Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  Q: Did your own experiences with childbirth flow into the novel in any way? Of the four women you write about, do you relate most to Lia, Becky, Kelly, or Ayinde?

  A: I have a weblog that got a lot of hits as my pregnancy went up to—and then two weeks past—my due date. Once Lucy emerged, a lot of people wrote to ask whether I’d ever post the story of her birth. I told them no, because I was saving it for the novel . . . and I used some of what happened to me for Becky’s birth. But I made a lot of friends in my own prenatal yoga class, and I heard a lot of stories—everything from the accidental natural childbirth (my friend Kim had fully intended on an epidural, but her labor progressed too quickly for any drugs at all), to scheduled C-sections. Long labors, slow labors, speedy labors, pitocin, inductions, doulas, midwives, doctors, mom in the room, mom and dad in the room; mom and dad and professional videographer in the room . . . you name it, I know someone who’s told me her story about it.

  In terms of the characters, there’s a little bit of me, and my experiences, in all of the women, but I will say that I definitely identify with Becky’s inability to find decent maternity clothes.

  Q: Did the process of writing this novel encourage you to rethink any of your own ideas about babies, family, or relationships? What did you learn along the way?

  A: What I learned along the way is to never, ever forget to take my pill again! Just kidding.

  I think what I really learned was that birth, and motherhood, and the experience of being a mother, wasn’t going to be anything like what I’d thought about, read about, or imagined. I thought I’d be able to have this very nice balance of baby and work, and that my work wouldn’t suffer, that my marriage wouldn’t undergo the total upheaval that a new baby brings, that I’d never feel any longing for the life I’d left behind . . . in short, I figured I’d be immune to all of the things the books and magazines talk about (because A Baby Story never showed any of that, perhaps). I’ve learned that having a baby, being a mother, balancing work and family, is much harder than I believed, but also more rewarding, and that the experience reshapes your life more profoundly than I ever expected.

  Q: Most women with children, and even most without, will be able to relate to at least one of the women in this book. How did you make all of these characters so different, and yet so believable?

  A: I think it was a combination of drawing from my own experiences and being lucky enough to have a lot of friends who were going through what I was going through, in terms of birth and babies, marriages and mother-in-laws, reading all the baby books, and gaining, in many cases, a new appreciation of our own mothers. For example, my sister and I are fifteen months apart, which meant that my mother got pregnant when I was six months old. When Lucy turned six months old, I did the math, called my mother, and asked, “What in God’s name were you thinking?”

  Q: In particular, how did you gather the emotional depth and painful experiences that characterize Lia? What was the biggest challenge you had while writing about her?

  A: I think all of my books have an element of “what’s the worst thing you could think of?” In Good in Bed, it’s a woman who finds her body image and sex life served up for public consumption in a national magazine. In In Her Shoes, it’s a sister committing the ultimate act of treachery. With both of those books, the worst thing in them was the worst thing I could imagine. With this book, the worst thing actually happened: One of my friends lost her baby in circumstances similar to Lia’s. I remember thinking this was, really and truly, one of the most terrible things I could imagine. And it raised so many questions: How do you put your life back together in the wake of that kind of tragedy? How does your marriage survive? How do you get past the feeling there had to have been something you could have done differently to prevent it, or wanting to go back in time and undo everything up to and including the act that led to the baby being there in the first place?

  My friend, who is one of the most incredible people I know, said something that actually made it into the book in a different guise. It was that her loss was, in its way, a blessing, because it let her know how much her friends and family and husband loved her, and would be there to support her and care for her, and carry on her son’s memory. So I started thinking about a character who’d go through losing a child, and what she might have lost already, and how the tragedy of a baby’s death could help her see her life in a new light.

  Q: What idea or impression would you most like your readers to walk away with? What did you most want to convey through these characters and their experiences?

  A: That motherhood is hard, that marriage is harder, and that even though we’re all living in a culture that mandates nothing less than perfection—Lose that baby weight! Hang that educational mobile! Have hot sex with your husband, in between taking your newborn to five classes a week!—we should all try to be a little easier on ourselves, and recognize that the best we can do is good enough. Which I know makes me sound like Stuart Smalley, but damnit, there it is.

  Q: Have you had trouble juggling your family and career, as Kelly does? Do you have any helpful hints for other mothers trying to work from home?

  A: First of all, I’d just like to say that I’ve got it better than 99 percent of the other working mothers I know. I write four hours a day in the afternoons, when I have the world’s best nanny caring for my daughter while she plays and naps, and I work in a coffee shop that’s a five-minute walk from home. There’s no boss to sweet-talk if I need to take an hour off for a pediatrician’s visit or if I come in late because a playdate ran long, no commute to deal with if I have to get home in a hurry. I’ve got a supportive husband and health insurance, and those two things alone mean I’m better off than many, many working mothers in the world.

  All of that being said, it’s still not as easy as I thought it would be. I think I imagined myself as one of those super-competent mothers with a well-behaved, well-dressed baby available as an optional accessory for the occasional public appearance my job requires. And in the early days of my daughter’s life—the months I fondly refer to as the potted plant stage—it was like that. I went on a short book tour three months after Lucy was born. She’d hang out in her car seat and sleep through readings. She even did well in hotels.

