September: Jennifer Weiner

In September, we'll be reading Jennifer Weiner. Any thoughts at this early stage?

Scribd has loads of books by Jennifer Weiner, including The Jennifer Weiner Reader's Companion: A Collection of Excerpts. That might be a good place to look for help narrowing down the possibilities.

I have never read any Jennifer Weiner before. I am borrowing someone's copy of The Next Best Thing to read for September. The short story "Swim" is included in the back of my copy of The Next Best Thing, but "Swim" is always free in the iBooks store as an e-book (or e-story in this case). It seems like Swim is considered a prequel to The Next Best Thing but it looks like they are stand-alone. Swim gives more of the back story to the character of Ruth who is the main character in The Next Best Thing if readers are interested in knowing Ruth's past before they read the full-length book.

I loved the movie of In Her Shoes, but I am not sure I would want to read the book since I already know what happens.

>1 sweetiegherkin: What have you read by Jennifer Weiner in the past that you liked?

>3 Tara1Reads: I've read In Her Shoes and The Guy Not Taken. The latter is a collection of short stories; I am fairly certain that "Swim" is included in there as well. I was pleased with both books.

My memory isn't always the best, but I'm fairly certain I have Good in Bed at home, so my plan is to read that one in September.

There is a piece about Jennifer Weiner in one of the recent editions of Us Weekly since she has a new book, Who Do You Love, coming out in 2 days.

She was asked what her favorite romance books are and she chose:

How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan
Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz
Almost Paradise by Susan Isaacs

I have Little Earthquakes on my TBR shelves.

>5 Tara1Reads: Thanks for the heads up. Here's the article (I think):

http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/jennifer-weiners-who-do-you-love-b...

I am interested in Fly Away Home and Goodnight Nobody. I might end up reading one of those instead.

I plan to read Good in Bed which seems to be her most popular book. I put a hold on it at the library.

I finally settled on Fly Away Home for this month. The title comes from the children's rhyme: "Ladybird, ladybird fly away home / Your house is on fire and your children are all gone..." because one of the main characters, Sylvie, goes back to her family's Connecticut beach house that she hasn't been to in decades after she finds out from her best friend that her senator husband has cheated on her with his legislative aide. None of that is a spoiler because that's all in the beginning; the rest of the book is about how Sylvie and her two adult daughters react and cope with the news of the scandal. One of the main questions posed by the book is in regards to women standing by their husbands at press conferences after news of the scandal breaks. Sylvie's decision about this is questioned throughout the book by Sylvie herself as well as other characters. And that's one I am still thinking about.

I really enjoyed the alternating chapters so the reader gets to find out not only Sylvie's reactions to everything but we get to find out what is going on in her adult daughters', Diana and Lizzie's, lives and thoughts too. I thought the characters were a bit too cliché. Diana, is the typical overachieving, eager-to-please type who, of course, has to be a doctor. Lizzie is the younger sister who wilts in the shadow of her accomplished older sister and drops out of college more than once and has had several stints in rehab for a drug problem. Both Diana and Lizzie evolve throughout the novel but despite that Lizzie never felt less clichéd to me which I cannot say much more about without giving away too much of her storyline.

My other complaint also relates to there being too much of something. I enjoyed the many feminist bits in the novel and the emphasis on body image issues and self-confidence, but when Sylvie finally goes to the Connecticut house and decides to take up cooking all her own food to have something to fill her days there started to be too many descriptions of food. We suddenly needed to know what each character was cooking, eating, and drinking or thinking about another character's weight at all times. Even at the end of the book when all three women's storylines were wrapping up there were still descriptions of what was in a picnic basket and what a random family at a rest stop was eating! It got to be really unnecessary. And I am a foodie and love food talk.

This may sound like I didn't enjoy the book but I did. I liked all the references to real-life political cheating scandals. There were some I knew about (Bill Clinton and John Edwards) and some I remember seeing in the news but didn't know the details of (Mark Sanford and Eliot Spitzer) and some I had never heard about (James McGreevey). Jennifer Weiner mentions Larry Craig in her acknowledgments at the end although he is never referenced in the text of the book itself. I enjoyed Googling the crazy stories of these politicians.

As I was reading, I kept thinking about what I would do if I were in Sylvie's shoes and I am pretty sure I would have reacted and handled the situation a lot differently than she did. Sylvie herself notes that many people think it will never happen to them so that's part of why it hurts so much is that it's being totally blindsided (at least in Sylvie's case she was blindsided).

