by Meg Wolitzer
In Sara’s room, Natalie tossed Sara’s belongings into a suitcase. In her haste, the items lost their special meaning; she didn’t treat them reverently, but lobbed them into the bag without ceremony. In went the beach hat, the bathing suit, the Japanese notebook, and assorted books and papers. When she was all packed, she convened with Peter, Maddy, and Adam in the upstairs hallway, all of them holding luggage and standing as stunned as tourists getting off a transatlantic flight.
“What exactly is it we’re supposed to have done again?” Peter asked.
“I don’t know,” said Maddy. “Terrible things, I guess. Orgies; freebasing crack cocaine; human sacrifices.”
Sara had been the first sacrifice of the summer, the first ever in their relatively short and uneventful lives. They all knew they would not come back to the house anymore. Next summer they would be living elsewhere, and apart. They thought of Sara across a table, Sara explaining how to make perfect sushi, Sara rolling seaweed as carefully as she used to roll a joint in college. If she had lived, would they still be staying in this house next summer, and the summer after that? Would time stop for them, the way people often wished it would? Her clothes and her cassette player and her books were all packed, and her mother was carrying them out of the house for good.
They took turns embracing Natalie, as in a receiving line, and they made plans to speak to her very soon. They would all meet in the city to help clear out Sara’s apartment, and Peter would bring his truck. Even Peter hugged Natalie how, and she felt a small, leftover pulse of feeling toward him, and then it was gone. “I will miss all of you kids,” Natalie said in a voice that was pointedly parental. “I want to thank you for letting me stay. It’s meant a lot to me; I can’t tell you how much.”
“What will you do now?” Maddy asked. “This fall, I mean. Will you just go back to your job at the travel agency? Will you be all right on your own?”
“Oh, maybe I’ll take a trip,” said Natalie. “I can get myself a dirt-cheap fare to Japan.” They nodded knowingly, imagining her among the rush-hour crowds in Tokyo, this intense, pretty Westerner, searching for what her daughter had once searched for, and had eventually found.
They said a round of intense and endless good-byes. Standing on the front porch in a small circle, Natalie looked at the others. “Owakare ni narimasu,” she said, with a decent accent in her pronunciation, and the words meant: This is the parting. It was a formal phrase she had learned on the Berlitz tape, used only in farewells of real importance. They hugged lightly, formally, then separated. Peter, Maddy, Adam, and Duncan would be riding home in the truck, and Natalie would be taking her car.
As they drove away from the house for good, they left Mrs. Moyles to glare at them from the front window, indicting them for infractions both imaginary and real. The lawn still bore vague helicopter prints, but everything else was intact. The house was amazingly clean, as clean as it had ever been, although despite Natalie’s efforts, a tiny cluster of mushrooms was shooting up from an ungrouted spot between the bathroom tiles. The outside world always managed to find its blind way in. You kept yourself clean, safe, organized, but eventually there it was, the disorder of the natural world, finding its way inside your home. A young woman could die; people were routinely stolen from earth, as though by UFOs. Ascending in the Normandy helicopter the other day, Natalie had felt as though she was leaving the earth for good, rising up and getting a last glimpse before the details spun away and left her vision, which was perhaps the way you felt at the end of your life. Everything grew smaller, experiences more remote, left in fragments: the taste of a particularly good dinner eaten a long time ago; a favorite novel; the pale blue comforter used on winter nights. There had been men, her husband and others, and she remembered them, the gratification of their weight on her. But they had not registered in exactly the way that other experiences had. Her daughter had left a deeper mark; daughters did.
