Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  My mother and I assured her that we’d wake her up in time. We had dinner late—six-thirty. We went back to Nanna’s place in Century Village and watched a little Raymond. (Even though I know it can’t be true, I am convinced that there’s a channel in Florida that plays nothing but Everybody Loves Raymond reruns.) At nine, Nanna bid us goodnight, then tried to slip into her bedroom and close the door behind her.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “It’s none of your business,” she said, with the cordless phone in her hand.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “None of your business, stinker!” she said. “You’ll put it on the computer!” I had a blog, at the time, which Nanna referred to as “the computer.” She lived in fear of me putting her words “on the computer” while remaining strangely untroubled about showing up in my books. “If you must know, I am calling the sheriff’s office.”

  “Why,” I asked, “are you calling the sheriff’s office?”

  “Oh, they call me every morning.”

  “Why do they do that?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, it dawned on me. “Nanna,” I asked, caught somewhere between horror and hysterics, “are they calling to see if you’re still alive?”

  She drew herself up to her full five feet two inches and gave me a frosty glare. “It’s called the Call of Life,” she said.

  I bit the inside of my lip, took a steadying breath, and asked, “What happens if you don’t answer? Like, if you’re in the shower or something?”

  No worries, Nanna said. “They call back!”

  And what if you still don’t answer?

  “Jenny,” said Nanna. “You know those ambulances that just drive around and around and around?” She turned toward her mirror, giving a single, satisfied nod. “Well, one of them stops.”

  We woke up early the next morning, got Nanna installed in the Camry, and hit the highway, heading a few exits north on I-95 until we reached the community where they were filming. As we rolled slowly down a lane lined with tents and groups of people, lights and cables and cameramen, canvas tents and paparazzi and port-o-potties, I saw Nanna’s eyes get big.

  “Is this all for you?” she breathed.

  No, I explained. Oh, no. This is all for Cameron Diaz (whose name I was, at that point, saying as often as I could, because Nanna kept calling her Carmen Diaz).

  We met a smiling, cheerful PA, who whisked Nanna off to hair and makeup. She emerged, her short white curls beautifully coiffed, her makeup tasteful and flattering. I felt my stock rise. Then came wardrobe. Nanna came out dressed in a beautiful blue-green gown. Designer label. I felt my stock rise higher.

  The scene she’d been cast in was the “senior prom,” where Ella, played by Shirley MacLaine, danced with her suitor, with both of her granddaughters, Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette, looking on. The room they were using was filled to capacity with the actors and the extras, the camera and light and microphone operators, the director and his assistant and the hair and makeup people, taking up every available inch of space. I waited outside, holding baby Lucy and watching on a monitor. Nanna sat at a table for ten, in profile, her folded arm resting on the tablecloth, a heavy bracelet of gold links at her wrist. Outside, watching take after take on the monitors, I saw, with relief, that she was in every one. Uncuttable. Which was good news, because how awkward would it have made the holidays to have to try to explain to Nanna that she’d been left on the cutting-room floor?

  After an hour, the director called, “That’s a wrap! Moving on!” I slipped into the building, stepping carefully over the cables and behind the cameras until I reached Nanna’s table. She got to her feet and she hugged me hard, whispering, “I am so proud of you!” in my ear. Then she turned to the roomful of people—the director, the stars, the cameramen and the boom mic operator, the hair and makeup ladies, with their leather holsters full of hairspray and brushes, and announced, “Everyone! This is my granddaughter, the author!”

  It was one of the best days of my life. Not only that, but I knew, for that one brief and shining moment in time, that I was, unquestionably, the number one grandchild.

  Of course, six weeks later Cousin Rachel had a baby, sending me right back down to the number five slot. But the buzz and excitement for the movie continued to build. Each week, it seemed, People and Us Weekly would publish pictures from the set, while the more serious publications put MacLaine on their short list of potential Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominees.

  Best of all, I got to escort Nanna to Los Angeles as one of my dates for the Hollywood premiere, along with my mom, my siblings, and Nanna’s baby brother Freddy (then a youthful eighty-seven) and his wife, Ruth, who drove down from San Francisco for the weekend.

