By Marion Roach Smith
IT’S NOT TRUE that Meg Waite Clayton wrote the book on sisterhood. In fact, she has published not one but two, and has just sent the third to her editor. “The emotional turf I seem to go back to again and again is sisterhood in the friendship sense,” Meg, the author of the national bestseller The Wednesday Sisters, told me during a recent email exchange.
I met Meg Waite Clayton when I joined She Writes.com, an online community for women writers. Having already read The Wednesday Sisters, Meg’s most recently published novel, I was delighted to see her there, and immediately reached out. We’ve been online talking sisterhood, books, and writing ever since.
Meg, who grew up “all over the place,” was born in Washington D.C., lived in Kansas, Los Angeles, and had several homes in suburban Chicago. “Perhaps as a result,” she says, “home is very much where my family is rather than a geographical place. And yet place is very important to me, and the setting for each of my novels includes place almost as an additional character.”
Meg has four brothers, but no biological sisters. “All my ‘sisters’ are by choice rather than blood,” she says.
“I do remember how devastated I was as a girl to learn that my youngest brother David, was not the sister I was longing for,” she adds. “Fortunately for me, my Dad is a very special guy who was smart enough to break the news to me with my two best friends there in the kitchen with us, and then to poll me on what to name him. I wanted Davy, after Davy Jones of the Monkees.”
Meg’s first novel, The Language of Light, is about a recently widowed young mother and an older woman who befriends her. Her second, The Wednesday Sisters, is about five young mothers whose friendship becomes the base from which each is able to reach for her dreams. It has been the talk of many women’s book-group–sisterhoods in their own right, you might say.
“And the one I’m working on now,” she says of the book that will be published by Ballantine Books next year, “is about four women friends who first meet in law school coming together thirty years later, as one of them is being considered for the Supreme Court. All three are very much about how our ‘sisters’ carry us through.”
The TSP interview with novelist Meg Waite Clayton:
Q: Fill in the blank: You know you’re a sister when…?
A: “You’ll answer the phone anytime, day or night, and be glad she didn’t hesitate to call when she needed you.”
Q: What does the word “sister” mean to you?
A. “Jennifer Belt DuChene and Brenda Rickman Vantrease. They are my friends, rather than my genetic sisters, but they are definitely family. One of the things I love about writing about friendship is it allows me to wrap myself up in the warm blanket of their caring every morning when I sit down to write.”
Q: Are there any pop culture or cultural references that make you think of your siblings or sister-friend(s)?
A. “Oddly, the books To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, perhaps because the friends I found in the characters of Scout and Meg in those books meant so much to me as a young girl who didn’t have sisters with whom to share girl-experiences. I felt like they were my friends, which is a mark of how wonderful their stories are.”
Q: Are there any worst-of/best-of sister tales you want to share?
A. “It’s so hard to describe a personal moment in a way that means half as much to someone not in the moment. I suppose this is why I write novels rather than stories. One of my best-of moments would be a gathering of women law students in a hot tub one cold winter night of my first year at University of Michigan Law School. The details are sworn to secrecy, but I’m seriously considering dedicating my new novel (which, for lack of a better title, is now called “the law school book”) to The Hot Tub Gang.”
Q: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from your “sister” experience?
A. “That giving love always feels good, even when it hurts.”
Meg's desk, from an animated page on her website outlining her tools of the trade.
Q: Please talk about the origins of your book, The Wednesday Sisters, specifically that moment of aha! when you got the idea for it.
A. “The Wednesday Sisters was a title in an empty file for a long time, and about the only thing I knew about it was that it would be about sister-friends rather than blood sisters, because I do know from my friends who have sisters that that’s a complicated relationship I don’t have first-hand experience of. But my aha! moment came as I was journaling one morning, a journal entry that begins, literally, ‘Feeling incredibly well-run-dry today … I don’t have anything … Not a character yet. Not any idea where it will go, or even where it will start.’ And ends, I should say, with five characters and a brief synopsis of the novel.
“The only thing that happened in the interim: A woman with a long blond braid sticking out of her Stanford cap walked across the patio where I was writing. She was gone in seconds (I never even saw her face), but already I had the character of Linda bearing down on me, wondering if I could possibly get her story into words before it was lost.”
Q: Please tell us a little about the research you did for your book, and how it may have heightened—or in any way changed—your original sense of sisterhood.
A. “The Wednesday Sisters is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was a child, so one of the many things I researched was the ways in which women’s lives were different then. I knew things were different, but didn’t know or had forgotten how much different they were. I didn’t know, for example, that women could be fired when they got married, or when they had children. That there were men-only flights, called ‘executive flights.’ That women couldn’t attend many of the country’s best colleges, never mind law schools, medical schools and business schools. That we quite literally could not become astronauts; after a brief ‘experiment’ with women astronauts, it was determined that only men ought to go into space.
“It gave me a much better sense of the history that shaped my opportunities, and therefore who I am. It gave me a much better appreciation for my mother, who came of age before the movement. And it left me with an enhanced sense of responsibility to continue to promote the progress of women in all fields and endeavors, and particularly in politics.”
Q: The Sister Project met you through She Writes, an online site for women writers. Please tell us how you got involved with She Writes, and what support it gives you and other women writers.
A. “I was very lucky to be in the initial invitation list for She Writes, thanks to Marilyn Yalom. Kamy Wycoff, who founded She Writes, was a student of Marilyn’s at Stanford. The moment I heard about it, I joined, and sent out an email to my best writer-pals. I just love having a place I can go to any time I like to connect with other writers.
“When I was just starting to publish, I was fortunate to have the support of other published writers on a now-sadly-defunct site called Readerville.com. SheWrites.com is the first time since Readerville folded that I’ve begun to find that kind of online friendship again. As writers, we are so often re-inventing long-ago discovered wheels. It’s an amazing pleasure to have a site where I can share what I’ve learned on the journey, learn from others, and connect emotionally with others who share an obsessive interest in the written word.”
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More about The Wednesday Sisters:
Five young mothers—Frankie, Linda, Kath, Ally, and Brett—meet in a neighborhood park in the late 1960s, and become friends. One evening, while watching the Miss America Pageant, Linda admits to wanting to write a novel, and the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society is born. While all around them the world begins to change, and the challenges of the times intrude upon, and shape and provoke the members, they write on.
After a friend of mine read this lovely novel, she asked me, “How did the author know so much about my life?” Meg didn’t, of course, but that’s one of the book’s many charms—its understanding of the lives lived by women who truly befriend one another, as well as one of the features of the novel that made it a national bestseller, as well as the 2009 Target Bookmarked selection for summer, a Borders Bookclub pick, and a Top Club pick at bookmovement.com. A great book group book, a perfect day at the beach, a fine gift for your college roommate, and one to clutch to your heart, the book is for sale here. –Marion Roach Smith
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