Sitting beside Natalie and watching The Wizard of Oz so many years ago, Sara had buried her head under her mother’s arm during the frightening moment when the witch wrote “SURRENDER DOROTHY” in the sky. But now the idea of surrender did not seem so terrible. Natalie thought of a young girl wandering through a strange land among trees that spoke and reached out their knobby arms to touch and warn her. Perhaps it was better to surrender, to collapse into the inevitable. That was what a mother wanted for her children; life was frightening, but if you gave in you could somehow be pushed through it all, and perhaps it would not be so painful. You wanted to think of a wide and easy path for your children. Of course it always led to death; it had to, even when you saw them for the first time in all their wet and slick and misshapen-headedness at birth. You were always saying good-bye, starting then, when an anonymous nurse took the baby away to be cleaned, drops put in her eyes, the white, protective curds of birth sponged from her body. You wanted the baby not to struggle, not to shriek; if she did, it made it so much harder for you to let her go. If she went quietly, let herself be wheeled down the hall as passive as a room-service dinner, then maybe you could rest.
Now Natalie drove and drove, the sparse landscape of the country slowly turning to city. Trees appeared less frequently, their branches starting to thin out and lose their green. There were signs advertising cigarettes and Goya canned pineapple and Jockey shorts; there were buildings being erected, highways under repair. Traffic blossomed. She imagined herself in Japan, wandering lost, searching for the places Sara had studied. Suddenly she was embarrassed at this image. She would not go to Japan this winter; she would go somewhere new, perhaps with her best friend, Carol, or even with Melville Wolf. She would go to Cancún, or maybe St. Bart’s. She would go someplace her daughter had never been.
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
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A Conversation with Meg Wolitzer
Q: Your books all offer highly detailed depictions of day-to-day life as many of us live it today. In this sense, your work follows the prescriptions of Jane Austen—who saw fiction as a mirror held up to reality—and Sir Walter Scott, who defined the novel as just a reflection of the everyday doings of ordinary people. Do you see your novels as mirrors of reality? What sorts of novels do you imagine Jane Austen would be writing today?
A: Trends in novels have changed a great deal since Jane Austen’s time, and the big, realistic, “mirror” novel is only one kind out of many being written today. But it happens to be the kind that I’m drawn to again and again, both as a writer and a reader. I’m not sure fiction “should” do anything in particular, but when I read a book that really shows me the inner mechanics of peoples lives—the moments of tedium and epiphany—I feel extremely grateful. It’s not that I consciously set out to provide a mirror of reality when I write fiction, but because I myself am so curious about other people—the way they think and talk and the complexities of the world they’ve constructed for themselves—I always end up putting some of this into my books. If I hadn’t been a writer, I think I would have enjoyed being a psychoanalyst, just so I could have these stories told to me all day. If Jane Austen were writing today, I think her novels would be as wry and knowing as ever, and would provide a guide to the customs and intimacies of an increasingly strange and difficult world.
Q: How do you feel about the popular critical practice today of sorting contemporary novels into neat categories: women’s fiction, men’s fiction, gay fiction, romantic comedy, literary fiction, etc? To what categories have you most often found your books assigned?
A: Sorting novels into categories can be a reductive
act, because it keeps readers away from certain books. My books have sometimes been classified as “women’s fiction” and while I don’t mind this classification, I don’t want to put off male readers. I’ve also been shelved in bookstores under “literary fiction,” and that’s fine with me, though lately it seems that “literary fiction” basically means anything that’s not written by Danielle Steel.
Q: Who are your favorite novelists? What book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing?
A: My favorite novelists are Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Evelyn Waugh, Colette, and Philip Roth. As for shorter fiction, I’m a fan of James Joyce, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov and a contemporary of mine who’s also a friend, Lorrie Moore. It’s not that the influence of any of these writers can really be seen in my writing, but each of them has made me so excited about fiction that I just want to go write. I would say that Virginia Woolf has exerted the strongest influence on me in terms of language and memory; Mrs. Dalloway is one of my favorite books ever. It’s a perfect novel.
Q: Your previous hooks have been called “seriously funny.” But Surrender, Dorothy, which begins with the sudden death of its central character, clearly emphasizes the tragic over the comic. What inspired you to make such a major thematic departure?
A: Perhaps it’s a by-product of getting older, but I’ve been giving a certain emphasis to the darker aspect of my characters’ lives. A close friend of mine died suddenly some years ago, though under different circumstances, and I think the experience was so overwhelming to me that I simply needed to turn it into something, to try to understand it better. So I wrote about the first death among a group of friends, though the actual story of Surrender, Dorothy is completely invented.
