This Is My Life Read online

  Praise for The Interestings

  “The Interestings is warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly, and undeniably a novel of ideas.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A victory . . . The Interestings secures Wolitzer’s place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She’s every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn’t women’s fiction. It’s everyone’s.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A)

  “I don’t want to insult Meg Wolitzer by calling her sprawling, engrossing new novel, The Interestings, her most ambitious, because throughout her thirty-year career of turning out well-observed, often very funny books at a steady pace, I have no doubt she has always been ambitious. . . . But The Interestings is exactly the kind of book that literary sorts who talk about ambitious works . . . are talking about. . . . Wolitzer is almost crushingly insightful; she doesn’t just mine the contemporary mind, she seems to invade it.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A supremely engrossing, deeply knowing, genius-level enterprise . . . The novel is thick and thickly populated. And yet Wolitzer is brilliant at keeping the reader close by her side as she takes her story back and forth across time, in and out of multiple lives, and into the tangle of countless continuing, sometimes compromising, conversations.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Masterful, sweeping . . . frequently funny and always engaging . . . A story that feels real and true and more than fulfills the promise of the title. It is interesting, yes, but also moving, compelling, fascinating, and rewarding.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “It’s a ritual of childhood—that solemn vow never to lose touch, no matter what. And for six artsy teenagers whose lives unfold in Wolitzer’s bighearted, ambitious new novel, the vow holds for almost four decades.”

  —People

  “In probing the unpredictable relationship between early promise and success and the more dependable one between self-acceptance and happiness, Wolitzer’s novel is not just a big book but a shrewd one.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “[The Interestings] soars, primarily because Wolitzer insists on taking our teenage selves seriously and, rather than coldly satirizing them, comes at them with warm humor and adult wisdom.”

  —Elle

  “In Meg Wolitzer’s lovely, wise The Interestings, Julie Jacobson begins the summer of ’74 as an outsider at arts camp until she is accepted into a clique of teenagers with whom she forms a lifelong bond. Through well-tuned drama and compassionate humor, Wolitzer chronicles the living organism that is friendship, and arcs it over the course of more than thirty years.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “Wonderful.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “Juicy, perceptive, and vividly written.”

  —NPR.org

  “A sprawling, ambitious, and often wistful novel.”

  —USA Today

  “Smart, nuanced, and fun to read, in part because of the effervescent evocation of New York City from Watergate to today, in part because of the idiosyncratic authenticity of her characters.”

  —The Daily Beast

  “You’ll want to be friends with these characters long after you put down the book.”

  —Marie Claire

  “A page-turner.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “[A] big, juicy novel . . . Wolitzer’s finger is unerringly on the pulse of our social culture.”

  —Reader’s Digest

  Praise for The Uncoupling

  “Enchanting from start to finish . . . Thoughtful and touching, The Uncoupling is also very funny.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Keenly observant.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Wolitzer writes with wit and barbed insight . . . a master of modern fiction.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Wonderfully funny . . . reveals a wry understanding of modern relationships.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “At this point in her career, Meg Wolitzer deserves to be a household name.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[Wolitzer’s] wittiest and most incisive work yet.”

  —People

  “[A] sly homage to the Aristophanes classic Lysistrata.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “A sage exploration of the role of sex in both sustaining and wrecking relationships.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Wolitzer expertly teases out the socio-sexual power dynamics between men and women.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “Meg Wolitzer, like Tom Perrotta, is an author who makes you wonder why more people don’t write perceptive, entertaining, unassuming novels about how and why ordinary people choose to make decisions about their lives. . . . The Uncoupling is a novel that can’t help but make you think about your own relationship.”

  —Nick Hornby in The Believer

  “Every few years [Wolitzer] turns out a sparkling novel that manages to bring the shine back to big, tarnished issues of gender politics, such as women’s pull between work and family, or the role of sexuality in family dynamics.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Superbly written, wry yet compassionate.”

  —ABC News

  Praise for The Ten-Year Nap

  “About as real as it gets. A beautifully precise description of modern family life: the compromises, the peculiarities, the questions, the reconciliations to fate and necessity . . . written with the author’s trademark blend of tenderness and bite.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Vividly, satisfyingly real.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene, or artifact with deadeye accuracy.”

