Surrender, Dorothy (29 page)

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.

Q: What is your sense of who your readers are? What do they want from a novel? Who is your ideal reader?

A:
I’m not really sure who my readers are, although I have a vague sense of them as being in their 30’s and early 40’s, and predominantly female and well-educated. I sense this from the letters I receive and the people who come to my readings. They remind me of my own friends. My ideal reader, of course, is myself. I’ve always said that I try to write the books I wish I could find on the bookstore shelf. This is advice I have given my writing students: write the kind of fiction that you would love to read.

Q: Have you met many of your readers at book signings or through letters and e-mail? What sorts of feedback do you most appreciate?

A:
I’ve met some readers at readings I’ve given and through the letters they’ve written me, but I haven’t really gotten to know any of them. Still, it means a great deal to me when someone tells me how much he or she liked a particular book of mine. I think almost all writers feel this way, though readers sometimes imagine that compliments or comments aren’t of great interest to writers. They are wrong; writers love to hear substantive commentary or praise. It may just be because it feels good to have your ego stroked, but I think it’s also because writing so often delivers delayed gratification, and the sudden pleasure of a reader’s reaction is a welcome burst of immediacy. Unsolicited criticism, while valid, is of course less fun to receive. Mostly I just enjoy getting hard evidence that people who aren’t my mother or my relatives or my friends are actually reading what I’ve written.

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. In the particular emotional realm of
Surrender, Dorothy,
the issue of “growing up” is central. Sara feels that her mother “has not prepared me for being grown up.” Adam is obsessed with losing his identity as a precocious young artist—and the idea of becoming a washed-up, “one-hit wonder” terrifies him. What does “growing up” mean to the novel’s other characters?

2. In what ways has the summer house always offered its inhabitants a sort of month-long respite from these concerns about “growing up”? What else has the summer house represented to Adam, Sara, Maddy, and Peter? After Sara’s death, how does this change?

3.
Surrender, Dorothy
begins with a powerful internal monologue: “Immortality was the vehicle that transported me, every summer, to the squalid little house we called our own. Immortality was the thing I rode in, barely noticing.” Who is presumably speaking here? To what degree might the thoughts expressed here—that “death was not for us, certainly not for me”—be attributed to every character in the novel? Explain.

4. What does Meg Wolitzer achieve by opening the book with such a rueful and elegiac Prologue? How does it color the tone of the rest of the novel?

5. With which characters in
Surrender, Dorothy
do you most closely identify? Why?

6. How would you describe each of the main characters in this story? What are the motivations underlying their choices and actions?

7. What can we learn about Natalie’s character from the fact that she continues to think of her 30-year-old daughter and her friends as “irresponsible teenagers, instead of this crew of careful, faithful friends hurtling in a pack toward the middle of their lives”? If Natalie were to recognize them as adults, how would she then have to adjust her own sense of self?

8. What are the dynamics of Adam and Sara’s friendship? What are the advantages and disadvantages associated with their platonic relationship, one that is “freed from the netting of sexual love, from the calamities that regularly plagued their more predictably coupled-up friends”? How does Natalie seem to feel about their relationship?

9. What does the future hold for Maddy? Do you think the marriage with Peter will last? Do you think she should stay with him? Why or why not?

10. Adam is not so much attracted to Shawn as he is flattered that someone so good-looking wants him. Who suffers more as a result of this affair? To what extent is Shawn’s self-image damaged and/or modified by this relationship? Adam’s?

11.
Surrender, Dorothy
climaxes with an emotional argument between Adam and Natalie. What compels Adam to lash out the way he does? Is his behavior justified? How much of what he says about Natalie is true? And what does his personal attack reveal about his own frustrations?

12. In the middle of this scene, Wolitzer’s omniscient third-person narrator ruminates on the tension underlying her characters’ anger: “Of course it was [a contest], a heated, furious competition, and the theme of it was: Who owned this broken girl now, her mother or her closest friends? There were no rules, no reference book in which to look up the answer.” How does this unspoken “competition” bear out?

13. Describe the nature of the relationship between Maddy and Sara. How does it begin? What roles do competition, jealousy and rivalry play at different points in their friendship? How do these ambivalent feelings color Maddy’s mourning process?

14. What do you think about Peter and Sara’s mutual decision to not tell Maddy about their brief affair? How does this deception contribute to Maddy and Peters estranged marriage after Sara’s death?

15. The ghost of Sara is very much a part of the sexual moment that flickers between Natalie and Peter on the beach. Why is her presence so significant?

16. What effect does Kenji’s translation of Sara’s Japanese diary seem to have on Natalie? Consider her actions and behavior once she hears Sara’s posthumous request to “leave me the hell alone…enough is enough.”

17. Discuss the author’s writing style. How does Wolitzer’s use of dialogue serve to develop and distinguish each of the novel’s characters?

18. Chart the different grieving processes acted out by each of Wolitzer’s characters. By the end of the novel, to what degree has each of them begun to heal?

19. What is the likelihood that the characters in
Surrender, Dorothy
will remain close friends in the future? Without Sara as their glue, what will hold them all together? What would an Epilogue have in store for this group?

20. What are the central themes in
Surrender, Dorothy?
What does Wolitzer seem to be saying about the shifting notions of family in modern life?