Good in Bed (57 page)

It's true that being big can give you all kinds of unhappiness, but it doesn't mean that you're destined for a life of misery and/or comic relief. There are stretches of time—minutes, hours, days, weeks— where my body is just something I live in, and I'm not obsessing over it, fretting over it, wishing it was different—because I'm busy writing, or working, or riding my bike. Fat women might be punch lines in the movies or on TV, but in real life, we have jobs, and babies, and lovers and husbands, and not all of us are going to end up size twos.When I set out to write
Good in Bed,
there was no question that Cannie was going to be my size—and there was no question that her reality was going to reflect my reality. I wanted to encompass the unhappiness of living in a plus-size body, but also show that it's not pure, unadulterated, 200-proof misery. I wanted to show the whole scope of things—professional success, rewarding friendships, a loving, if vexing family, a weird little dog, great meals, great adventures, love, and self-acceptance at the end. Whether it fills a void in bookstores, or in readers' personal collections, I can't say, but I know it filled a void for me!

Q: Cannie Shapiro: feminist heroine? Is
Good in Bed
a “message” novel? … And are labels like these reductive?

A:
Lord knows, I've never sat down at my laptop and said, “I'm going to write a political novel that will have women storming the barricades and bring the weight-loss industry to its knees!” I really just wanted to tell a story where I could draw from my own experience, and where there'd be a happy ending (at the time I was writing, I wasn't sure my own life would feature a happy ending, so I wanted to be very sure that my heroine got what I so desperately wanted). And I knew that ending up thin was not going to be part of Cannie's happy ending. Also, I started writing in the midst of the Lewinsky backlash, which
upset me a lot. I mean, here we had issues of perjury, of infidelity, of an employer carrying on with his employees in ways that would have gotten any CEO fired, and what did we as a culture do? Crack fat jokes. Talk about how the president could have at least betrayed his wife with a more stereotypical beauty. Say unbelievably horrible things about Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp's looks, and treat what to me were the central issues as peripheral. It made me crazy … and it made me really sad. Because if you're someone whose body looked more like Monica's—or like Linda Tripp's—the message came through loud and clear—you're not worthy. You're not worthy of respect, you're not worthy of love, you're not even really worthy of lust. The message thing was never intentional, but by the end of the writing, I could see very clearly that the book had one … . and, luckily, it's one I agreed with (I think it would have been entirely dismaying if Cannie's empowerment had resulted not in radical self-acceptance but in white supremacy or something like that).

Q: “Women are going to love this,” Violet says about Cannie's screenplay. The same can be said about
Good in Bed
itself, no question. But what about men? They're of course going to be coming at
Good in Bed
from a completely different perspective. Were any of your early, pre-publication readers guys?

A:
Wait, what!? You mean we're letting men buy this book, too? Okay. Sorry about that … I guess men can buy whatever they want. The truth is that
Good in Bed
had no early readers. I wrote it all by myself, in my spare bedroom, and I wasn't sure whether anyone else would ever be interested. When I finished it, I made four copies and sent three of them off to various New York City agents whose names I'd seen on the dedication pages of books I'd loved. I gave the fourth copy to the man who was then my boyfriend, is now my husband. He was my first reader of all. He'd send me emails or call me through the day and tell me that he loved it, and I always asked him what page he was on, because I wanted to be able to pinpoint the exact moment when he decided that I was a) nuts, or b) pathetic, and that he didn't want to date me anymore!

I think the second guy who read it was my brother Jake. That was pretty embarrassing. I wanted to give him a redacted version, with all of the sex scenes crossed out. But I think he handled it okay. I just kept telling him, “It's fiction! Don't worry! I made this stuff up!” So at this point, I'm not sure how men who aren't related to me or planning to marry me will react to the book.

I hope it will give them a look at a life they probably can't imagine. Men in our culture are still judged largely by their actions, their successes, and their incomes, whereas women are still judged by their bodies, their faces, and their failure or success to conform to what the world says is “beautiful,” and I think men are constantly surprised and horrified at how hard life can be for women who don't fit those definitions.

Q: Maxi, Samantha, Cannie's mother, and Tanya are all wonderfully developed, totally believable characters. (I also love the little bit of Violet we get to see.) Are they based on any real-life models? A:
I've known a lot of very interesting, smart, funny women through the years—and also some not so great ones—and I think there are bits and pieces of real-life people in all of the women in
Good in Bed
. Samantha is based somewhat on my friend Susan, and Cannie's mother, Ann, is pretty darn close to my mom, Fran. As for Violet, the Incredible Cursing Agent, I will admit that she looks a little bit like my own agent, the divine and beneficent Joanna Pulcini, but I've never heard Joanna say anything stronger than “darn.” And readers should know that the result of putting real people (even bits and pieces of them) into your novels is that folks can get very weird. My family, for instance. “OH, NO!” they'll say at the top of their lungs, “IT'S JEN! DON'T TALK TO HER! SHE'LL PUT YOU IN A BOOK!”

Q: How did your work at
The Philadelphia Inquirer
feed your work as a novelist, and vice versa?

A:
My work at the
Inquirer,
and as a journalist in general, gave me a way of seeing the world that not a lot of people get. It let me stand right at the edges of tragedies, comedies, and really boring school board
meetings, and it let me meet people I'd never come into contact with otherwise, which is about the best day job a novelist could ask for. It gave me unlimited fodder. For example, the dreadful April is an amalgam of every horrid publicist I had to deal with in my quest to interview various movie stars.

Q: Who would make the perfect Cannie Shapiro in a movie adaptation?