  Then there was a nice chunk of time where I wasn’t doing anything in public. When Lucy was ten months old, I got an invitation to speak on a Sunday afternoon to a group in a city about three hours away. No problem, I figured—I’d pile the baby and my husband into the car, drive down, do my thing, drive back up. I stupidly hadn’t taken into account the differences between a three-month-old and a ten-month-old—a ten-month-old who’d been teething, and who was cooped up in the car for a three-hour trip.

  The event was a complete and unmitigated disaster—the kind every mother I know has endured at least one of in her baby’s first year. I forgot to replenish the diapers in the diaper bag, which meant hanging out with baby in the bathroom while my husband drove around a strange city trying to find more. I wound up sitting onstage for an hour and a half while three other speakers did their presentations, while Lucy grew increasingly fussy, and while the women in this organization gave my husband increasingly dirty looks. When it was finally my turn, I had to nix the PG-13 scene I’d planned on reading (the guy who’d spoken before me had written about the Holocaust, and a sex scene after that just didn’t seem quite right). I read, asked for questions (there weren’t any), and bolted.

  The next morning, the event’s organizer was quick to let me know how disappointed she felt in my performance. She complained about everything from the length of time I spent in the bathroom to the passage that I read, adding that she “hoped I learned my lesson about mixing work and family.”

  I felt terrible—in fact, even writing about this more than a year later still makes me feel terrible! I hated the idea that I’d disappointed people who wanted to hear me be funny. I felt awful that I forced my daughter to spend an afternoon around a group of women wh
o clearly didn’t want her there. And I beat myself up for trying—and failing—to do two things at once, and do them both perfectly. (I did, however, get to turn the whole thing into a scene in Little Earthquakes. The organizer actually did complain that my daughter was “never taken out”. . . I only wish I’d had Kelly’s presence of mind to say, “She’s a baby, not a sack of trash!”)

  What I learned is that doing two things at once, perfectly, is a fool’s mission. Nobody can pull it off. I don’t even try anymore.

  I’ve also learned, sadly, that in my experience, nobody can make a mother feel worse about her screw-ups than another woman. I think that’s a shame. And if I had any helpful hints, it would be for women to be a little easier on themselves, and a little more forgiving of each other.

  Q: You’ve written columns and articles and short stories before—what draws you to writing novels?

  A: I like having a broad canvas to tell a story on, and novels give me a kind of range and freedom that newspaper articles and short stories never could. Of course, the down side is timeliness. When you’re writing for newspapers and something happens, you can give the world your take on it the very next day. If you’re writing a novel and, say, September 11 happens, your book won’t appear for another entire year, and what you have to say might not seem as timely or meaningful. Of course, I’ve got a weblog (www.jenniferweiner.blogspot.com) where I can unload my daily musings, although generally they’re not about important national or cultural issues, and they’re more about what nonfood items my daughter’s eating these days.

  Q: Are you working on another novel now? If so, what can you tell us about your new project?

  A: My new novel, Goodnight Nobody, is about a reluctant mother of three named Kate Klein who’s found herself stranded and friendless in an upscale Connecticut suburb inhabited by a tribe of supermommies. (“If one of those women is feeding her kids carrots,” she complains, “the woman next to her is feeding her kids organic carrots that she grew herself in soil she personally composted.”) Lonely and bored, with a husband who’s never home, a mother who’s rarely in the country, and a best friend who’s never forgiven her for leaving Manhattan, Kate’s life takes a dramatic turn when she shows up for a playdate to find one of her fellow mommies lying on the kitchen floor with a German carbon-steel butcher knife sticking out of her back. When the police can’t come up with a suspect, Kate decides to solve the mystery herself (of course, she can only fight crime between the hours of 8:30 and 11:45 when her kids are in nursery school). As she unravels the dead woman’s double life, Kate ends up facing some surprising facts about her neighbors, her marriage, and ultimately, herself. It should be out this fall, God and baby willing!

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. All four of the women who star in Little Earthquakes have complicated relationships with their mothers or mothers-in-law. Think about how these relationships affect them and the bonds they develop with their babies. For instance, how do Ayinde’s childhood memories and the current dynamics between her and her mother affect the relationship she develops with Julian? Ayinde clearly wants to raise her child differently than her parents raised her, but she also shows she wants to live up to her mother’s expectations by taking Baby Success! seriously. How do you think this blend of motivations will affect Julian?

  2. In Little Earthquakes, Ayinde, Kelly, and Becky each take a different approach to raising their baby. Ayinde tries Baby Success!; Kelly starts with a type-A approach, keeping track of every little detail on spreadsheets and making sure Oliver has the perfect clothes and toys; and Becky goes for a more laid-back, all-natural strategy. How do their approaches work out for them? Does any one approach seem to work out better than the others?

