That’s when my wish came, unbidden and impossible, to my mind: I wish, I thought, that my life would stay exactly as it is, right this minute, forever.
Up Close and Personal
with the Author
WHERE DID THE IDEA FOR YOUNGER COME FROM?
I wanted to write about what I saw as the war between younger and older women, and I came up with the idea to let that struggle play out within one person, my heroine Alice. My first notion of the book was very dark: I saw Alice as a rich and shallow woman on the brink of killing herself who decides to spend her last hour of life reading Vogue—and therein discovers a miracle-working plastic surgeon whom she gets to transform her into someone who looks young. But I had no interest in writing about the kind of woman who would do such a thing, however redeemed she may be by the end of the book. Then I spent a long time imagining that the fortune-teller, Madame Aurora, would magically transform Alice into a younger woman. And then finally I realized that Alice could simply pretend to be younger, that in fact her rejuvenation by act of will was more powerful than it could ever be by magic or surgery.
LET’S GO BACK TO THAT WAR BETWEEN YOUNGER AND OLDER WOMEN—WHAT’S THAT ALL ABOUT?
I believe all women are under a tremendous amount of pressure, imposed by time and age, to get all the pistons of their lives—relationships, babies, home, career—firing efficiently. Younger women seem to have a need to believe that it’s going to be different for them than it was for the generation before them, that they’ll have an easier time balancing work and motherhood, for instance, and that their own marriages will stay as hot as their bodies. And older women, of course, have some need to see them fail, to prove that they really couldn’t have done it any better no matter how hard they might have tried. And of course both groups are raging against the same truth: That most women’s lives demand considerably more compromise than men’s lives do.
WHAT KINDS OF COMPROMISES?
The main one, of course, is the relatively narrow window women have in which to have their children. Young women today are more aware of that than women now in their forties or fifties were; they know they really need to be having their children by age thirty-five, which doesn’t leave them any time to fool around. But older women know how difficult it is to keep a career moving forward in high gear once you have kids, or to step off the career path for a few years and then hop back on. They know that devoting your life whole-heartedly to either children or a career can mean sacrificing the other, and that trying to do both often means constant compromise.
HOW HAS THIS PLAYED OUT IN YOUR LIFE AS A WRITER?
I have three children and I’ve always worked, but the biggest sacrifice I made when my children were younger was that I stopped writing fiction completely for ten years. I only had time to write purely for money—magazine articles and nonfiction books—and to be a mom. Then when my youngest child was five and started kindergarten, I felt ready to go back to working a longer day and was able to devote half my time to working on what became my first novel, The Man I Should Have Married. That book took a long time to write, mostly because I had no idea what I was doing, and I wasn’t getting paid for those thousands of hours—and didn’t know whether the book would ever be sold. But with my nonfiction career well established and my children more independent and those incredibly overwhelming years of pregnancy and babies behind me, I was able to take that professional risk.
IN WHAT WAYS ARE YOU LIKE ALICE, THE HEROINE OF YOUNGER?
I love my house; many writers, I’ve found, invest a lot of creative energy in their houses, maybe because they spend so much time there. And I have a daughter, my oldest child, who’s the same age as Alice’s daughter. Although I haven’t lived Alice’s life of being a full-time mom, I do relate very much to that feeling in your forties of wanting to live out your dreams before it’s too late. For Alice, looking younger began as merely a means to reclaiming her old job as an editor. The corollary in my life was writing fiction, something I’d done in my early twenties and then given up for years.
WHY DID YOU MAKE ALICE’S FRIEND MAGGIE GAY?
She didn’t start out being gay, but I always wanted her to be someone who’d lived independently, who’d never wanted to get married and have kids, and her being a lesbian explained all that very neatly. Also, Maggie is the opposite of Alice in that she’s never tried to fit in or be conventional in any way. But the fact that the two have stayed best friends all these years is a testament both to Alice’s constancy and her willingness to step outside the box.
WHAT DOES ALICE LEARN FROM BECOMING YOUNGER?
In some ways, she learns that she is who she is, regardless of age. Being younger doesn’t automatically make you braver or wilder or more independent. In the same vein, she realizes that if she wants to change those aspects of herself, she’s going to have to put a lot of hard work into it, work she avoided because it was too difficult the first time around. She really grows up from this second chance at youth.
WOULD YOU BECOME YOUNGER THE WAY ALICE DID IF YOU HAD THE CHANCE?
What woman wouldn’t look fifteen or twenty years younger if she could? The trick is owning your hard-won experience and life and getting the respect of someone older while also enjoying the fruits of looking like a babe—and it doesn’t usually work like that, as Alice found out when Teri didn’t take her seriously at work. I’d love to have the option of looking younger when it suited my purposes, but I don’t have that kind of face or body. I have friends who do, though, women in their forties with kids in high school who can pass for being in their mid-twenties. It’s amazing. But I don’t think I’d like to go back to that stage of life of being confused about love, of having to prove myself all the time. That’s not fun for anyone.
DO YOU BELIEVE IN HAPPY ENDINGS?
Although I know it’s not very cool, I do believe in happy endings. I need to believe in at least the possibility of a happy ending, in a story as well as in life. All of my books have a fairy-tale aspect to them, which reflects my earliest reading love along with some underlying wish I have about how things will work out in real life. I continue to believe in magic, in hope, in change, in true love. And any of those things, or all of them together, can lead to a happy ending.
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