Q: Woody Allen has said, “Comedy writers sit at the children’s table.” But many authors feel it is harder to write comedy than tragedy. Do you agree? What are the challenges of blending humor and drama? Why do you suppose “comic” and “slice-of-life” novels, no matter how well-crafted and accomplished, are generally perceived as separate from the “serious” literary canon?
A: Written comedy is tremendously hard because, for one reason, you can’t rely on “shtick”—the funny voices, the facial expressions, the physical stuff—that stand-up comics or comic actors do to heighten the effect. It’s just your words, left on their own to live or die. Voice becomes central in comedic fiction. I agree with Woody Allen’s comment, but I also happen to think that a lot of comedy writers are secretly glad to be banished to the children’s table, because they know that’s where the action is. Blending humor and drama is a great challenge, because you run the risk of readers saying, “Well, I liked the funny parts, but not the sad parts,” or vice versa. You can’t please everyone when you write, so you shouldn’t try to please anyone. Ideally, the humor and pathos will come out all in one burst. I’m not sure why funny writers aren’t taken as seriously as their more highbrow counterparts, because I know they’ve contributed a great deal to literature. There are exceptions, of course, although generally these serious writers who are given credit and recognition for writing in a wildly funny way tend to be men (think Roth, Pynchon, Waugh). When wit is absent from a book, I worry. I like books to be deeply observant, and often those observations will end up having a slightly hilarious edge to them, like life itself.
Q: How did you begin writing? Did your parents play a role in your aspirations?
A: My mother, Hilma Wolitzer, is a novelist, and I grew up watching her sit in her nightgown at her Smith-Corona typewriter all day. In the beginning, I was slightly embarrassed by her “job”—actually, it didn’t seem like a job at all—and I kind of wished at the time that she’d do something more normal, like be a travel agent. But gradually I began talking about writing with her, and she was a great influence and supporter of my earliest efforts, encouraging me to think that I could become a writer someday too. And now I am, and I suppose my children are equally embarrassed by my pseudo-job.
Q: Adam, Natalie, and Maddy are all wonderfully developed and consistently surprising characters. Are they based on any real-life models?
A: None of my characters are ever really based on actual people, although I do borrow certain traits and idiosyncrasies from people I know. But I tend to mix them together to make a more interesting hybrid. While I don’t “know” any of my characters in real life, per se, I do sometimes know their “type”—the kind of men and women they are, who live certain kinds of lives that I’ve tried to understand.
Q: One of the most compelling things about Surrender, Dorothy is how each character is initially armed with a false sense of immunity to mortality and loss. And after Sara’s death, much of the struggle for your characters—the young mother Maddy, most poignantly—seems to have to do with losing their “sensation of immortality” and recognizing how tenuous and random life is. What inspired you to tackle such a universal theme, and how did you go about shaping it into a narrative so personal and immediate?
A: As I said earlier, the death of my friend years ago was in some definite way the catalyst for the book. But the notions of mortality vs. immortality were inspired by many factors, one of which is simply that I’m getting older and I experience life in a different way Having children has contributed to this shift greatly; it’s slowed down my life while at the same time expanding it. As I watch my children grow up, I feel as though I’m witnessing one of those fast-action “growth of a flower” films we used to watch in elementary school. Everything is whizzing right by me, though I never really knew it before. Of course this is going to make me a bit more existentially driven as a writer, though without losing my irony, I hope. I’d like to be a bit like the late Alice Adams, with a dash of Camus thrown in for good measure.
Q: Peter is, perhaps, the most likely to elicit mixed emotions from readers. As you were writing, what were your feelings about him? Did you struggle with his emotions and choices?
A: Since I have ambivalent feelings about many of the people I know in real life, presumably I ought to have such ambivalences about my characters too. Peter is a good example, a man who wants to be good but who has qualities that are less than stellar, causing him to dissemble from time to time. I can relate to this aspect of him, and I think if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t dare to write a character like this one. It’s a great challenge for women writers to create believable men, ones who aren’t either romanticized or demonized in our portrayals. I think in the past I’ve sometimes tended to romanticize my male characters, to make them sensitive in a poetic way that might disregard their other, more difficult sides. As I was writing Surrender, Dorothy, I tried to force myself to stay true to who Peter was, and not try to wrap him in a kind of “goodness” that would make me lose sight of his complexities, no matter how uneasy they might make me feel.