  The studio flew me out to Los Angeles and hired someone to tend to my hair and makeup—which, let me assure you, is something you really want if you are planning on being in photos with Cameron Diaz. Or, you know, in the same room or zip code or country as Cameron Diaz. The makeup artist was friendly and sweet, and we got to talking, and I asked if I could hire her for the rest of the afternoon to do my mom and my sister and my Nanna. “Sure,” she said. “No problem!”

  She finished Molly first, coaxing my sister’s long, dark brown hair into beachy waves and doing a dramatic smoky eye. Nanna took her all of ten minutes (Nanna has a very definite sense of how she wants her makeup to look). Then the makeup lady turned her gaze toward my mother, who smiled back, bare of face, unplucked of eyebrow, short and gray of hair.

  “Ooh, blank canvas!” she said. “Can I play?”

  “Sure,” said my easygoing mom.

  The makeup artist unlatched an aluminum suitcase full of tools, brushes, pots of powder, palettes of eye shadows. She mixed, then airbrushed foundation onto my mom’s face. She lined her eyes and applied false eyelashes, painted her lips and contoured her cheeks and teased her half inch of hair into a stylishly tousled cap. With her face painted, her hair styled, in a black dress and sheer black hose and, for once, shoes that were neither orthopedic nor sneakers, my mother looked objectively amazing.

  As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones who thought so.

  We rode in the studio-provided limousine to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. We walked the red carpet as flashbulbs flared, exploding in a blinding fusillade, and reporters shouted questions. We watched In Her Shoes. (“It was excellent” was Uncle Freddy’s review. “I didn’t fall asleep once!”) Then it was time for the afterparty, which was held at Spago.

  It was a scene—there’s no other way to say it—straight out of a movie. Waiters circulated with hors d’oeuvres, bits of sushi and miniature cheesesteaks that had been flown in from Philadelphia. Shirley MacLaine held court in a booth in the middle of the restaurant, posing for photographs and talking at length with Nanna. There was music and toasts and excited chatter . . . and then the unbelievable happened: a man asked for my mother’s phone number.

  I don’t remember who he was—only that he was connected to the film in some professional capacity, that he and my mother had been enjoying a pleasant conversation, and that, at some point, he asked if he could get the digits. Startled, my mother looked at him and blurted something to the effect of I am a gay lesbian American woman in a committed relationship! (In my retelling, the guy just shrugged—this being L.A.—and said, “Can I watch?”)

  My mom told my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law told my brother Jake. Jake told Joe. Joe told Molly. Molly told me. By the end of the night, we were all outside, waiting for the Town Car to arrive and laughing at this surprising turn of events. Oh my God. Can you even believe it!?

  All of us were laughing except Nanna. Nanna was not laughing. Nanna was regarding her difficult daughter with a gimlet eye and poking one perfectly manicured index finger into the flesh of my mother’s upper arm. “You see that, Frances? You see? If you’d just wear a little lipstick, you could get right back in the game!”

  • • •

  A few years ago, I did a
fund-raising event for a women’s shelter on Cape Cod. There were four authors there, all of whom had had their books turned into movies—me, Claire Cook, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Alice Hoffman. At the beginning of the afternoon, once we’d all arrived, the organizer announced her plan to show a brief snippet of each film, then have us comment on the experience of seeing our book make its way to the big screen.

  First came a scene from The Deep End of the Ocean. Jackie Mitchard spoke graciously about the unbelievable good fortune of not only having her book chosen as Oprah Winfrey’s inaugural pick, but having it turned into a film with Michelle Pfeiffer. Next, a bit from Must Love Dogs. Claire Cook told a story about writing her first book in her minivan during her daughter’s swim practices, and how included in the process the filmmakers had made her feel, inviting her onto the set, even giving her a director’s chair monogrammed with her name. The scene from In Her Shoes was one with Nanna, so I got to talk about her stint as an extra. Finally, the organizers played the clip from Practical Magic, a scene in which a drunk and rowdy Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock traipse around the kitchen in their nightgowns, dancing and singing “Put de lime in de coconut.” The lights came up. The audience looked expectantly toward the stage. Alice Hoffman leaned into the microphone. Eyes narrowed, she bit off each syllable as she said, “I FUCKIN’ HATED that movie!”

