In Her Shoes

by Jennifer Weiner

  Q: Do you have a favorite character in In Her Shoes? Do you relate to one sister more than the other?

  A: I have a special place in my heart for all the characters in this book.

  Rose is the sister I most resemble, both physically and in terms of being responsible to the point of anal retentiveness. (Her cluelessness about fashion and makeup is all me, although I have to say that she’s got embarrassingly bad taste in music. George Michael! Please!) Maggie is very, very different from me, but it was a very interesting exercise trying to slip into the skin, and the mind-set, of someone who’s not like me at all, from the itsy-bitsy body and the constant flow of male attention to the spotty employment history.

  Ella was the most interesting character for me to write because her life required me to imagine things I’d only seen or heard secondhand, or read about. My grandmother, Faye Frumin, lives in a place that’s a lot like Golden Acres, so I was able to take some of the details of retirement-community living in Florida from my visits over the years. But thinking of what was going on inside Ella’s head—how it would feel to lose a child, to feel a degree of responsibility for that child’s death, and all of the guilt and longing she’d feel about these granddaughters she couldn’t save—was a real challenge.

  And in terms of favorite supporting characters, Mrs. Lefkowitz wins, hands down.

  Q: Which authors have influenced you the most, and how have they helped shape you as a writer? Are you more influenced by journalists than fiction writers?

  A: Besides newspapers and magazines I rarely read nonfiction in my free time. I much prefer novels. I figure there’s enough reality in real life, and when I read I want to escape, and novels are what work for me.

  There’ve been a lot of writers who’ve been influential, whose books I turn to again and again. Stephen King, for one. He’s an amazing storyteller, with an unbelievable imagination. Susan Isaacs, for another. Every one of her lead characters is someone you’d want to sit down and dish with over coffee. It’s interesting, but I just realized that both of them are writers I discovered in my adolescence. I remember devouring Pet Sematary in one fevered gulp when I was in seventh grade.

  In addition to Sapphire’s Push, I also reread Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone when thinking about Maggie’s voice. Precious, the lead character in Push, is, like Maggie, at war with the world— she’s someone who’s been through incredible pain in her life, who’s been judged as expendable and told that she’s stupid, and yet she has this voice that’s so sharp, so full of rage and sorrow and dead-on observations about the world.

  And then there were the novelists and poets I discovered in college and keep coming back to, and it was fun to give them little cameos during Maggie’s time at Princeton. The Elizabeth Bishop poem is a particular favorite of mine.

  Q: In both of your novels, the idea of body image is a central theme. Do you think this concept is a constraint that we place on ourselves, a restraint that society places on women, or a combination of the two?

  A: Um, all of the above? I think it starts out as being a societal mandate—a kind of signpost outside of life’s roller coaster, reading “You Must Be Less Than This Fat Or Nobody Will Ever Love You”—and it’s something that women internalize, and carry with them in different ways. One of the things I was trying to do with this book was to show both sides of the coin, and the different ways that buying the beauty myths can harm you. Rose, for example, who’s a normal size and healthy, gets the message that her body is something to be ignored and concealed, swathed in sweatpants and unfashionable-length skirts, until she learns that however it appears, her body is, first and foremost, something to use—to get her around, to ride a bike, to walk a dog, to hold the people she loves. And then there’s Maggie, who’s got this ready-for-its-closeup body (which, as we see, requires a tremendous investment in terms of effort and time), but it doesn’t bring her all the happiness that the plastic surgeons and diet merchants promise. It gets her scads of attention—good and bad—and it gets her judged, the same way Rose’s body earns her judgments. I hope someday the idea of “you are how you look” will change, and I hope that in some small way my books will be part of that change.... But I worry that there’s so much money to be made off of convincing women that they’re inadequate, too big, too little, or otherwise completely unacceptable that change is going to be painfully slow.

  Q: What do you consider to be the greatest challenge that you face as a fiction writer? Are the challenges different from those that you encountered as a journalist?

  A: I think the greatest challenge I face as a fiction writer is character economy. I usually wind up with so many characters—all of them vying for space and attention, all of them wanting to do things—that a few of them wind up miserably on the cutting-room floor. In Good in Bed, for example, Cannie had another sibling, a second brother, who got lost in the revisions (my two real-life brothers spend lots of time fighting over which one actually made it into print, and which one got abandoned). In the early drafts of In Her Shoes, there was a lot more about Josh, the guy who menaces Maggie at Princeton, and what turned him into the creep he became. (It was actually a rotten father, who’d founded a Survivor-inspired weight-loss service: Dieters were dropped in the middle of deserted, bug-infested islands with only a handful of rice and some waterproof matches ...and don’t think for a minute that he’s not coming back in a book someday!)

  And the biggest difference between fiction and journalism is, far and away, the lack of immediacy. Working for newspapers, you can respond pretty much immediately to something that’s happening in the world of politics or pop culture. As a novelist, if you’re lucky, your book will be out within a year of whatever event you’re outraged or amused by. It’s been a challenge to strike a balance between writing about current events that aren’t going to be interesting by the time the book comes out, and writing books that still feel contemporary and current and relevent.

  Q: Is there a message that you wish your readers would take away from your novels? Any themes or issues that you would like to get people thinking about?