"I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry that I didn't see it coming. I thought I had a happy marriage. I thought that. I did. We said 'I love you' every night. We never went to sleep angry. But you don't know... it's like it could happen to anyone. Nobody likes to think it, but it could happen to anyone. Anyone."

Sylvie also says she doesn't think this is really true but I thought it was still something scary to think about.

I finished Good in Bed today. It was a very quick poolside read for me (I started last night), but not a very satisfying one. It starts off well, very witty and quick-moving, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Even the critiques of chick lit and the weight loss/dieting industry feel only skin deep. I had been hoping that this was one of those books that appears to be chick lit but has a deeper message, but I didn't get the depth, or even the winks, that I'd hoped for.

I do think that Weiner is a talented writer; her syntax and diction are certainly a step up from the average popular chick lit. Are there other books of hers that have more depth? I could try another before September is over.

>10 Tara1Reads:, >11 sparemethecensor: Wow, I'm impressed with you two! We're barely into September and you already completed a full novel each.

>10 Tara1Reads: Your descriptions of Diana and Lizzie sound a lot like the two sisters from In Her Shoes (although if my fuzzy memory is at all accurate, I think there was a lot more growth in those two throughout that novel).

>11 sparemethecensor: I'm sorry that the book was disappointing; I've been looking forward to reading it. It's one of her earliest books (if not her first, I'm not 100% sure), so maybe she was still getting her footing with this one.

>12 sweetiegherkin: A reviewer on GoodReads said that there are similarities between Fly Away Home and Little Earthquakes from circumstances in which characters to meet to dialogue being the same. I am inclined to believe this reviewer since they could name the book and the characters the exact scenes/dialogue that were the same.

>11 sparemethecensor: and >12 sweetiegherkin: Good in Bed was her first book.

>11 sparemethecensor: Are you interested in reading the sequel Certain Girls?

I read Swim the e-short story prequel to The Next Best Thing so I can read The Next Best Thing eventually. It was okay; the page count was 70 but the story actually ends at page 38 and the rest is advertisements and excerpts from The Next Best Thing.

In Swim 29-year-old Ruth lives with her grandmother in California after they move there together to pursue their Hollywood dreams. Ruth wants to be a screenwriter and the grandmother gets a job as an extra in hospital/ER dramas. Ruth worked as a writer on a TV show until it was unexpectedly cancelled and so she's forced to work on "writing" gigs that are really just typing things into a computer for people who could do it for themselves. Ruth swims a lot as a way to escape real life and having to face the possibility of failure not only as a screenwriter but in her personal relationships as well. Her grandmother thinks the scar on Ruth's face from a horrible childhood accident is what keeps Ruth from pursuing what she wants.

I feel like I am giving away the whole story but I am not. The childhood accident is explained as is the reason why Ruth's one real writing job she's had since moving to California did not work out.

I can see how Swim is a set-up for a longer work. It ended rather abruptly. Although based on the description of The Next Best Thing it sounds like a lot changes in the lives of Ruth and her grandmother which does make me interested in reading the book.

Jennifer Weiner apparently did write her own TV show for ABC Family but it was a flop.

>14 Tara1Reads: Hmm, I read "Swim" in the collection of short stories I mentioned above, The Guy Not Taken. I actually liked it just the way it is. After reading the reviews for The Next Best Thing, it doesn't seem as appealing, but it's hard to tell.

Interesting, I did not know that Jennifer Weiner had written a TV show as well.

>15 sweetiegherkin: I enjoyed the first 3/4 of Swim and then Ruth goes to the mall where she had previously met with Gary to what? buy him a puppy? Then she sees Caitlyn and her brother and goes home and cries to her grandmother?! That's where the story lost me.

>16 Tara1Reads: This is where my Swiss cheese memory lets me down again: I don't remember the bit with the mall and the puppy at all... I actually don't remember a whole lot on the specifics on this story other than that I liked it at the time. Maybe I didn't think too hard about it...

By the way, I stumbled on this article that mentions Weiner tangentially but is about the idea of likability in fictional characters: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/01/likeable_versus_unlikable...

>17 sweetiegherkin: That's fine haha I wouldn't be able to comment if I had read it more than a few months ago either.

I read the Slate article but I don't have any comments about it right now.

I have never read any Jennifer Weiner before.

Wow, I didn't realize we discussed Jennifer Weiner so long ago; it seems like just yesterday! At any rate, she has a new memoir out titled Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing. It's more like a series of essays than a strictly chronological autobiography, but I quite enjoyed it overall and would recommend it.

Shared this article in another thread, but obviously appropriate here as well: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/written-off