Q: At the end of the novel, Natalie seems to be moving away from her Sara-obsessed stasis: she simply tosses her daughter’s things into a bag, abandons her plans to visit Japan, and vows to “go someplace her daughter had never been.” How far along is Natalie in the healing process at this point?
A: I would say very far along, with one important exception: she has yet to test her healing outside of the “laboratory” that the summer house provided her. She’s come quite far in terms of facing various issues with the people in Sara’s life, but now she needs to see what it’s like to be Sara-less among the people in her own life. She needs, in effect, to get a life. And I know how wrenching a prospect this is, as it would be for anyone who has experienced such an enormous loss and is trying to reinvent his or her life.
Q: What do you hope readers will come away with after reading Surrender, Dorothy?
A: I hope they see that the book is meant to be funny as well as dark, and that these two qualities have some sort of satisfying balance. We can’t choose the balance of light and dark in our own lives, of course, but we can choose it when we write novels.
Q: To what degree do you draw upon your own experiences with family
and friends as you create the characters and situations for your novels?
A: I’ve never written truly autobiographically Everything has been processed, put through one of those Play-Doh shapers so that it is thoroughly transformed. This keeps writing interesting for me. I love the strange ways in which experience can be altered and translated in fiction; some of the things I’ve written have been based on things that have actually happened, but usually it’s the small moments that are from life, as opposed to the over-arching plots. My writing “voice” is probably similar to the way I speak—at least I’m told by friends that it is. I think I may be more irreverent in person; something happens when I write that creates a slightly hushed and muted voice. I’m not sure why this happens.
Q: Give us the inside scoop on your writing regimen: How many hours a day do you devote to writing? Do you outline the complete arc of your narrative early on? Do you draft on paper or at a keyboard (typewriter or computer)? Do you have a favorite location or time of day (or night) for writing? What do you do to avoid distractions?
A: What a difference having children makes. It used to be that I’d stay up until all hours watching ridiculously bad movies on TV, and sleep exceedingly late, starting my writing in the late morning or early afternoon, and going as long as I pleased. But after I had children and my time was totally sucked away from me, I began to take schedules seriously. I now work from the minute the house is quiet to the minute it’s noisy again. I like to talk on the phone sometimes during work, just to give me a needed distraction and break up the solitude. And I also like to take an occasional walk, or exercise on the treadmill to get those weird endorphins flowing. But mostly during the day I write, and this is the most pleasurable way to spend the day that I can think of. I’m fairly disciplined without forcing the matter. I usually have a large sense of what I want a novel to be “about,” and a few notions of the characters who will populate it, and I proceed from there. I never create outlines—I stopped doing those in fourth grade, when I had to hand in an outline of Greek civilization—but I try to trust my structural instincts and hope that the collection of chapters I put out will somehow feel like a book. If it doesn’t, I rewrite it. And even if it does, I still rewrite it. I always work at the computer; I’m as fast a typist as they come, though I never took touch-typing in high school (it was either typing or creative writing; both couldn’t fit in my schedule), and I have no idea where the different keys are located. I sit and actually look at the keyboard as I work, and yet my fingers fly. But my favorite stage of writing is when I get to print out what I’ve done and make some changes by hand in the margins. I usually do this in a different setting: in a library, on a park bench or in the booth of a coffee shop, enjoying the freedom of being away from my desk yet still feeling productive. And I have a huge collection of fine-point magic markers that help me along. I almost never write at night (except to do re-writing) because I’m kind of wiped out by then, and I like to reserve weekends for my family. I don’t really go out of my way to avoid distractions, but instead embrace them in small quantities. The occasional movie during the work day or lunch with a friend can be the best tonic in the world, leading to a tremendously productive week.