Episode 17: Jennifer Weiner
On Pushing Back Against De-Jewified Last Names, “Women’s Fiction,” and Activism in the Face of Despair
Jennifer Weiner’s Five Books:
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Dark Tower by Stephen King
Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley
The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits by Jennifer Weiner
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
Cassie and Zoe Grossberg were thrust into the spotlight as The Griffin Sisters, a pop duo that defined the aughts. Together, they skyrocketed to the top, gracing MTV, SNL, and the cover of Rolling Stone. Cassie, a musical genius who never felt at ease in her own skin, preferred to stay in the shadows. Zoe, full of confidence and craving fame, lived for the stage. But fame has a price, and after one turbulent year, the band abruptly broke up.
Now, two decades later, the sisters couldn’t be further apart. Zoe is a suburban mom warning her daughter Cherry to avoid the spotlight, while Cassie has disappeared from public life entirely. But when Cherry begins unearthing the truth behind their breathtaking rise and infamous breakup, long-buried secrets surface, forcing all three women to confront their choices, their desires, and their complicated bonds.
Jennifer Weiner’s books have spent over five years on the New York Times bestseller list, including several times at #1. She has written over a dozen works of fiction and the nonfiction collection Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing (2016), which was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Opinion section in addition to numerous other publications. Her novel In Her Shoes was turned into a movie starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine. Jennifer graduated from Princeton University in 1991 and lives in Philadelphia with her family.
In our conversation, we’ll discuss Jennifer’s feminism, raising daughters, and why she has never felt more Jewish than right now.
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The Five Books: Jennifer Weiner on Pushing Back Against De-Jewified Last Names, “Women’s Fiction,” and Activism in the Face of Despair
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to the Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Jennifer Weiner about her new novel about pop star sisters in the early aughts called The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits.Jennifer Weiner:
Where this book came from actually was, my husband and I were on vacation in Alaska and I started to think about a woman who I could picture her in like this parka with this bucket full of cleaning supplies. And then I started to think about, you know, maybe there's a sister and maybe there was fame and maybe things went wrong and that was the Griffin sisters.Jennifer Weiner's books have spent over five years on the New York Times bestseller list, including several times at number one. They have consistently earned critical raves, which recognize her significance in the literary world and contemporary culture. Her novel, In Her Shoes, was made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, and Shirley MacLaine.
In this episode, we got to talk about the many Jewish characters in her books and the reception to their overtly Jewish names.
In the music industry, in Hollywood, there is a long tradition of people with Jewish names picking names that are less specifically Jewish, right? I wanted to sort of call that out a little bit. Like, why couldn't they be the Grossberg sisters? And also, my god, the name of it all. Like, when your name is Jennifer Weiner and you've just heard every single joke that there is to hear.
We also talk about Jennifer's activism, raising daughters, and why she has never felt more Jewish than right now.
It was a reminder also that however we might see ourselves, however we might call ourselves, “I'm an American, I'm a novelist, I'm a Philadelphian, I'm a feminist, I'm a mother,” to the world, to a lot of the world, like I'm a Jew and that's what they see before they see anything else, for better or for worse.
All that and more, coming up next.
Welcome to the Five Books, Jennifer. Thank you so much for being here. I'm delighted to have you here.
Thank you for having me. This is lots of fun.
You have millions of books in print. They are a testament to your ability to craft characters that are, and stories that are specific and universally relatable. You also are an activist and you've used your platform to advocate for women, to challenge societal standards for how women's stories are marketed and perceived and valued. So I just am delighted to have you here. I want to talk to you about all of that. And I'm, also want to talk to you about your newest book, The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits, which I inhaled like in 24 hours.
Aw, thank you!
So maybe just tell us why this book, a little bit about what it's about and why you decided to write this book.
So I think the great themes of my work, if I can sound really self-important for a minute, I'm interested in women's stories. I'm interested in women's relationships. I'm interested in sisters. I'm interested in mothers and daughters. I'm interested in bodies and how women inhabit theirs. And I'm interested in pop music of the early aughts as somebody who lived through that time and then had the, the reckoning I think that all of us had during the Free Britney moment and the publication of Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me. Lots to think about.
And where this book came from actually was, my husband and I were on vacation in Alaska, which is beautiful. And if you haven't been, you should go. It's gorgeous. And so get there before the ice all melts. And we were doing a lot of, we were talking to people and we were listening to people, we were maybe eavesdropping a little bit and noticing that a lot of the people that we met or came in contact with seemed to have left some previous version of themselves behind when they came to Alaska. And I started to think about a woman who, I could picture her in like this parka with this bucket full of cleaning supplies who was running Airbnbs and had everything set up in a way that nobody ever saw her. And I started to think about, like, okay, who is this woman? What happened to her? What brought her to this place? What is she running from? And then I started to think about, you know, maybe there's a sister and maybe there was fame and maybe things went wrong and maybe there was a band and that was the Griffin sisters.
That's great. The way you write about music with so much intensity, you could feel the energy and the specifics of the music. I just kept feeling like I wanted to pull up their music on Spotify, like, I want to hear this song.
Well, amazingly, my publisher found a band, found a sister band that actually wrote and recorded one of the songs that I had lyrics for in the book. So you're going to be able to listen to one of the songs, which is kind of —
That's so exciting!
I know. The whole thing's amazing. I’m so thrilled.
Had you pictured music in your head as you were writing it?
You know, I so I listen to a lot of Kelly Clarkson because I think that she writes those pop anthems where it's like, you know, the prechorus, the chorus, the verse where it's sort of you start off singing and then you're kind of shouting and then you're singing like, she nails it, like she has it down to a science. And so I listened to, like, “Since You've Been Gone.” And then I would sort of like play with the melody and then I would write some lyrics and then I would just sort of think about you know, how it sounded in my head. I mean, I wish I had more musical talent. I wish it was something that came more easily to me. So I just kind of did the best I could.
