When my husband and I were living in Atlanta back
in the early nineties, I left my teaching career
behind and gave birth to our first son. Not surprisingly,
I joined a moms’ group. Within months, these
near strangers became my closest friends as together
we faced the challenges that motherhood brings.
Looking back, some of my fondest memories of those
years include these extraordinary women who made
motherhood seem like a walk in the park.
This month’s Jen’s Jewels,
Meg Waite Clayton, touches upon this theme of
bonding mothers, yet it is set in a turbulent
time…the late sixties and early seventies.
THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS is a spell-binding
novel that truly depicts the essence of an era
in which women dared to make a change. Beautifully
written, this remarkable story of five distinctive
women coming together to unearth their true destinies
is sure to win your heart. Quite simply, it’s
a story of love, loyalty, and friendship.
As part of this interview, Ballantine
Books has graciously donated five copies
of THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS for
you, my readers, to win. So don’t forget
to look for the trivia question at the end. Please
go ahead and grab something cold to drink and
get to know my friend and this month’s featured
author, Meg Waite Clayton.
Jen: It seems that the growing trend
among novelists today is to have pursued their
supposedly “chosen” career before
coming to the realization that their true passion
is and always has been writing. Not surprisingly,
your unique story seems to follow suit. Please
tell us a little bit about your educational and
professional background that led to where you
are today.
Meg: In my experience,
most people who are at all humble have difficulty
believing they might reach their dreams. That’s
one of the things The Wednesday Sisters
is about: how friends help us believe in ourselves.
Growing up, I dreamed of writing books
like A Wrinkle in Time, but to me, writing
novels was like leaping tall buildings in single
bounds. Even a girl going to law school was a
stretch. So I studied history and psychology in
college, went to law school, and then to a law
firm.
The history background sure prepared me to write
novels set in other times, though, and the psychology
training helped me better understand the sometimes
odd things people do, and why. Through the law,
I learned to anticipate every angle of a situation,
which pays dividends in writing, where you really
do need to consider what every character in a
scene brings to that scene. I learned discipline,
too, and met some really interesting and often
very successful folks along the way, all of whom
turn out to be as human as you and me –
a great perspective to have when you’re
writing. And in the law, you are often telling
stories of one sort or another.
Jen: How did you arrive at the premise
for your latest work, THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS?
Meg: The way I think
most readers would describe the premise of The
Wednesday Sisters – something like
“five moms and homemakers connect over books
in a park at the dawn of the women’s movement,
and bond when they form a writing group”
– wasn’t, for the most part, even
there when I began the book. My first journal
entry for it does not contemplate a historical
setting or a park. It doesn’t contemplate
that they meet over books or will end up forming
a writing group. What it does contemplate is a
group of women who become friends, and help each
other through life. Since the book started on
a day when I was having a tough time myself, feeling
like my literary life might be over almost before
it had begun, and at the time when my own closest
friends lived thousands of miles away, I suppose
I was gathering them around me in the best way
I could, which was by trying to capture the spirit
of our friendships in words.
Jen: One of the most difficult tasks for
a writer is to find her main character’s
voice which enables the story to truly come to
life. However, you chose to have five main characters,
each with adversities as well as moments of triumph
which mold them into the strong women with whom
we can identity. Please tell us about this very
special group of ladies. What makes each one so
vital to the evolution of the plot?
Meg: The Wednesday
Sisters started with five friends: Frankie,
a timid Midwestern transplant; Linda, a brutally
blunt athlete; Brett, an eccentric math-science
geek; Kath a spunky Southern debutante; and Ally,
the quiet, thoughtful one – although reducing
them to type like that loses the contradictions
and details that make them interesting.
I’d like to say I had a very logical reason
for including each of them, but the truth is they
arrived as a group, and eliminating any of them
would have been like whiting one of my law school
pals out of my favorite photo: the whole picture
would become unbalanced in a way it’s hard
to imagine, because I only known the world with
all of them there.
Jen: No matter what the genre, some research
is required in order for the overall book’s
authenticity to ring true. One of the things I
liked best about your novel was as the story unfolded,
history was also being made. How did you go about
preparing for the writing of this book? How much
factual research was needed? And what, if anything,
did you discover along your journey that was most
fascinating to you?
Meg: The wonderful history
professors at University of Michigan left me steeped
in the emotions of the sixties, if not with a
great memory for dates and names some twenty-five
years later. I did a lot of research on the particulars,
turning to 1960s bestseller lists and fashion
photos, articles on the state of medicine, the
Olympics, women’s marches, Miss America
photos and quotes, and footage of the lunar landing
and the Johnny Carson Show.