  —The New York Times

  “The ultimate peril is motherhood, loving someone more than you love yourself. Meg Wolitzer nails it with tenderness and wit.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “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. An engrossing, juicy read.”

  —Salon

  “Wolitzer perfectly captures her women’s resolve in the face of a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties. To whom does a woman owe her primary allegiance? Her children? Her mother? Her friends, spouse, community? God forbid, herself?”

  —The Washington Post

  “Provocative . . . Wolitzer’s intimate look into these women’s subsequent quests for validation is both liberating and poignant, as she deftly explores the relationships among family, friends, husbands, and lovers that shape her heroine’s views of their pasts and the uncertainties of the future.”

  —Elle

  “[Wolitzer’s] smart, funny, and deeply provocative novel takes the lives of its women very seriously. . . . She follows the inner workings of the minds of a group of friends in hilarious detail without condescending or judging. . . . It’s a marvelous jungle in there, especially when written with Meg Wolitzer’s unsentimental compassion and wit.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  Also by Meg Wolitzer

 
THE INTERESTINGS

  THE UNCOUPLING

  THE TEN-YEAR NAP

  THE POSITION

  THE WIFE

  SURRENDER, DOROTHY

  SLEEPWALKING

  HIDDEN PICTURES

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  THIS IS MY LIFE

  Copyright © 1988, 2014 by Meg Wolitzer

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with all copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  First published in the United States of America by Crown Publishers, Inc.: 1998

  Published as This Is Your Life by Penguin Books in 1989

  Riverhead trade paperback edition: April 2014

  Riverhead trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-59463-314-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-15927-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  CONTENTS

  Praise for Meg Wolitzer

  Also by Meg Wolitzer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  About the Author

  For Richard Panek, with love

  PREFACE

  I went back and forth over whether to publish the reissue of this novel under its original title, This Is Your Life, or under the title you see on the cover, which was the name given to the movie based on the novel. I thought: This Is Your Life; This Is My Life—whose “life” is it anyway? My decision to go with the movie title has to do with my fondness for the movie; the fact that there’s a subculture of people, mostly female, who loved the movie when they were young; as well as my desire to honor it after the death of its director and co-screenwriter, Nora Ephron, who was my friend. It was her directorial debut.

  The novel tells the story of a stand-up comedian, Dotty Engels (who mysteriously became Dotty Ingels in the movie) and her two daughters, Opal and Erica. “How did you come up with the name Opal?” Nora once asked me. “It’s so not-Jewish.” But I had no idea that the name Opal was so not-Jewish. I wrote the whole novel, including its character names and all else, in a kind of protracted hunch state. I just knew I wanted to write a book about mothers, daughters, work, family, fame, love, and teenaged passions, all themes I have returned to as a writer over the years. The book features New York City in another era, and while I haven’t read it in a really long time, I am prone to feel about it much the way a mother might feel about a slightly unpolished daughter. But that’s the thing about one’s early books—often they are unpolished, lacking the finished, knowing sheen that comes later on, and which you may spend the rest of your career madly trying to rub off.

  People who have seen the movie first are sometimes surprised that the book is darker and less funny than they’d imagined it to be. It’s not a comedy, exactly, though it does take a look at the world of a certain kind of shticky stand-up. Some of the cultural touchstones will feel as if they come from a long-lost world. There’s one line in it that my husband, who went to more than a few of my readings back before we were married, used to tease me about. When Dottie is a guest on The Tonight Show, there’s a reference to “the beefsteak laugh of Ed McMahon.” If you are young now, you might ask: “Who is this Ed McMahon you speak of?” As I used to say at the end of the book reports I wrote in elementary school, “I guess you will have to read the book to find out.”

  It’s been just over twenty-five years since this novel was published. I was a daughter when I wrote it, but now I’m a mother, too. The work/family tensions emphasized in the movie are personally relevant to me in ways they weren’t back then. But, of course, I’ve never been one for believing that novels need to be personally relevant to their readers. Instead, I’ve always felt that a reader needs to be willing to step outside herself and her own experience and follow the novel where it takes her. In this instance, I think it will take a reader back to an earlier time in New York, when the entire city looked different, and a fictional, polka-dot-wearing stand-up comedienne mother and her two young daughters were trying to figure out how to accommodate one another’s needs and longings. This, I guess, is their lives.

