When I was twenty-one years old and had just sold my first novel, Sleepwalking, I took the train down from college to New York City in order to have my first meeting with my editor. After I stepped onto the elevator at the publishing house, anxiously clutching the little cardboard box that contained my manuscript, a priest got on carrying an enormous manuscript, a huge thing of many hundreds of pages, all tied up with twine. He looked at me and said, “Do they know you’re coming?” I said yes, they did. Then he said, proudly, “They don’t know I’m coming!”
I sometimes think about this moment, which dates back not only to the start of my life as a writer, but also to a different era in publishing. Back then, in the early 1980s, fiction was experiencing a golden moment. Novels anchored by all kinds of voices were being celebrated, even ones that, if they were published today, would certainly be considered “small.” I’m not entirely sure what “small” means, exactly, or its related adjective, “quiet,” but I know enough to have a feeling that Sleepwalking could be aptly described using those two words. And yet I don’t mean this as criticism. I feel a real tenderness and protectiveness toward this book, in part because it was my first, but also because of its hushed awareness and its lack of showiness. I wrote the book I wanted to write, and I wasn’t particularly concerned with whether it would find an audience, or whether it would be “relatable,” which is a concept that all writers have heard a lot about in the intervening years. I suppose it was written in a state of innocence and mild grandiosity. I am fortunate to have a mother who was supportive of my endeavors from the start. Hilma Wolitzer, herself a novelist and the dedicatee of this novel, always pointed me toward good books and encouraged me deeply. We both loved the same kind of writing, and though I couldn’t say exactly why I loved what I loved, I started to be able to recognize when a line of prose was good, and when one was a lot less good. I wrote Sleepwalking in the same way I’d written short stories for my creative writing workshops in college—with an eye toward language and observation much more than toward the overarching “thing” itself.
My novel predates the Brat Pack era that would follow it in a couple of years; this book does not feature a college world or postcollege world of careless debauchery, but instead one of bookish, brooding self-consciousness. I don’t think the publisher quite knew what to do with it; the reviews were excellent, and yet when it was time to put out the paperback, it was decided that it would be published as if it were Young Adult, with a sort of lurid dark illustration on the cover of a pale girl holding blood-red roses. People have asked me, smirking, about that cover over the years, and I’ve always hated to talk about it. The kind of book that cover seemed to suggest was contained within is not the kind of book I wrote.
I was struck by the YA/adult book distinction and overlap recently, when I published my newest novel, The Interestings, a full thirty years after Sleepwalking. Like my first novel, this recent book has a group of adolescents at its core, and it takes their lives seriously and hasn’t been considered YA. I suspect that some of the ideas about teenagers in Sleepwalking, and coming into one’s own, and being awfully self-conscious in the way that people can be when they’re young, are still being worked through in my writing. For all I know, I’ve blithely plagiarized myself, and certain images appear in Sleepwalking that I later recycled. My recent work may be much bigger, literally as well as figuratively, with many more characters showing up, multiple points of view, a huge sweep of time passing, and certainly more plot to speak of, and yet, even taking a quick peek at the prose in the pages that follow, it’s obvious to me that the person who wrote Sleepwalking is the person who went on to write her later novels. Although this person, in her current incarnation, would never let a publisher put a depressed-looking girl holding roses on the cover of this novel.
—MEG WOLITZER, OCTOBER 2013