  If more writers were really honest, Alice Hoffman–level honest, there would be, I imagine, a lot less carefully temporized “I wanted it to be the filmmaker’s story to tell” and a lot more “I fucking hated that movie.” I think of some of my favorite books (Shining Through, A Prayer for Owen Meany), and the botches that Hollywood has made of them. I knew—how could I not?—that by signing the rights to In Her Shoes away, there was risk involved, risk that the movie wouldn’t look anything like what I imagined, that it wouldn’t reflect the heart or the soul of the story I’d set out to tell.

  The experience of translating In Her Shoes from book to film, up to the week of its release, had been as close to perfect as any novelist had a right to hope for. Were there quibbles? Of course. I wish Toni Collette had found a way to gain more weight and look more like Rose as I’d imagined her. When Collette was cast I was thrilled, because I knew she had no problem, physically or morally, with playing the big girl. She’d gained weight for her star-making turn in Muriel’s Wedding, which made her the next best thing to a genuinely right-size woman—at least she was willing to be the right size temporarily.

  Unfortunately, she’d just finished making a movie where she was playing a grief-stricken mother. The part had required her to be practically emaciated and, unlike those of us whose natural gifts include the ability to gain weight just by thinking about dessert, she struggled mightily to put on even a handful of pounds for In Her Shoes. For a while, I was getting updates from the West Coast. “She’s gained five pounds!” they’d tell me. Whoopee, I’d think. “She’s gained ten pounds!” they’d say. So have I, I’d quip. Just since this phone call started. Seriously, guys, does she need me to go out there and give her lessons? Somebody tell her about doughnuts! She made it to fifteen pounds. Then things got quiet. Finally I got the call I’d been expecting but dreading: “She’s hit the wall.”

  “What wall?” I asked Susan. “There’s a wall? I’ve never found a wall!”

  But these were minor issues, especially given what could have gone wrong. The filmmakers could have cut out the explicitly Jewish aspects of the story. They didn’t. They could have eliminated the senior-citizen characters, reasoning that the over-seventy set isn’t buying as many tickets as young men. They didn’t do that, either. They didn’t turn Maggie’s dyslexia into something showier, or have her growth emblemized by something more visual than reading. There are men in In Her Shoes, but it’s a story about sisterly love, and also the love of books, of stories, the redemptive power of words. That’s not an easy thing to show in a movie, and the filmmakers pulled it off.

  In Her Shoes, the book, came out in the fall of 2002. The film rights sold fast, the stars aligned, the actors and director and screenwriter signed on, and the movie was ready to go by the fall of 2005 . . . which, in film-land, where projects can advance and retreat toward completion for years, is an almost unheard-of pace. The speed, the ease, the excellence of the director and the screenplay and the cast, not to mention how much fun I’d had with my family, had all conspired to make me believe that this would be, from start to finish, completely positive, an unmitigated joy.

  The first hint I got that the experience might be something other than complete and total bliss was when my brother called to say that the “tracking” indicated that the movie would likely finish in third place at the box office its opening weekend, behind Flightplan and a new Wallace and Gromit cartoon.

  “What’s tracking?”

  Jake patiently explained that tracking involved polling people to ask about their potential interest in seeing a film.

  “What can I do?”

  See if you can rally your readers, Jake advised . . . and I did.

  Then came the reviews. Many were positive. A few were puzzled, or even outright hostile, that a respected director like Curtis Hanson would lower himself to truck with a chick flick. Some of the critics took aim at my book, in ways I still find incomprehensible—I know what “glib” and “masochistic” mean on their own, but was bewildered when the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis described my characters that way. Girlie trash seemed to be the minority opinion . . . and for the most part, despite my get-out-the-viewer campaign on my blog, the filmgoers stayed home.

