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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Hungry Heart

  The Outsiders

  . . . and Then There Was Nora

  Road Trip

  Fat Jennifer in the Promised Land

  Admissions

  Worth

  Not That Kind of Writer

  Travels with Molly

  Girl Reporter

  Nanna’s Gefilte Fish (Philadelphia Inquirer)

  Renaissance Fran

  My Girls

  Two in a Million (Good Housekeeping)

  With Child

  Never Breastfeed in a Sweater Dress, and Other Parenting Tips I Learned the Hard Way

  Nanna on the Silver Screen

  Appetites

  A Few Words About Bodies

  The F Word (Allure)

  “Some Say a Parent Should Teach a Child to Swim”

  Mean Girls in the Retirement Home (New York Times)

  Judging Women

  Twitter, Reconsidered

  TLA: The Bachelor and Me

  Miss

  One Good Thing

  Men and Dogs: A Love Story

  Coda: Letter to Lucy and Phoebe (Time)

  Acknowledgments

  About Jennifer Weiner

  For my family

  “I wrote my way out.”

  —“HURRICANE,” HAMILTON

  Hungry Heart

  The other day, I was walking from the hair salon to pick up my eight-year-old after school. It was a beautiful February afternoon, unseasonably sunny and springlike, with a sweet breeze rummaging in the tree branches that were just starting to bud.

  Also, my hair looked spectacular.

  I was feeling really good. I’d put in a solid morning writing; then I’d done a spinning class, where, according to the computerized rankings that I obsessively checked, I hadn’t finished last. I was wearing my favorite jeans, which are dark-rinsed, straight-legged, stretchy and forgiving, and the Eileen Fisher cashmere sweater that I’d snagged for 70 percent off at the cash-only sale. With my UGG boots on my feet and my purse, with its furry purse-charm, slung over my shoulder, I strode confidently down Lombard Street, feeling like I was on top of things, like this was a day when I had it all figured out.

  And then I fell.

  My toe must have caught a crack in the pavement as I hurried to cross Twenty-Fifth Street before the light changed. I felt myself leave the ground, saw my arms flailing, then heard myself shout in pain after I smacked down on the pavement, landing on my knees and the heels of my hands. This was not a cute stumble, not the dainty little stutter-step you’d see in a ZZ Top video right before the band launched into a paean to the high-heel-wearing, miniskirted heroine’s legs. This was a full-on pratfall, a wind-knocked-out-of-you, flat-out, oh-my-God, people-running-over-to-see-if-you’re-okay face-plant.

  I think I lay there whimpering for a minute before I hauled myself to my feet, assured my fellow pedestrians that I was fine, staggered through the school gate, and inspected the damage. There was dirt and grit and gravel ground into my palms. My jeans were torn. Both of my knees were bruised and bleeding.

  “Mommy, are you okay?” asked Phoebe moments later when she came out of the classroom and found me holding a paper napkin to my knee.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I muttered. I limped outside, where we waited for an Uber—no way was I walking home in this condition—and I realized that this was not just a trip, not just a stumble; it was a metaphor for my life, maybe for every woman’s life.

  You fall, you get hurt, you get up again.

  • • •

  Last summer, the New York Times wrote a profile of the author Judy Blume, in which she described herself and her work. “I’m a storyteller—you know what I mean—an inventor of people,” Blume said. “And their relationships. It’s not that I love the words—that’s not the kind of writer I am. So I’m not”—she made a furious scribbling motion with her right hand—“I’m not a great writer. But maybe I’m a really good storyteller.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever identified so completely with a description, or the way it plays into the seemingly endless debate over what qualifies as literature. I, too, am a storyteller; I, too, eschew the furious-scribbling-motion kind of writing. I care about language and structure and pace, but I care about plot and characters more. I know I’m not the kind of writer who wins prizes and a place on the ninth-grade summer reading list, the kind of writer who gets called “great.” And, lucky me, if I was ever in danger of forgetting precisely where on the literary food chain I reside, there are people lined up on the Internet to remind me.

  But “great writer” was never my ambition . . . and I suspect was never within the realm of possibility. I believe that, through education and inclination, through temperament and history, all authors grow up to be a particular kind of writer, to tell a specific type of story. We could no more change the kind of work we do—the voice in which we write, the characters that call to us—than we could our own blood type.