What I discovered was that women’s lives
were even more limited than I’d imagined:
women weren’t allowed to run marathons and
even Stanford had no women’s track team;
new mothers were often required to forfeit their
jobs; want ads were separated by gender; there
were actually men-only flights; and my own high
school, the year I started – 1972 –
had only six girls’ sports teams (no track
there either!), all listed after the many, many
pages of the many, many boys’ sports. I
think of myself as coming of age on the other
side of the women’s movement from the Wednesday
Sisters, but I see in retrospect how long it has
taken – and is still taking – for
the world to change.
Jen: From start to finish, approximately how long
did it take for you to complete this book? Which
of the five characters was the most rewarding
to write and why?
Meg: For a year and a
half or so, “The Wednesday Sisters”
was just a title on a blank file on my computer.
On July 1, 2004, I sat down to write in my journal
with only the idea that one of the sisters –
whoever they were – would wear white gloves.
It was an amazing morning: when I got up again,
I had the guts of the story. When I sat down to
write it in earnest the next spring (I spent the
interim on another novel that I still haven’t
gotten right), I wrote the bulk of the first draft
in an eight-month burst, then revised very quickly.
I had a manuscript ready to go by mid-January.
To make a long story short, eleven months and
many discarded drafts later, at the urging of
some writer pals I trust, I changed agents. Marly
Rusoff – who walks on water – helped
me edit over an intense few weeks, then sold it
in early March of 2007. So by one measure, it
took almost three years to write it. But it feels
like it came much more quickly than that.
Kath was the easiest character to write from
the start, Ally the most difficult. Frankie’s
was the voice that came to me in that first journal
session, and never left. I liked Linda and Brett
the best at first, but in the end each of them
tapped into something I feel deeply. So I think
the most rewarding part was not any single character,
but rather the way the friends – together
– seem to be bringing readers a little of
the kind of joy my own friends share.
Jen:Frankie is the catalyst that ignites the
desire in each of the women to follow their dreams.
What is her biggest strength? Weakness? What is
the driving force behind her willingness to break
out of her cocoon?
Meg: I suppose Frankie’s greatest strength
is that she recognizes her weaknesses and wants
to grow; she’s willing to work toward her
dream. Her greatest weakness is probably that
she fears being seen to fail: hence her hiding
her writing even from her husband.
But I don’t think of Frankie as the sole
catalyst for the sisters actions. She does urge
the sisters to try harder after they’ve
settled into complacency. But it’s Linda
who gives them the first push. Brett capitalizes
on Linda’s push by plunging into the water
head first. Through Ally, they learn the value
of wanting something badly enough to face failure
again and again. And Kath provides the sort of
unconditional positive regard we all need sometimes
to believe in ourselves, which perhaps answers
your earlier question about what makes each one
so vital to the evolution of the plot.
Jen: At the beginning of the story, there is an
air of mystery surrounding Ally. Without giving
too much away, why do you think the women choose
to stand by her side despite the non-conventional
choices that she has made?
Meg: I think very few women lack empathy for what
Ally goes through, and the Wednesday Sisters are
no different. One of the things they come to realize,
particularly through Ally and Kath’s stories,
is that who we choose to love – if it is
a choice – and how we love them is impossible
to judge from the outside. And I suppose Ally’s
story represents my own hope that the polarization
of groups-think falls away when we come to know
individuals from unfamiliar groups, and see that
they are more like us than not.
Jen: Tacking on to the last question, there also
was some mystery surrounding Brett and her fetish
for white gloves. Why did the women not come right
out and ask her why she was wearing them? What
made them not dare to cross that line?
Meg: Linda does ask about Brett’s gloves
at the end of Chapter 2, but Brett ducks the question,
and Kath – who is nothing if not well-mannered
– cuts off another pass by Linda to spare
Brett embarrassment. Once the question is avoided
the first time, it becomes more difficult to raise,
although Linda does make another pass in Chapter
12. As the sisters come to care about one another,
though, even Linda comes to see that those gloves
are the only band-aid Brett has to cover some
deep pain, and the sisters allow Brett the dignity
of uncovering that pain in her own way, at her
own time which is what, in my experience, the
best of friends do.
Jen: The Miss America Pageant could very well
be the sixth main character in this novel. Why
did you decide to have it play such an important
role in the book? (I really enjoyed how you worked
it into the storyline. Well done!) What relevance
does it have in your life?
