The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly

In her latest novel, Wolitzer (The Wife; etc.) takes a close look at the opt out generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood.

When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts.

Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise?

Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women's liberation and equality.

Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters' crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before.

Wolitzer's novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women's (and men's) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purpose. (Mar.)

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Book Description

From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage-and what happens in one community when a group of educated women chooses not to work.

For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen.

But when Amy gets to know a charismatic and successful working mother of three who appears to have fulfilled the classic women's dream of having it all-work, love, family-without having to give anything up, a lifetime's worth of concerns, both practical and existential, opens up. As Amy's obsession with this woman's bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they've made in opting out of their careers-until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.

Written in Meg Wolitzer's inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of these women with candor, wit, and generosity.

About the Author

Meg Wolitzer is the author of seven previous novels, including The Position, The Wife, and Surrender, Dorothy. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1998 and The Pushcart Prize.

Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff

Don't Go Into That Closet!

By Kevin Autrey (Dallas, TX 75218)

See all my reviews

March 9, 2008

First off, I should say that I'm not one of those "I read it cover to cover in one day" kind of readers. I hear people say "I couldn't put it down" when describing a book and wonder what kind of life - obviously devoid of things needing to be DONE - they live.

That said, I read "Tweak" - cover to cover - in one day. I couldn't put it down.

I've had friends addicted to meth. I know that meth's grip is insidious and tenacious - that the predictable and almost-methodical way it destroys everything in a person's life is almost viral in nature. But seeing this "inside look" at how a meth addict perceives his addiction, his drug, his life, and the destruction of everything perceived as valuable - occurring right before his eyes... it's a compelling, haunting narrative.

The most striking thing for me in Nic's story is how at the very bottom - when virtually all is lost - the only thing that remains is the most sober of thoughts: "it's time to get clean". And at a time and in a condition where no hidden reservoirs of strength remain, the fight of a lifetime begins.

Watching Nic's recovery is like watching the heroine in a horror flick walk (usually backwards... go figure) into a closet where the slasher villain is lying in wait to kill her. You recognize the villain and the precariousness of the situation long before Nic does - and you're screaming "don't go in there" - because by this point, you see how far he's come and you're rooting for him to make it and you see the disaster about to happen. It's interesting that Nic's father (who also writes "the parent's perspective" of his son's addiction in Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction) is involved in the production of horror movies, because his story has so many elements of a great horror movie.

There are many heroes in this story aside from Nic - his family and his sponsor (Spencer) chief among them. To open yourself up to participating - emotionally investing - in a life with someone who repeatedly has shredded all sense of normalcy, safety and comfort - that takes a healthy dose of courage, perseverance, and love. Those are the hallmarks of every great hero, and his father, step-mother, mother, sponsor (and his wife) bear all of these hallmarks.

Read this book to reaffirm your faith in the strength of the human spirit - its dogged determination to survive, its desire to thrive and its capacity to forgive. Give this book to the young people in your life to instill an honest, powerful image of how drugs can destroy a life and inflict pain and sadness on everyone connected to that life.

But be prepared to lose a day, because you're not going to want to put it down.

BEAUTIFUL BOY A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction. By David Sheff

Books of The Times


When Addicted Son Hurts, Father Feels His Own Pain

By JANET MASLIN
Published: February 21, 2008



Addiction is a compulsion to do the same thing over and over, despite knowing that the outcome will almost certainly be the same. Addiction memoirs often illustrate this same definition of insanity. They follow the same arc, voice the same helplessness and arrive at the same set of conclusions. Yet the genre itself remains so addictive that readers keep hoping to discover something new.


There are reasons to hope that David Sheff’s "Beautiful Boy” will be exceptional. For one thing, it is one of the rare books selected for sale by Starbucks; somebody thinks it is riveting enough to capture the interest of a caffeinated clientele. For another, its subject is methamphetamine addiction, which exerts such body-snatching effects on those who succumb to it. A cycle of madness and decline prompted by crystal meth goes well beyond the horrors of garden-variety substance abuse.