  3. In the midst of their personal troubles, Becky’s friends sometimes have a hard time remembering the ways in which they are fortunate. Kelly, in particular, tends to be scornful when people call her “lucky.” But toward the end of the novel, Becky says, “If there was one lesson she’d learned from new motherhood, and from her friends, it was that any bit of good fortune had to be counted as lucky . . . and that there was always, always someone worse off than you” (357). How does motherhood help put things in perspective for Becky? What does she learn from her friends, and what can we learn by comparing the experiences of each of the four women?

  4. Kelly puts a lot of pressure on herself and on Steven to maintain the kind of life she couldn’t have growing up. The schedule she tries to maintain is difficult, but it’s not that different from the “double shift” of work and chores that many women take on when they have kids. Still, as the article in Power magazine read, “if Kelly O’Hara Day, with her smarts and her savvy and her Ivy League degree, can’t successfully integrate a career and a family, it doesn’t suggest that things for other working mothers are much different—or that thirty some years after the feminists waged a so-called revolution, the workplace is likely to become a kinder, gentler place for the women who will follow in her footsteps” (397). Do you think Kelly mismanaged her life? Or do you think the choices available to working women are, as the reporter wrote, likely to put any woman in a tough spot? Can women today really have it all? Or do they need to choose between having a family and having a career?

  5. Both Ayinde and Kelly consider divorce at some point. When Ayinde considers leaving Richard, she thinks of the chapter on divorce in Baby Success!: “Marriage on the rocks? Keep your eyes on the prize. Remember what really matters. Remember who comes first. . . . Babies do better with mommy and daddy both under the same roof (267). Is this good advice? Were you surprised that Ayinde patched things up with Richard? Do you think either Ayinde or Kelly should have followed through with a divorce?

  6. When Lia flees to Philadelphia, she leaves her husband behind, even though they love each other very much. She says, “Every time he looked at me, he’d see what we had lost; every time I looked at him, I’d see the same thing. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t stay and hurt him anymore” (5). Why does Lia assume her presence is hurting her husband? Where does her sense of culpability and guilt come from, and how do they complicate her grief? Why does she finally reach out to Sam?

  7. After Ayinde learns what’s causing Julian’s heart murmur, she thinks, “A hole in his heart. It was almost poetic. She’d been walking around for weeks feeling like someone had torn a hole in her own” (318). How does Julian’s malady reflect the injury that Ayinde has sustained on an emotional level, and what do his prospects for health and well-being imply about hers and the well-being of her friends, who have each had their own struggles?

  8. Kelly’s mother, Paula, tries to convince her daughter that covetousness is a sin. She says, “You should be concerned with the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account” (41). Considering the kind of life Kelly had at home, it’s not surprising she doesn’t take her mother’s advice to heart. Should she have taken her more seriously? Why does Kelly strive so hard to find the perfect accessories? Is she truly covetous? Is she looking for security? Does she wish to appear affluent? Does she appreciate nice things aesthetically? Whatever her motivation is, do you think she will ever be satisfied by the acquisition of objects?

  9. Like all the other characters, Ayinde’s life changes dramatically when she has Julian. However, unlike Becky and Kelly, she also finds she can no longer continue her career, due to her new husband’s celebrity status. How does Ayinde’s sense of self change after she marries and has her baby? Do you think she makes choices for Julian and for herself she would not have made if she could work? How is her relationship with her husband and baby affected by her decision not to pursue her career?

  10. Becky has struggled with body image throughout her life, but her pregnancy seems to draw her attention to her weight more than usual. She had hoped pregnancy would allow her to relax a little, but instead she finds herself playing “pregnant or just fat?” How does this disappointment and Becky’s struggle with body image affect her experience with pre
gnancy?

  11. Similarly, the characters experience numerous aspects of pregnancy and childbirth they didn’t really expect, or with which they were disappointed. Together, they discuss things that surprised them like the unpleasant physical side affects of pregnancy and baby farts, and more serious unexpected problems like Lia’s trouble getting Caleb to sleep. Why do you think the characters, many of whom read books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting or took classes in childbirth and baby care, found themselves confused and surprised so often? How did their expectations of motherhood conflict with reality? Where do you think their expectations came from?

  Dear Reader,

  Every book I've ever written had started with a picture.

  Whether it was Cannie Shapiro hurling a box of tampons at her ex-boyfriend's head in my first novel GOOD IN BED, or Maggie Feller struggling to read from a Teleprompter in IN HER SHOES, every book has had its genesis in that one snapshot. My job as a writer is to figure out who the character is and what she's doing, what's happened in her life to make her sound or behave that way, and where she wants to go in the course of a novel.

  My latest novel CERTAIN GIRLS started with a very startling picture: the image of a thirteen-year-old girl, coltish and lovely (and unaware of her own loveliness),walking across a parking lot fast, shoving something into her pockets. I've known for a long time that I wanted to revisit Cannie Shapiro's story and see how she was faring in the land of happily-ever-after where I left her at the end of GOOD IN BED. It took me a while to figure out that the girl in the parking lot was Cannie's daughter, who's just an infant at the end of GOOD IN BED . . . but, once I knew who she was and what she was putting in her pockets and why she was walking across that parking lot so fast, the world cracked open, and I had my story, the continuation of Cannie's story, Cannie in her forties, instead of her twenties, as seen through her own eyes, and through the eyes of her daughter.