Meg Wolitzer suspects that writing about psychoanalysis in The Position, her latest novel, was a way of having a “funny, challenging conversation with my analyst—even if I'm the only one doing the talking.” In this interview, she addresses the psychoanalytical community at large.
SL: When I first met you in college, you were already publishing regularly in “glossies” and in the middle of writing the beautiful and auspicious debut novel, Sleepwalking. You're the author of six more, including the newly released, The Position. You're a screenwriter, and have seen your novels made into films. Your short stories have been anthologized in the prestigious Pushcart and Best American volumes. You've taught at the elite Iowa Writers'Workshop, among other places. You're in psychoanalysis. Has your analysis had any conceivable effect on your writing?
MW: At first, I barely discussed my work with my analyst. I had always had a love of writing and a facility with language, and so I never saw this area as one that might give me enormous trouble. But during my analysis, I realized that it was my facility and ease that had led me to a kind of stasis in my writing—perhaps invisible to other people but increasingly obvious to me. At a certain point, I began to talk about my writing during every session.
SL: What facilitated that?
MW: It was after I received a quite critical review in the daily New York Times. At first, I addressed the feelings of anger and embarrassment, but after a while I began to look at what the reviewer had actually said.
SL: I've often heard writers talk about rage, despair, and trauma over—not just bad reviews—but lukewarm, mildly withholding, or simply not unconditionally loving reviews. Never have I heard one calm down sufficiently to use it constructively.
MW: Believe me, in terms of turning that review into something constructive, we're talking months and years of hashing it out, not days and weeks. I'm as thin-skinned as any writer I know. Even analysis can't change that. It's just my constitution. But yes, I was able to calm down enough to look at the situation with something vaguely resembling clarity.
There's a hopefulness in the idea of creating something new—a sense that you can set it right next time, a grand “do-over,” and a chance to redeem yourself. I like the movement toward things, the tropism that is central to both art and psychoanalysis.
SL: The Times called your novel, The Wife, a light-stepping, streamlined novel fashioned from the heavy themes of gender, writing, and identity: “…rage might be the signature emotion of the powerless, but in Wolitzer's hands, rage is also very funny.”
MW: I was pleased when the reviewer referred to rage and humor in the same opening sentence. In fact, my suppression of anger had led to a Bonsai-like writing style over the years. When I realized I could use this one-two punch in my fiction, it allowed me to write The Wife. This was the first book I'd written in the first person—the first time I'd decided to throw over the distancing and perhaps more potentially lyrical “she” in favor of the angrier “I.” Maybe readers responded to the book because of the nakedness of its anger; and they saw that the character had a quality of selfirony, implying awareness.
SL: You mentioned your constitution. Is there a writer's constitution?
MW: I'm certain there are many kinds of writerly constitutions out there, but my own is a combination of grave self-doubt and feverish excitement. There's a hopefulness in the idea of creating something new—a sense that you can set it right next time, a grand “do-over,” and a chance to redeem yourself. I like the movement toward things, the tropism that is central to both art and psychoanalysis.
SL: Your newest novel, The Position, opens with four children seeing for the first time their parents' runaway best-selling book, Pleasuring, which features graphic illustrations of their parents' lovemaking. The Oedipal couple met while the mother was the father's analysand.
Tell us about the books on your parents' shelves, your apprehension of the secret, yet exhibited contents of their minds.
MW: The idea of the parents' book being filled with sex and thus dangerous and exciting is only part of the equation. I have always felt that all books are, in a sense, burning-hot objects.
The books in my parents' den were extremely compelling to me: not just the sex books, though those were there too, because my father is a psychologist, but also The Family of Man with its black and white photographs of bodies and my mother's feminist manifestos.
Sandra S. Leong, M.D., is a member of the faculty of the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute, and is clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine.
Reading and writing get you inside. So, while I like the control and power necessary for writing, when I read I feel a relief that I don't have to control anything and can be free of much of the anxiety inherent in needing to exert power. But the two experiences—one muscular, one somewhat passive—flow into each other as well, because reading is at times tempered by thoughts of one's own work, and when one reads a wonderful book, thoughts of inadequacy.
Books were important to both parents, and I very early jumped into the fray as a way of joining, yearning, and perhaps showing off as well. Like athletes continually working out, we were always lying down with a book.
SL: And your mother?
MW: I admired my mother for being a writer. It made her seem powerful, as though she was a big celebrity in our suburb. She is a truly natural writer. My own writing was intricately connected to my mother and her work, although I slowly made a shift toward autonomy.
As for my father—I did feel a slight uneasiness that he trafficked in people's deepest thoughts and feelings. (As though my mother, in her writing, didn't!) When I went into analysis, I discussed it a bit with him, and though our connection over it wasn't as powerful as that between my mother and me over fiction, it was significant.
SL: What do your husband and boys think about your analysis?
MW: My children know I go to an analyst. In their eyes, I spend a lot of time pacing, frozen in obeisance before the computer, talking on the phone, worrying about reviews, and going off to some office somewhere to pour my heart out to a person they've never met. All of it is vaguely incomprehensible and strange, yet at the same time completely familiar. My husband has been in analysis himself, and so he gets it. But I like to keep my analysis separate from my family and friends; it's one of the only things I really have for myself. Even my work, as soon as it's finished, goes out into the world and belongs to readers. My analysis belongs only to me.