  —MEG WOLITZER, OCTOBER 2013

  PART ONE

  One

  It was her sister who taught her how to hyperventilate. They sat facing each other on the bed, and they panted together like a husband and wife in a Lamaze workshop. When they could just about take no more, they felt that identifying swoon, the oxygen leaving their brains for good, the cells dying en masse. One day Erica put an end to it. She couldn’t be bothered anymore, she said; she had other things to think about. Suddenly her walls were lined with posters; huge, disembodied heads of folksingers loomed down from above the bed and the dresser. Voices started coming from the stereo speakers: trembly underwater sopranos singing about medieval wood-nymphs and slain labor leaders. But the 1960s had already ended, and the records were strictly from the remainder bin. Buffy Sainte-Marie had a big orange 99¢ sticker slapped over her face.

  Erica’s room grew lush with things to touch, and fiddle with, and smell. Something was always burning in a dish. Once she bought a wand of incense from a man in a white robe on the subway and was later appalled by the literature he had sweetly handed her with her purchase:

  Thank-you for Buying “Lovely” Patchouli Incense. You’re contributions will Go to help FIGHT the Rise of worldwide Judaism.

  Still the incense burned, and now Opal stood and breathed in the bad air of her sister’s room and thought longingly of how they used to hyperventilate together, and how all of that was finished. In the past, sitting cross-legged on Erica’s bed, the two sisters would allow their breathing to quicken. It was those first moments that Opal liked best. Erica had made a rule that they must keep their eyes closed, but sometimes Opal would crack open an eye and watch her sister heaving for breath, her shoulders moving up and down. It was embarrassing to see this, but somehow necessary. Erica was like a big sea creature that had washed up onto a rock, and Opal was the sea creature’s diminut
ive sister. If someone had burst into the room then, it would have seemed crazy: two girls gasping for oxygen when there was certainly enough of it to go around. But no one would burst into the room; even the babysitters knew enough to keep their distance. Sometimes Opal could hear one of them practicing a routine in the den. She grew used to hearing the distant swoop and mutter of a voice, the rise and fall of words out of context. She rarely paid much attention, preferring the company of her sister. In Erica’s bedroom it was just the two of them, breathing and falling.

  One evening when they were hyperventilating, Opal actually thought she had died. She thought she had slipped into some narrow, dark province where she would be held forever. It was like all the hiding places she had ever found in the apartment: like the alley behind the refrigerator, where you wedged your body in and stood flush against the humming coils and wires until you were discovered. And you always were discovered; that was a given. But now Opal felt as though she might never get out, might never come to. She could not move, she could not open her eyes.

  Goodbye, she thought, goodbye. She remembered Charlotte’s babies at the end of Charlotte’s Web, and the way they had parachuted off into new, separate spider-lives, calling goodbye to Wilbur even as a current carried them along. She had wept then, as she had wept pages earlier during Charlotte’s death. It made sense to cry at someone else’s departure, someone else’s death. But this now, this was worse; Opal was mourning only herself. She would be found in her culottes and headband and knee socks. She saw herself being lifted gently, held in some anonymous adult arms and carried from the room.

  That was when Erica reached out and shook her.

  “Earth to Opal,” Erica said, and Opal’s eyes flew open like a doll’s. “You should have seen yourself,” Erica said, but her voice was kind.

  No more was said about it. Together the two sisters caught their breath and went into the kitchen to hunt for supper. There was always a babysitter around to serve as a vague supervisor. Their mother had hired a string of young comedians to take care of Opal and Erica when she herself was away—men and women whom she had discovered at various comedy clubs around the city. She paid them decently and gave them a place to stay and a telephone to use and a pantry stocked with interesting food. The apartment was never empty; there was always the sound of one of the babysitters in the background, obsessively practicing a routine. The babysitters were like extremely lenient, youthful parents who let you do what you want and eat what you want.