A:
To tell you the truth, I can't think of a single actress who'd be just right—which to me is one of the tragedies of Hollywood. As of this writing, Janeane Garofalo's been on another one of her cigarettes-and-black-coffee diets, so she's out. Kate Winslet's been dieting too—she gave a very rueful interview where she said she hated herself for doing it, but she can't get parts otherwise—so forget her. I think Drew Barrymore has the right spirit and spunk—and a beautiful smile to boot, and she's almost the right age—but she's way smaller than the Cannie I had in mind. I'm willing to sell out in all sorts of ways, but if
Good in Bed
ever became a movie—and it's not looking likely, because of the size thing—I'd really try to insist that the actress who played her be genuinely plus-size, not just Renee Zellweger with twelve extra pounds, and certainly not Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit!

And even though I've been discouraged, and disgusted, by some of the responses I've gotten from Hollywood types (the “only one bankable fat actress” line that the slimeball agent gives Cannie is actually a verbatim quote that a similarly slimeball agent gave me about an early draft of
Good in Bed
), I still have hopes that
Good in Bed
will be a movie or a TV show—mostly because I believe that at the same time Hollywood is telling me that there aren't any plus-size actresses, I have a sneaking feeling they're telling plus-size actresses that they should lose weight because there isn't any work!

Q: Fill in the blanks: 1. I never miss a new novel by [blank]. 2. I've lost count of how many times I've reread [blank], by my favorite author, [blank]. 3. A fitting soundtrack in readers' heads as they read
Good in Bed
might include music by [blank].

A:
Oh, you can't expect me to play favorites … it's like asking a mother to choose between her children! But here goes: I never miss a new novel by Susan Isaacs, Andrew Vachss, John Irving, and Nicholas Christopher. I've lost track of how many times I've reread
Pearl
by Tabitha King, and
A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving. A fitting soundtrack in readers' heads as they read
Good in Bed
might include music by Liz Phair (“Exile in Guyville” and “Whitechocolatespaceegg”), Emmylou Harris, Dar Williams, Richard Thompson, plenty of Ani DiFranco and, of course, Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen.

Q: Tell us about the novel's epigraphs. Philip Larkin and Liz Phair make for an intriguing pair.

A:
When I was in college, I took a class in Modern British Poets. Larkin was my absolute favorite, because it was the first time I came across poetry that could make you laugh out loud … and then, five minutes later, realize that you'd just read something heartbreaking. The poem that Cannie and her siblings quote—the one that starts “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they do not mean to, but they do” is a perfect example. On the one hand, you're shocked and titillated to hear a curse word in a “serious” poem, and you're nodding your head and laughing at the truth of it, because everyone who has parents knows that they do fuck you up, and no, they don't mean to do it, but yup, that's what happens, and the way the nursery-rhyme rhythm works its way into your head, like a jingle for bubble bath. But when you get to the end—the image of misery that “deepens like the coastal shelf,” and that bitter, bitter warning that concludes the poem—it's like feeling a knife twist in your heart, after you've been rendered defenseless by your laughter. That was the effect I was looking for with my own writing—something that was funny, but could also twist the knife.

Liz Phair is one of my heroes. I think her writing is so brilliant and brave, and I was listening to her song “Polyester Bride” almost constantly during those early months of writing
Good in Bed
… but “Polyester Bride” seemed too obvious, and the line about love being “nothing, nothing, nothing like they say” really fit both the tone and the plot of
Good in Bed
.

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

A:
My ideal reader is any woman who's ever felt like she needed to get undressed in the dark, any woman who's ever felt miserable about the size of her hips or the shape of her face or the texture of her hair … which is to say, lamentably, every single woman in America, and probably beyond, judging from the reception
Good in Bed
has gotten abroad.

I think what people want from a novel is entertainment, first and foremost—characters they can hold on to, characters they want to spend time with … and somewhere in there, a message that reinforces the truths that they already know. The readers who come to
Good in Bed
are going to be a lot like Cannie herself—smart, a little cynical, fed up with a culture that tells them they're not good enough, and willing to open their hearts to the possibilities of love—even if only in fiction.

1. With
Good in Bed,
Jennifer Weiner has garnered a lot of praise for her alternately hilarious and poignant dialogue, and also for her pitch-perfect ear in rendering the conversational rhythms of Cannie's first-person narrative voice. Looking back through the novel, what is it about the dialogue that works so well? In what ways does it serve to subtly develop each character's motivations and idiosyncrasies?

2. Discuss, in connection with the previous question, the specific tone and quality of Cannie Shapiro's voice. What techniques does Weiner employ to make Cannie's musings and descriptions come across so intimately? What sets the author's style apart from that of other contemporary authors? To which novelists would you say Weiner bears the closest comparison?

3. Cannie Shapiro is, among other things, a woman struggling to emerge from the shadow cast by her father's emotional abuse and aggressive abandonment. How successful is she, finally, in doing so?

4. In what ways do we see the painful legacy of Cannie's early relationship with her father (whom she dubs “the Original Abandoner”) at work in the action of this novel, affecting the tenor of Cannie's relationships, choices, and/or motivations? To what degree can we view Bruce as a stand-in for her father?

5. “Maybe,” Bruce writes in his notorious Moxie debut, “it was the way I'd absorbed society's expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars… . C. couldn't make herself invisible. But I know that if it were possible—if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant.” With these lines, from the novel's opening chapter, Weiner begins to lay the framework for the larger themes that temper, texture, and lend weight to the comedy and romance propelling Cannie's story. What are these themes and issues, and how are they developed throughout the rest of the novel?

6. The real-life specter of the Lewinsky-Clinton debacle looms in the background of this novel's fictional landscape. How does the Monica Lewinsky scandal—and, more to the point, the wither-ingly cruel and petty reception that accompanied Lewinsky's emergence in media stories—speak to the novel's portraits of male-female relationships in a body-obsessed culture?