Meg: Thank you! I am definitely a girl who grew
up watching the Miss America Pageant, even after
the 1968 protests called its existence in to question,
and continued to read women’s fashion magazines
well into the 1990s. There still seems to me to
be an unhealthy emphasis on a woman’s physical
appearance, even for a woman running for president
– which ought to be all about intelligence.
And just as it was primarily women watching Miss
America, it is still women buying the fashion
magazines with the anorexic models. I certainly
meant to use the Miss America pageant to remark
on that, to say that yes, some things are better
now, but other things haven’t changed as
much as they should.
Jen: After reading THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS, I have
to admit that I felt somewhat empowered in the
sense that I could appreciate how far we as women
have really come. At any point in the writing
of this novel did you feel the same way? What
stuck out in your mind as perhaps the most significant
achievement for women?
Meg: I’m so glad
you felt that! I certainly did as well. When I
think of the moments that have moved me most,
they are Sandra Day O’Connor and Nancy Pelosi
being sworn in to their respective positions,
Katie Couric taking the anchor’s chair,
Joan Benoit winning the first women’s Olympic
marathon. But one of the things that became very
apparent to me in researching The Wednesday
Sisters was that those moments only happened
because of the moments that came before them:
women marathoners staging a sit-down strike at
the New York City Marathon to draw attention to
the state of women’s running; protestors
facing ridicule by newscasters and onlookers when
they took to the streets to draw attention to
gender inequality; individuals suing law and medical
schools to gain admission, and suing employers
to gain jobs or more equal pay.
Jen: With the completion of a novel comes
a sense of accomplishment but also some sadness
due to the need to finally put the characters
to rest. I would imagine that these women became
a part of your life. (They did mine!!) Was it
hard to say good-bye?
Meg: One of the nicest things about touring with
the book is that I get to share Frankie, Linda,
Kath, Brett and Ally with audiences. It’s
a little like taking my children out and showing
them off.
Jen: In relation to your craft, what was the
most valuable thing you learned from writing THE
WEDNESDAY SISTERS?
Meg: I learned so much about point of view on
this novel! I have a strong preference for the
intimacy of first person, but it can be limiting.
How do you get stories of five characters told
that closely from a single point of view? The
solution I settled on – having a single
narrator who knows all the stories well enough
to tell them even though she wasn’t actually
there every moment – certainly has its roots
in the way my family tells stories about ourselves.
And now I that I’ve stepped beyond tradition
first-person; I’m exploring other first
person or mixed points of view in my new work.
Jen: Please take us on a tour of your
website. Do you have a mailing list? E-mail notification
of upcoming releases? Blog? Do you participate
in author phone chats? And if so, how would my
readers go about arranging one?
Meg: My website is the
amazing creative work of Ilsa Brink, and I am
just thrilled with the great job she did. My favorite
pages are the Character pages (reached through
the character buttons on the home page); each
of Linda, Ally, Brett, Kath and Frankie has her
own page – and they are beautiful! The Book
Groups pages include not just information for
book clubs and all readers, but also a little
bit about my own book clubs. And the Writers pages
are meant to inspire anyone who wants to write
to pick up a pen. That’s also the point
of my blog, 1st Books: Stories of How
Writers Get Started, where I host a different
author every Wednesday. And you can email me or
sign up for my mailing list on the site, or request
a book club chat. It’s one of the things
I most enjoy: talking with readers.
Jen: Are you busy at work on your next novel?
If so, what can you tell us about it?
Meg: I’ve got two
under construction. For one, I have a first draft
– I’ve bulldozed the road I think
I’ll travel - which for me is the hardest
part. The other is not quite as far along. It’s
always hard for me to say what a book is about
until it’s pretty close to done; I have
to write it to see what’s there. But both
books have a friendship core of one sort or another,
like The Wednesday Sisters, although
they are very different in other ways.
Jen: Thank you so much for taking part in this
interview. Your novel is an inspiration to writers
such as me who dream of becoming a published author
someday. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking
with you. Best of luck in your career!
Meg: An inspiration! That is a lovely thought.
Thanks for hosting me, Jen!
I hope you have enjoyed my interview with Meg.
Please stop by your local bookstore or library
and pick up a copy of THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS
today!
Okay, it’s time for the trivia question!
Be one of the first five people to e-mail me at
jensjewels@gmail.com
with the correct answer to the following trivia
question and you’ll win your very own copy
of THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS!
What is the name of Meg’s blog?
In September, I will be bringing to you my interview
with screenwriter, David Fuller. His debut novel
entitled SWEETSMOKE will be one
of this fall’s most talked about books!
You won’t want to miss it.
Until next time…Jen
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Meet
the Author: featuring Jen's Jewels