The Guy Not Taken (33 page)

The Wedding Bed
(2006)

I wrote this piece recently, to revisit the fictionalized version of my family and complete Josie’s arc. These days, the books about single girls in the city that are dismissively called chick lit get a lot of flak for the Cinderella fantasy they allegedly embrace—the way their heroines muddle through the pain and poundage of single-girl existence, wisecracking all the way, until Prince Charming appears and Takes Them Away from All of That. I’ve written two novels that end with wedding bells. But does a marriage, and a man willing to proffer a ring and promise forever, necessarily equal happily-ever-after? I think Josie would beg to differ. I know for sure that Nicki would.

Swim
(1989/2006)

When I was in college, I spent a summer working in New York City. One of the free weekly newspapers there had a fiction contest, which I entered and won, with a short story called
Swim,
about a young woman who graduates from college with a degree in English and few marketable skills. She sets up shop ghostwriting personal ads, and one of her clients falls for her. (It was an enormously comforting fantasy, one that I could embroider endlessly back when I was a soon-to-be college graduate with a degree in English and few marketable skills.)

“Find me that story!” my agent demanded.

I tried . . . but I couldn’t.

My version of record-keeping involves bundling piles of documents—rough drafts, tax returns, photographs, diplomas—into big plastic shopping bags, which get stacked on my third floor, just down the hall from the guest bedroom. I went through all of my bags and couldn’t find
Swim.
Nor could I remember which free weekly in New York had printed it. All I remembered were the bare bones of the story: The girl in New York. The classified ads. The title.

I started from scratch this past year, over a long weekend in Los Angeles in my favorite hotel in the world, the Regent Beverly Wilshire (or, as I—and Laura San Giacomo in
Pretty Woman
—call it,
the Reg Bev Wil). I set it in L.A., because that’s where I was, and gave it a few modern updates (online dating as opposed to ads in the
Village Voice
).
Swim
—or, as I’ve been calling it,
Swim 2.0
—is the result.

Meanwhile, if anyone reading this was living in Manhattan in 1990 and remembers the original story, or even who printed it, I’d love to know.

Buyer’s Market
(2005)

Part of promoting a book is sitting for interviews—and, maybe because writing is such a distressingly boring thing to watch, a lot of times the interviewers want to visit the writer’s house. “We want to see you in your element,” they say, in a way that always makes me feel like some kind of expensive but useless, exotic, flightless bird.

You try to be a good sport and take everything that gets written with a sense of humor, but it’s hard not to feel a little invaded. (Because, really, what woman wants to be judged on the contents of her refrigerator or whether her bedroom’s sufficiently clean?)

I once had a reporter sneak into my closet, find clothing with price tags still attached, and report on the prices in her story. Sadly, she was so pleased with her investigatory coup that she failed to note that the outfits were borrowed for a photo shoot. To this day, I don’t think I’ve managed to convince my mother that I do not, and never would, actually purchase a $2,100 sweater. And the scene where Toby picks up Jess’s mother’s photograph and sneers, “She’s not that good-looking . . . I thought it was a picture of
you
?” True story—and too good not to use.

This is a love story, but it’s a love story about both a person and a place, about dreams and memories, and about what you get when you let them go.

Good Men
(1997)

I spent a lot of time in my twenties thinking about love and marriage and what gives two people the impetus and the courage to decide
to link hands and jump off the cliff (I had a pretty jaundiced view of the institution. See Story Note One).

Good Men
has the same characters as my first novel,
Good in Bed
—Bruce, who is sweet but a bit of a slacker, and Cannie, who’s funny but kind of a control freak, and Nifkin, the small, quivery, spotted rat terrier, who is, of course, perfect in every way. This story was actually written before the novel, in my spare bedroom of my Philadelphia apartment, on the Mac Classic I’d had since college, at night, when I was still working full-time as a reporter for
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
It occasioned a lovely rejection letter from
The Atlantic.
(“Dear Ms. Weiner, While you are obviously a writer, this isn’t quite right for us.”)

The Guy Not Taken
(2005)

A few years back, I was on
www.weddingchannel.com
buying a wedding present when I happened to accidentally type in the names of every guy I’ve ever dated. (And don’t look at me like I’m a freak . . . you know you’ve done it, too.)

I typed in the names, and lo and behold, one of them popped up, with a wedding date and a registry and all.

So, of course, I emailed his registry to my best friend, and we spent a giddy evening making fun of his and his betrothed’s crappy taste in china, and that was pretty much the end of it.

Except it wasn’t.

A long time ago, I read a Stephen King short story called
Word Processor of the Gods,
in which a man inherits a computer from his dead nephew and ends up using the Delete key in ways the good folks at Wang had never imagined. I started thinking about the magical possibilities of online registries. What if you could make your own additions and deletions? What if you could, say, erase the bride’s name and type in your own? What if you hit Enter and woke up the next morning in bed with your ex?

And so a story was born.

This piece took a few funny detours along the way to publication.
When I first described Marlie registering her ex for a Hitachi Magic Wand, my agent, who’s my first reader, sent the story back with a note reading: “What is this?”

Okay,
I thought. She went to Catholic school from junior high through graduate school. Of course she’s not going to recognize a name-brand vibrator. I kept it in, and sent the story to my editor in New York, who sent it back with the exact same note in the margin . . . at which point I realized that I am a pervert.

This story was originally published by
Glamour
in the fall of 2005 and was optioned by DreamWorks shortly thereafter. A screenplay’s in the works, and even though it’s early, I understand that in the movie Marlie will not be a mother, as the concept of a mother semi-willingly wishing away her child has been deemed too disturbing for the film-going public. As my real-life child would say, “In-ter-est-ing.”

