“Fiction slows everything down”
In our house, the big event of the week was going to the library for new books. Somehow I didn’t pick up Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar until I was about thirteen, but I was a very sheltered, very young thirteen, and I may have been sticking with books I was comfortable with, or I may have been guided to it by a librarian—I don’t remember. What I do remember was a kind of awakening for me as an adolescent to a world of difficult sensation, to the idea that that was something people could experience. While I have not struggled with mental illness, Plath’s novel made me want to say to my parents, “Why have you protected me from the world for all these years?”
It led me to read Plath’s poetry, too, but it really made me consider, in a new way, compassion—feelings, and disturbing feelings that other people could have. You know that study about how reading could engender more compassion in people? Esther Greenwood isn’t really a very likable character, but you can fall into her experience and feel for her. That book led me to understand that even if you don’t like people, there may be things about them that you don’t know, that you don’t understand.
It’s very, very hard to write a novel. It’s also very hard to read a novel. Compassion is central to both. It’s how we navigate the world. I think fiction slows everything down and allows you to find out how people function. I was always reading on the Long Island Rail Road, reading on the train by myself, and I think that I realized that people have loneliness, the loneliness that I had on the train. The Bell Jar gave me a hint of the fact that you were alone, and that you had to do something to connect to other people. If you’re not struggling with depression, that may make things easier, but it’s still difficult. A novel becomes a mirror of what’s going on in your own life, whether you have other problems or not.
Fiction helps you figure out what’s important to you. The writer Mary Gordon, who was my first writing teacher, says, “Only write about what’s important,” and implicit in that remark is to write about what’s important to you. It’s easier, sometimes, to hold back, but it’s so much richer and better if you don’t. You can cope with a great deal more experience in literature than you can in real life. You might be a very sheltered, suburban adolescent, but you can read about a young woman’s negotiation of life in Manhattan and find something in there that speaks to you.
Good fiction—and nonfiction, too—shows us how people live. When you read, you form a kind of Venn diagram of yourself and the book. Other things can contribute to that experience later, even if you aren’t rereading the book. For example, when I was at Smith College for two years, it was the late 1970s, and there was still a lot of fascination with Plath and her influence. The girls who revered her inspired my characters in Sleepwalking. I used her journals (which are fascinating) to re-create 1950s Smith in my novel The Wife—people sometimes ask how I got all of those details right, from the mix of perfumes worn on campus to the dialogue, and I tell them it’s all Plath. The Bell Jar still speaks to me, which is why the tension of a notebook and its power can be found in my YA novel Belzhar, which uses the book as a springboard. Plath’s use of her own experience opened my eyes to how I might use my own, and how a set of characters might find it healing to use journals with fantastical properties to go back to a time when they had control over a situation.
I was a sensitive kid, but I was also in a different world. I wanted the self-consciousness of being a writer, but I also wanted to be with other people, and I think that tension is something lots of other writers feel. I don’t think you can write without it, in a way. I think that tension is what starts my Venn diagram: I started thinking about what another state might feel like. Then my own inner life. Then Plath’s journals, while I was at Smith, and so on. Everything that I’ve thought about and cared about—here’s the locus of it.
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Meg Wolitzer’s novels include The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. Her YA novel Belzhar was released in 2014.