  A: It’s always funny trying to answer this question, because I don’t think many novelists sit down in front of the blank page with any specific message in mind. They just want to tell a story, with characters their readers will care about, and keep them turning the pages—and in my case, give the characters as happy an ending as possible. The “message” part comes organically. It grows up around the plot and characters, usually without the writer having to do anything overt about it.

  That being said, there are issues that seem to pop up in my fiction, and that I think are always interesting ones to think about. There’s the question of interior versus exterior, and how much what you look like reflects, or determines, who you really are. And in this book I think there’s the theme of the redemptive power of words, the way a good book can literally save your life. One of the parts I most enjoyed writing was turning Maggie into a reader, and showing the way her world, and her character, expanded as she read more and more.

  Q: Do you have another project on the horizon?

  A: My new novel, Goodnight Nobody, is about Kate Klein, a reluctant mother of three who finds 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 play date—only 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 t
he dead woman’s double life, Kate ends up facing some surprising facts about her neighbors, her marriage and, ultimately, herself. It should be out in September, God and baby willing!

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Through the eyes of these two young women, we get a pretty modern view of the world. What then, do you make of the rather traditional ending: the fairy-tale marriage that seems to embody all the hopes of the future? Do you think the author is playing with this concept, or using it to offset her rather un-traditional story line?

  2. The author utilizes a rather unusual technique when she tells the story through shifting points of view. How did this affect your reading of the story? Why might the author have chosen to do this? Do you think there are insights that could only have come out through multiple perspectives, or do you think the author wanted the ambiguity and clashing perspective that shifting points of view can elicit in a reader?

  3. In many ways, this is really a story about growth, change, and transformation. Discuss the ways that virtually all of the characters alter their old, comfortable ways of being, acting, and thinking (or lack of thinking, in Maggie’s case) throughout the course of this story. How easy does it seem for the characters to change? Would you consider intense pain or disillusionment (with a person or a job) to be the main catalyst for much of this change, or do you think something else sparks it?

  4. Body image, for both sisters, obviously affects how they view the world around them. While Rose, at least in the beginning of the story, seems almost apologetic about her body, Maggie uses hers like a weapon, moving through the novel with a confidence that borders on aggressive. In what ways do you think their physical bodies, or perhaps the reactions that they receive from others regarding their physical bodies, helps create the people that they ultimately become?

  5. Early in the novel, we get a rather painful and disturbing view of Rose’s childhood during the scene on the dodgeball court. And while we would expect, or at least hope, that her sister might step in and try to protect Rose in such a humiliating moment, Maggie stands watching, obviously in pain, but frozen. In fact, Maggie goes so far as to blame her sister, asking herself, “Why did she have to wear those [underwear] today” and reassuring herself that “[Rose] brought this on herself.” Were you shocked by Maggie’s coldheartedness? Do you think that there were mitigating circumstances that help to explain this cruelty?

  6. Forgiveness plays a central role in this story, as many of the characters struggle with their need for family and their inability to let bygones be bygones. To what degree do you think forgiveness paves the way for the story’s resolution? Would you have forgiven Maggie? If you were Ella, would you have forgiven Michael Feller for having shut you out of Rose and Maggie’s childhood? What seems more central to this story: the idea of self-forgiveness or forgiving others?

  7. At times, it seems as if Maggie has created, in herself, the antithesis of her sister, and Rose heartily rejects and criticizes all things that seem to her Maggie-esque. Do you think the sisters’ rejection of each other is a form of self-rejection? Do they actually share more traits than they would care to admit? Do they want to be like each other? Have they accepted their respective roles as screw-up and good girl so wholeheartedly that they unconsciously squelch any behavior that might help them to step outside of those lines?

  8. Do you see this story as a common one in terms of sibling rivalry, or does this go above and beyond what you would consider “normal” sisterly animosity? If so, what do you think accounts for this? Obviously, the strain of losing a mother—one whose life was filled with struggle even before her death due to a debilitating mental illness—can lead to misplaced anger and bitterness, but why do you think the girls turn on each other like they do? Were you surprised that their shared experiences didn’t forge an absolute, unbreakable solidarity?

  9. Although Rose seems to have a strong and loyal friend in Amy, we get the sense that Maggie really has no female friends; it seems that male relationships are the only ones that she chooses to foster. To what extent do you think Maggie’s relationship with Rose affects her ability to make lasting, trusting bonds with other women in her life? Why is it that Rose seems more capable of these relationships?

  10. At one point, Rose says to a waitress upon Maggie’s departure, “She’s not my friend, she’s my sister.” How might this shed some light on Rose’s feelings of obligation and resentment toward Maggie? Do you think that, given better circumstances, Maggie and Rose could have been friends? Do you think family members can ever truly be friends?

  11. What significance does the title have regarding the larger themes that this novel encompasses? Do you think it is ever possible for someone to ever truly put themselves in someone else’s shoes? What do you think the author might say?

  12. Where do you imagine Rose and Maggie in ten years? Has their relationship grown and gotten stronger? Do you see them finally as friends, or do you think they ultimately will fall back into the same patterns?

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Washington Square Press eBook.

  Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Washington Square Press and Simon & Schuster.

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com