  I am the proud and happy writer of popular fiction, and I would never argue that it matters as much as the award-winning, breathtaking, life-changing meditations on love and humanity and the Way We Live Now. I would also note that critics still stumble over the gender divide, where a man’s dissection of a marriage or a family is seen as important and literary, whereas a woman’s book about the same topic is dismissed as precious and jewel-like, domestic and small. Double standards persist, and in general, men’s books are still perceived as more meaningful, more important, more desirable. Last summer, a writer for the feminist website Jezebel revealed that querying six literary agents under a male name netted her five responses (including three requests to see the manuscript) within twenty-four hours, while the exact same letter, sent fifty times under her own name, had gotten a total of just two invitations to send her manuscript. “The judgments about my work that had seemed as solid as the walls of my house had turned out to be meaningless,” she wrote. “My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me—Catherine.”

  Clearly, there is progress to be made in terms of how we regard women’s work . . . and being the one who points out the problem does not earn you the Miss Congeniality sash. Particularly when your insistence on fair play and a level playing field is interpreted as a form of delusion about the kind of books you write and the kind of attention you deserve.

  She thinks she’s as good as Jonathan Franzen, my critics sneer. She thinks her stuff belongs in the New Yorker. Not true! As a lifelong reader of both literary and popular fiction, I am completely equipped to tell the difference, and I know what belongs where. What I believe is that popular fiction by and for women deserves the same regard as popular fiction by and for men. I believe that if the New York Times is going to review mysteries and thrillers and science fiction, it should also review romance—which remains by far the bestselling genre of all literature—and everything that comes under the catch-all umbrella of “commercial women’s fiction.” Maybe books like mine won’t win the National Book Award, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter at all. Nor does it mean that the women who read them deserve to be ignored or erased. Women’s stories matter, the stories we write, the stories we read—the big-deal winners of literary prizes, and Harlequin romances, and documentaries, and soap operas, and PBS investigations, and Lifetime movies of the week. Women’s stories matter. They tell us who we are, they give us places t
o explore our problems, to try on identities and imagine happy endings. They entertain us, they divert us, they comfort us when we’re lonely or alone. Women’s stories matter. And women matter, too.

  • • •

  You fall down. You get hurt. You get up again.

  In my own life, I can trace the ups and downs, the things that have gone spectacularly wrong, and the things that have gone right beyond any imagining. There has been heartache. There has been embarrassment. There was that time I had to read about my father’s scrotum in the newspaper. (Fear not; we’ll get there.)

  But I’ve realized my childhood dream of becoming a published author and a contributing writer for the New York Times. I have a beautiful home in a city I love, and friends who’ve stood by me, and a wonderful, loving, crazy family that’s come with me for the ride.

  I’ve lived through a divorce and a miscarriage. I’ve seen my books become successful in a way few books do. I’ve taken stands, and taken heat, and—I hope—seen the world change, a little bit, because I spoke up.

  I had a father who left me. I have girls whom I will never leave. I had a marriage end. I have a man I hope will love me forever.

  You fall down. You get hurt. You get up again.

  • • •

  These are stories about hunger, that thing that women are taught to ignore or endure. They’re about wanting something from a world that instructs women that appetites are unattractive, that we should never push, should never demand, and should never, ever raise our voices. But we all want something from the world—love, approval, a boyfriend, a partner, a sense of belonging, a way of doing some good. We all desire, we all yearn, we all dream that if only I had this or lost that, if I could live in that house, marry that man, get that promotion, lose those thirty pounds, then my life would be perfect. As we get older we all learn that there isn’t a finish line . . . or maybe there is, but it keeps moving. It’s a rare moment where we look around, sigh with satisfaction, pull our spouse or kids or pets or parents closer, and say, This is perfect, or Now I have everything. Wanting is the human condition. It’s what led us to invent fire and the wheel and Instagram. There’s nothing wrong with desire, but just like every self-help book, bumper sticker, and issue of O magazine insists, it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey; not the summit but the climb.

  I know I’ll never get every single thing I dreamed of. I’ll never be thin. I’ll never win a Pulitzer or even, probably, the pie-baking contest at the Agriculture Fair in Truro every August (because I think the judges are biased against summer people, but that’s another story). I will never get a do-over on my first marriage, or on my older daughter’s infancy; I’ll never get to not be divorced. I will never give birth again, and neither of my births were what I’d hoped for. I’ll never get my father back; never get to ask him why he left and whether he was sorry and whether he ever found what he was looking for. But, dammit, I got this far, and I got some stories along the way, and maybe that was the point, the point of the whole thing, the point all along.

  • • •

  I know how lucky I am for this simple reason: I remember being six years old and telling anyone who asked that I wanted to be a writer. And now here I am—I got to be the thing I wanted to be when I grew up. How many people get to say that? (Besides every fireman and ballerina.)

