character in the book whose husband is so bored when his wife talks about her day that he has to take Ritalin in order to listen. And look, I have a bit of playfulness in this book because I don't want it to be a somber meditation on motherhood versus work. I really want the novel to be about motherhood and work, and also about female ambition and what happens to it over time.

I don't read judgment in your treatment of the women, but I do feel sympathy from you for women who are bored, or worried about money, who feel bad about themselves for not having passions.

Certain kinds of '70s novels, in the first wave of feminist novels, were very earnest and ended with the woman getting into her hatchback Nova and taking off on the open road. The equivalent here would be that the women go back to work: Cue up the idea of them feeling purposeful. But as I say in the book, most jobs are not wonderful and most people don't necessarily have a passion, or even something they're so good at, that they can't wait to go back to.

It also doesn't go without saying that the kind of lives we're talking about here come from a narrow band of society, because most women don't have the luxury of saying, "Should I work?" or "Will I feel fulfilled?"

I set the novel in New York because I did want to have it in a milieu of affluence where at least you understood that the possibility of not working was very real. But elsewhere in the country, I meet readers who have left jobs when their kids were born and are now working in half-ways in which it's hard for them to keep up. If you're a corporate lawyer, they want you there all the time. A lot of women have left those jobs because the jobs don't love them or respect their lives.

The men of my generation and older don't have these choices. Ever. They're the schleppers, just sort of going along. That's another novel, I suspect.

The discussion of half-time work reminds me of one of the funniest details of the book, the suburban mothers who create Wuv Cards.

One of characters who is really brainy moves to the suburbs and meets a bunch of women who were formerly in business, but now out of the workforce, and are starting a business called Wuv Cards. These are greeting cards that children are meant to give their parents. And these earnest women, who were formerly in marketing or advertising, get together to put together this crackpot business. There I am really lampooning the idea of suburban boredom and finding something to do with yourself.

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