  I felt guilty and sick to my stomach for the three weeks that the movie was in theaters, weeks during which the producer, with whom I’d become, if not friends, then at least friendly, apparently lost my number. More than anything, though, I was unprepared. I’d readied a suit of armor to wear if the movie turned out to be a disappointment; if it betrayed the spirit of my story; if, instead of a plump dog walker and her stunning sister in search of a connection to their long-lost mom, the film was about a pair of hot stripper-sisters on a road trip to Vegas in search of another hot stripper. I was ready for that. I wasn’t ready for a really good movie that flopped in spite of its excellence.

  Writers get asked the same questions a lot. Where do you get your ideas? is number one with a bullet, What time of day do you write? and What kind of laptop do you use? and Could you introduce me to your agent? are also top ten. “Do you think they’ll make another one of your books into a movie?” is one I hear a lot. My go-to response is a shrug and a smile and a few practiced phrases about how a bunch of them have been optioned and, hey, anything could happen, and with Hollywood, you just never know. A slightly more honest answer is to explain that the filmmakers did such an amazing job with In Her Shoes that I’d be worried that subsequent experiences could only disappoint. More honest than that is explaining that, because the film didn’t make money, nobody in Hollywood is breaking down doors to bring anything else of mine to the big screen. The part I don’t talk about, because I think the very definition of ungracious is to complain about the movie that got made of your book, is how hard it was to live through; how I felt like I personally was disappointing people, that my work was damaging their reputations, that I was tainting their profiles or their legacies with my girlie tales about mothers and daughters and sisters. I am in no rush to live through that specific hell again. Let someone else climb aboard the Tilt-A-Whirl, I think sometimes, let someone else take that ride.

  These days, a movie’s life doesn’t end when it leaves the theater. There are many different ways for viewers to find a film, and the business of criticism has become livelier and more fluid. At the end of 2005, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman put In Her Shoes on his list of the ten best movies of the year, and viewers kept finding the film—on airplane screens, on cable, on DVD.

  Whenever it’s on TV—and it seems to happen a few times a year—I’ll get tweets and Facebook posts from people telling me how they
loved the movie, how they watch it with their sister, how they used the e. e. cummings poem from the book at their own wedding. It was fun and heartbreaking, and there were moments of triumph and joy and moments of disappointment and sorrow. Kind of like life. And, of course, the book is still the book, and the book is still in print, and available for downloading. The movie, and the experience of it, didn’t change a word.

  Appetites

  Years ago, an interviewer asked the writer Grace Paley whether she considered her novels political. Paley, I imagined, gave her interlocutor a long and level stare before answering, “I write about women. So, yes.”

  Nobody’s ever once asked me whether I consider my novels political. And I can see why: they come with pink covers, adorned with shoes and women’s body parts; their tone tends toward the breezy, and they always have happy endings, because I think that real life gives real people enough sad ones. But if someone ever were to ask the question, I would point out that, in my books, it’s fat women getting the guy, getting the great job, getting the big success, getting all of it, sometimes, at once. Are my books political? I give plus-size women happy endings. And, in today’s America, that is a political, even a radical, act.

  Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. I am not even a talk-show host qualified to dispense healthy living and body-image advice. What I am is a size-sixteen-and-mostly-okay-with-it woman who’s read many women’s magazines, studied a number of dress-for-your-shape tutorials, digested several—okay, more than several—self-help books, and also spent her entire adult life living in a larger body. During which time I have dated, gotten married (TWICE!), had babies, participated in sprint-distance triathlons, hundred-mile bike rides and ten-mile runs, wrote a bunch of books, and enjoyed myself . . . a lot.

  Getting here was, as they say on The Bachelor, a journey. I spent most of my twenties on a diet—an entire decade spent measuring out my life, not in coffee spoons but in four-ounce portions of chicken breast and half-cup servings of pasta. I did Weight Watchers, Atkins, and South Beach; low-carb and no-carb. I worked with a private nutritionist for six months, paying a very nice young woman to encourage me to eat frozen grapes instead of cookies and to weigh me once a week. I was part of a clinical trial of one of the drugs that was eventually marketed as part of fen-phen, the successful weight-loss medication eventually yanked off the market after the women who took it started having heart attacks.