Salon.com > Jennifer Weiner

A brief history of Jennifer Weiner’s literary fights

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:31:00 +0000

Jennifer Weiner, the best-selling author, wrote an essay for Slate this week raking Claire Messud over the coals for recent statements Messud made in an interview with Publishers Weekly, pegged to her new book "The Woman Upstairs." Messud had spoken out forcefully in defense of unlikable characters after her interviewer told her that "I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora," the novel's protagonist:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

Are men underserved in books?

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:45:00 +0000

Coming-of-age stories are normally associated with adolescence or young adulthood, when people have experiences that help them grow toward the person they are meant to be. Two recent novels, though—Amy Sohn’s "Motherland" and Jonathan Tropper’s "One Last Thing Before I Go" -- suggest that sometimes, a midlife crisis can also be a kind of coming-of-age story.

Sohn and Tropper have also played interesting roles in debates over gender and fiction -- and whether fiction on similar topics by male and female writers receives a different reception from critics. "Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely," said Jennifer Weiner to the Huffington Post, in the interview that sparked "Franzenfreude."

Sohn, meanwhile, wrote one of the more talked-about essays of the summer -- "The 40 Year Reversion" on the Awl -- about a group of New York friends with marriages and kids who have slipped back into their 20-something ways of drinking, drugging and hooking up with other people.

Hit me with your vest shot: Weiner pokes fun at Eugenides ad

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Best-selling author and Twitter-whirlwind Jennifer Weiner has launched a very funny online campaign for her new book, "The Next Best Thing." Weiner appears in a vest reminiscent of the one novelist Jeffrey Eugenides sported on a Times Square billboard advertising "The Marriage Plot" last summer. A billboard, one might recall, that astonished tourists and readers alike with its portrayal of a literary writer as a macho figure. (The words “swoon-worthy” appeared above the billboard, and we know they were talking about the book, but still.) The vest led to numerous humorous online discussions as well as, naturally, the creation of the @eugenidesvest Twitter account.

“Jeffrey Eugenides doesn’t have a book out this summer,” says the ad, “but Jennifer Weiner has 'The Next Best Thing.'”

On the one hand, the campaign is pretty insidery, perhaps targeted only at those readers who spend half their life on Twitter and obsess about things such as which authors are getting a Times Square billboard and which are not.