Meg Wolitzer Rides the Feminist Waves

The Female Persuasion tells a timely story of political awakening and personal reckoning.

By Alexandra Schwartz

Women are supposed to help women tell other women’s stories, or so Jill, a character in Meg Wolitzer’s 2008 novel, “The Ten-Year Nap,” ardently believes. After flunking out of academia — her feminist dissertation, “Women’s Unheard Voices in Antebellum America,” bombed with her male adviser — she goes to work at the New York offices of a small film-production company, where she options a piece of historical fiction about a schoolteacher’s erotic adventures on the Canadian frontier. Jill’s boss, Selby Rothberg, is a woman, too — a workaholic woman, granted, with no private life and an abusive management style. Read more at The New Yorker.

Join Meg Wolitzer in conversation with Julie Robinson about her novel The Female Persuasion on May 16. Read more about the event here.