  I knew I wanted to write, and I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be and who I was there for. To the extent that there was choice involved, I wanted to write novels for the girls like me, the ones who never got to see themselves on TV or in the movies, the ones who learned to flip quickly past the fashion spreads in Elle and Vogue because nothing in those pictures would ever fit, the ones who learned to turn away from mirrors and hurry past their reflections and instantly unfocus their eyes when confronted with their own image. I wanted to say to those girls and women, I see you. You matter. I wanted to give them stories like life rafts, or cozy blankets on cold nights, or a friend who’d sit next to you and tell you that whatever was happening, it was going to be okay. I wanted to tell them what I wish someone had told me when I was young and my own father said that no one would want me, that I’d never be worth much: to hang on and believe in yourself and fight for your own happy ending. I wanted to tell them that you can find friends who become like your sisters, that you can build a family that will cherish and support you, that you can find partners who will see your beauty, that you can find work that you love, that you can make a place for yourself in the world.

  These are my stories about hunger and satisfaction, about falling down and getting up and moving on. They’re stories about learning, slowly but surely, that the grace isn’t in the happily-ever-after but in the fall, and the pain, the bruised knees and bloody palms, and then the sheepish scramble back onto your feet.

  And now here they are for you.

  The Outsiders

  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 that gift, if only we could.

  Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” is everyone’s go-to poem, universally beloved because it’s universally true. There’s no one who doesn’t feel wronged by her parents; no one who, when the time comes and if she’s honest, can’t imagine that she’ll cause her own children pain.

  But when I think about 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 favorites.

  It is, I imagine, a beautiful, crisp fall morning in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in September 1961. Coeds are streaming through campus, carrying their books, pushing their bicycles. It’s bicycle registration day, and everyone who’s got a bike has to sign it up.

  My mother—blond and blue-eyed, five foot eight, a tennis and basketball and field hockey standout, broad-shouldered and big-handed and strong—is waiting in line with her blue Schwinn ten-speed. My father—barrel-chested, short and stocky, with curly black hair, deep-set dark brown eyes, an aggressive beak of a nose, and thick horn-rimmed plastic glasses—is walking along a glass-lined corridor called the Fishbowl. He looks down and spots my mother.

  “All of the other girls were crouching down, or lying on their backs, trying to see the number underneath the seat,” he would tell me and my sister and my brothers as we sat, enthralled. “And your mom just lifted her bike over her head.” He would demonstrate, lifting one arm up as fast as if he were holding feathers, and smile with nostalgic approval.

  He must have imagined that she was some Nordic goddess, a shiksa, the ultimate forbidden fruit for a Jewish boy who’d gone to an Orthodox yeshiva all through elementary school, and fed himself canned foods on paper plates because his parents refused to keep kosher. He must have been disappointed to learn not only that Frances Lynn Frumin was Jewish, but that his family and hers were practically neighbors, and that his father and her uncle had been friends, and their mothers played mah-jongg together.

  My mother’s father, Herman, came to America when he was twelve, sailing to Ellis Island from a shtetl that Google
tells me is called Krychyl’s’k, in the Ukraine. His parents had left him in the old country with his maternal grandparents while they got settled and, eventually, had another son, an English-speaking American boy who must have been bewildering to my grandfather when he finally arrived. He was smart enough for college, and he’d dreamed of law school, but the Great Depression changed his plans. He finished high school, stayed in college for a year, and went to work, eventually in the furniture business, starting off with an assistant and a cart, going to apartments where there’d been a death or a divorce to make an offer on the furniture. My Nanna finished high school, spent a summer learning to be a key-punch operator, but couldn’t find a job and went to work at Kresge’s, a five-and-dime on the corner, where she managed a counter of yarn and thread and notions.

  Faye met her future husband when she was sixteen. For New Year’s in 1931, Nanna was supposed to have gone to Grand Rapids to meet a boy, spending the week with her aunt and uncle and New Year’s Eve with him, but a snowstorm kept her in Detroit. Her best friend Edith’s boyfriend, Leonard, said, “I have a fella—he’s very nice and very shy, and will you go?” Nanna went. “Your grandfather was the handsomest man there. Dressed beautifully. I told him I’d go with him, but that I wouldn’t go seriously. I said, ‘I’m not getting serious until I’m twenty-one.’ ” She kept her word, dating other people, living first in Detroit with her older sister Sophie and Sophie’s husband, Max, then moving in with her parents, who’d gone to Flint after the bakery in Detroit where her father worked had closed and he’d been offered a job there. “Herman always came to visit. Every Sunday. I knew I was going to marry him.” When she was twenty-one, she did.

  They honeymooned in Atlantic City, making the trip by car and bringing Nanna’s little brother Freddy, who’d never seen the ocean, along for the ride. Then they settled in Detroit and eventually had two daughters, my aunt Marlene, born in 1941, and my mother, Frances, who arrived two years later.