What’s more, “Beautiful Boy” is heightened by a medical emergency that befell Mr. Sheff as well as the drama surrounding his son Nic Sheff. In the midst of weathering the grief and worry that came with watching Nic deteriorate, the senior Mr. Sheff suffered a brain hemorrhage. Did the son’s addiction and recidivism contribute to the father’s health crisis? In the words of one of the many therapists who drift through this book, often to frustratingly little effect for the Sheffs, “Well, it sure didn’t help.”


This story’s emphasis depends on which Sheff is telling it. Nic has written his own book, “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines” (Ginee Seo Books/Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster). It is being published concurrently with “Beautiful Boy,” though it’s not a Starbucks book selection. Nic’s version is rougher, slangier and more in keeping with his literary tastes, which favor Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Camus and Bukowski.


“Somehow the idea of being this drug-fueled, outsider artist has always been really appealing to me,” Nic writes in “Tweak” while detailing the hard drugs, street life and criminal activity about which his father could only guess.


The older Mr. Sheff approaches the family story more conventionally, with more of the baby boom parent’s standard narcissism. As a father he is inclined to place himself tearfully at the center of Nic’s troubles. “People outside can vilify me,” he writes. “They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But nothing they can say or do is worse than what I do to myself every day. ‘You didn’t cause it.’ I do not believe it.”


So he traces Nic’s unhappiness back to his own divorce — and to his own drug use, which he once regarded as a relatively harmless recreation. Now he is mortified that he ever found Hunter S. Thompson funny and that he tried father-son marijuana smoking as a way of bonding with Nic.


In their overlapping accounts, which share many painful details (Nic stole from both of his trusting, younger half siblings), the trouble escalates with sad inevitability. According to “Beautiful Boy,” the father saw early signs of his son’s problems but was easily assuaged by the boy’s excuses. And there were few useful guidelines that the father could follow. (“Is your child suddenly volunteering to clean up after cocktail parties but forgetting his other chores?” asked one list of warning signs on which the father tried to rely.) By the time the police appeared to take Nic away in handcuffs, the father realized how much he had managed to ignore — and how irreversible Nic’s problems might be.


“When I am alone,” the father writes, “I weep in a way that I have not wept since I was a young boy.” He is driven to this misery by realizing how insidiously meth addiction affects brain chemistry, how rarely it is successfully treated and how maddeningly close Nic comes to recovery, staying clean for long periods before abruptly relapsing. The reportorial side of “Beautiful Boy” explores the likelihood of a cure and comes up with little reason for hope. “There’s never going to be a drug that will make you check the peephole before you answer the door, so if it’s your dealer you won’t answer it,” one researcher tells the father.


The preliminary version of “Beautiful Boy” was a tough 2005 article in The New York Times Magazine, “My Addicted Son.” In expanding it into a book Mr. Sheff added some of the warm, fuzzy dailiness of family life to an otherwise stark portrait (both “Beautiful Boy” and “Tweak” describe rituals like carpooling), and, inevitably, he lost some certitude. The article ended with the hope that Nic might finally have outrun his demons; the book ends on a less resolute but perhaps more realistic note. Among Mr. Sheff’s conclusions: Nic might have benefited from being forced into rehab when his parents were still legally able to compel him to go, if only to keep him substance-free during a critical phase of adolescent development. It also ends with the demonstrably true idea that it is therapeutic both to read and to write stories like the Sheffs’.


On the long, crowded shelf of addiction memoirs “Beautiful Boy” is more notable for sturdiness and sense than for new insight. Even when paired with “Tweak” for a two-faceted look at the same events, it is not unprecedented. (“From Binge to Blackout: A Mother and Son Struggle With Teen Drinking,” about the drastically different perspectives of Chris Volkmann and her son Toren, remains a particularly visceral parent-child cautionary tale.) And on the subjects of parental worry, guilt and mourning, the singer Judy Collins wrote “Sanity & Grace” with exemplary wisdom. Compared with these more specialized books, “Beautiful Boy” has the advantage only when it comes to Starbucks-generated prominence.


“Beautiful Boy” does illustrate how the most clichéd insights into addiction can also be the most accurate. Nothing here is more succinct than what Nic’s little brother says when he tries to explain addiction. “It’s like in cartoons when some character has a devil on one shoulder,” the boy says, “and an angel on the other.”