The Mother’s Hour
(2006)

A lot of what I’ve written has an element of answering the question “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” This isn’t necessarily because, as one critic memorably suggested, I am a masochist (at least I hope I’m not). It’s just that I think the most interesting dramatic possibilities come in moments of crisis. So I put my protagonists through the wringer by asking: What if your ex-boyfriend writes a column about your sex life? What if your sister steals your boyfriend? What if your baby dies?

One of my current preoccupations as a mother is the standards parents hold themselves up to, the way mothers judge themselves and one another, the debate between working versus stay-at-home mothers, those who stay in the city versus those who go to the suburbs, those who hire nannies versus those who opt for day care . . . and on and on and round and round it goes. This story touches on some of the tension implicit in the choices, and the sacrifices, that modern mothers make, and takes up my old favorite question, slightly tweaked—“What’s the worst thing you didn’t do?” I think this is as close to a horror story as I’ll ever come.

(Interesting side note: This was almost published by a women’s magazine that was fine with everything except the ending. Would I consider changing it, the editor wanted to know. I decided not to. I think, given the circumstances, and the choices the characters made, it ends about the way it should).

Tour of Duty
(1992)

My mother actually told me that my father was leaving on our way back from my interview at Princeton, at the Vince Lombardi service area on the New Jersey Turnpike. (“Well, where was I supposed to tell you?” she demanded, when I pointed out that this was perhaps not the most appropriate venue for such a revelation.)

This was the first story I ever got paid for.
Seventeen
published it in the fall of 1992. They paid me $1,000, which was an unbelievable amount of money, especially given that I was earning $16,000 a year at the time. I used the check to buy a couch from Ikea.

Oranges from Florida
(1994)

My brother Joe used to fall asleep listening to talk radio, and that’s where the idea for this one came from. It was also an interesting challenge to write from the perspective of a man and view the end of a marriage through his eyes.

Redbook
published the story in 1994 (they retitled it
Someone to Trust,
for reasons I never understood).

Dora on the Beach
(1998)

I wrote an early draft of this story years before my second novel,
In Her Shoes,
but I think it contains the germ of the idea that formed part of that story: a girl with a surplus of chutzpah and a lack of funds heading to a resort community and, essentially, kidnapping a grandmother so she’ll have a place to stay.

It almost got published twice, but was turned down by two different
magazines. (I think the main character wound up being too old, and the teenage girls too unlikable. Plus, the whole abortion thing might have been a little too much.) Like
In Her Shoes,
it’s also a sister story, a story about secrets and the redemptive possibilities of love.

A C
ONVERSATION WITH
J
ENNIFER
W
EINER

Q: Some of these stories were published before, and some were stories you’d written years ago and revised. Have you always been a prolific writer? Before your blog, did you keep journals of your writing? Were you always interested in fiction, even before you started being published?

A:
I credit ten years of journalism for what probably looks, to outsiders, like an impressive work ethic. When you’re working at a small newspaper, writing three or four stories a day, you get used to being productive. I love writing—I always have—and I’ve been writing fiction almost as long as I’ve been reading it. So of course I have the obligatory shoeboxes full of unpublished short stories, articles, letters to editors, and fragments of novels. Not too many journals, though. I shared a bedroom with my sister Molly for seventeen years, and no matter where I hid my diaries she’d find them and use them to humiliate me.

Q: The family in “Just Desserts” bears very close resemblance to your own family. Do the characters—Nicki, Jon, and the mother—share traits with your family members? And if so, do they mind making these types of cameos in your work?

A:
I will offer my mother’s standard disclaimer—the one she typically recites when anyone asks about my work in general, and the mother in
Good in Bed
specifically—“it’s fiction!”

The truth is, no matter how autobiographical something is at the beginning of its life, by the time it’s been through four or five rounds of revisions, it usually isn’t my real life, or my real family, anymore. Fiction offers many more possibilities than autobiography does. Plus, I’ve got to save something for the memoirs!

Last answer: I am lucky enough to be related to a bunch of very funny and tolerant people who understand the reality of living with a writer. If there’s something funny, or interesting, or humiliating, or tragic, and the writer finds out about it, chances are, it’s going to show up in some form, some day, somewhere. All they ask is a chance to read my work ahead of time, which I’m happy to give them, and a chance to join me on vacations, book parties and at movie premieres (ditto).

Q: What inspired you to write “Good Men” from Bruce Guberman’s point of view? Do you have plans to revisit any of the other characters from
Good in Bed
or your other books?

A:
Believe it or not, “Good Men” was actually written before
Good in Bed
was even a gleam in my eye. I had those two characters in mind: a guy with a good heart, who’s a bit of a slacker, and a girl with a sharp tongue who’s a bit of a control freak, and the trouble they could get into. “Good Men” was their first outing (driven in part, I will confess, by my eternal fascination with stoner humor).

And yes, there is one other character from
Good in Bed
who will get a voice of his/her own in
Certain Girls,
the book that I’m working on now . . . but I think I’ll keep you in suspense as to which one (Tanya fans can start lobbying now!)

Q: Absent fathers loom large in most of these stories. Why are non-traditional families such rich fodder for your work? Do you agree with Tolstoy that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?

A:
I do agree with Tolstoy, but I also think that happy families (and, if you’re part of one, forgive me) . . . just aren’t that interesting. At least, not from a fictional standpoint. People who are suffering, or in crisis, or trying to make sense of their lives are much more fun for me
to play around with than, say, women who are in love, happy with their children, their choices, and the size of their hips. I’m not sure a character like that would yield an interesting chapter, let alone an interesting short story or novel.