That’s exciting.
Book One: A Jewish Book from Childhood: All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor.
So All-of-a-Kind Family, I don't know if, they'd be considered probably middle grade books right now. Like I probably found them when I was like eight or nine years old. They were actually in my synagogue library. And so it's the story of this family and they're in a tenement in New York and it's sort of like the turn of the century and there's five girls and it's just the story of their lives. Like, you know, they go shopping with their mother or they get ready for Shabbat or there's a talent contest at school or one of the kids gets lost. And it's all, you know, I'd read like Little House on the Prairie, I've read Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew. So it was very kind of just like a family doing family stuff, except they were Jewish.
Like there was Shabbat, there was Passover, there was Hanukkah, there was Yiddish and Jewish tradition. And I loved the way that it was just part of the story. It wasn't like, here is a Jewish text to learn about Jewishness. It was just like, here's a great story with these characters that you're gonna love. And by the way, they're Jewish. I loved those books. I really, really loved them. I pressed them on both of my daughters. I have no idea if they ever read them, but there's many copies in my house.
Before we get to your daughters’ part of it, I'm just curious if you could tell us a little bit about what you were like as a kid and what your Jewish life was like as a kid. I've read about you talking about yourself as a kid, and I love how you describe yourself. I feel like it gives everybody a little bit of, you know, that feeling of like, I was like that too.
Well, if there's any really lonely, nerdy bookworms out there listening to this, I can tell you there's hope. It gets better. So what I was like as a kid, the shorthand was I had a giant vocabulary and no friends. I read constantly. I loved books. I loved writing. I was always writing something, I was always reading something, but I had no social skills. I did not know how to talk to kids my own age. And then because it was the 1970s, what they did with smart kids sometimes was they would skip you a grade. So like, I went from second grade to fourth grade. So there could be a whole new set of kids to not be my friends. It was rough. It really was rough, but I had books and they, books got me through it.
And what was your Jewish life like as a kid?
So I was in a small town in Connecticut where there was not a big Jewish population. So the Farmington Valley Jewish Congregation, sort of all of the Jewish people in all of these surrounding towns would come together. Hebrew school twice a week, I was bat mitzvah’d, I was confirmed, I went to Israel, we did Shabbat in my house, we lit the candles. I really, really liked it. I mean, as a kid, I think that I sort of looked at Christmas and Christmas trees with a little bit of envy, but mostly I enjoyed being Jewish. I think it was something that made me different, but it was maybe something that made me special too.
I was thinking when I saw that you chose this book, I've read what you've written about your mom and that beautiful essay you published about her death in the New York Times. And the way that you describe her as being sort of preternaturally unflappable and happy. I just kind of wondered, it reminded me of the mama character in the All-of-a-Kind Family stories. I wondered if that's —
Yes, right! And there was a very academic book that was written about the author of All-of-a-Kind Family and the true family that the story was based on. And it was terrible. I mean, it turned out that the mother was sort of struggling with what was obviously not diagnosed back then as like postpartum depression. She'd had like a number of miscarriages that she kind of never got over. There wasn't great birth control back then, so you would just have baby after baby after baby. And in the story, it's portrayed as this very happy, jolly thing, like, look at this big family, look at all these kids, isn't this wonderful? And turns out it was a lot less wonderful. I think about that sometimes with my own mom, with like, I'm one of four kids, and my mom was very happy and unflappable. But I wonder a lot, especially after I became a mom myself, about like, what her interior life was like, you know, what did it really feel like to have this, like, brood where you're so outnumbered.
You talk about your daughters and having pressed this book upon them. I think I've read your daughters go to Jewish summer camp. So I'm just curious like kind of what your Jewish life looks like or why you sent them to Jewish summer camp even.
Oh my god. My daughter Lucy has never gotten over her summers at Eden Village. She's like, you sent me to hippie Jewish farm camp! And I think that one of her biggest objections was the food, of course, because it was kosher and mostly vegetarian. And I just remember one Shabbat they had posted on their Facebook page, like, look at this delicious vegetarian shepherd's pie we're all enjoying. And I'm like, I can hear Lucy screaming, like over the 200 miles between Philadelphia and this camp, like she is not happy about that vegetarian shepherd's pie. But we belonged to a synagogue even before I had kids, my kids went to Hebrew school, my daughters were both bat mitzvah’d, I had a COVID bat mitzvah. You know, Jewish values are such a large part of my life, and I think by extension, a large part of my work. Like I have a lot of Jewish characters, there's a lot of Jewishness in my stories. And I want my daughters to know who they are. I want them to know where they come from. I want them to be proud about it.
Book Two: A Jewish Book from Adulthood — Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth.
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, which was written when Philip Roth was a very young man, is sort of the stereotypical, you know, angry Jewish young man. And I think that the part that everybody remembers, that everybody who read that book was sort of scarred by, was the sex scene involving liver, which if you know, you know. If you don't know, maybe you don't want to. But, you know, it's sort of all of the stereotypes of sort of, here's this, like, overbearing Jewish mother who's, like, always up in the character's business and the shiksa goddess who is unobtainable and beautiful. You know, it's interesting because I was also reading like Fran Lebowitz and Nora Ephron, who both wrote with a lot of Jewish voice, I feel, and Jewish humor and Jewish characters. And I think that Portnoy's Complaint, it was something that I was just like, well, is this what it means to be a Jewish writer? Is this what it means to have Jewish characters? And I think that I carried that with me maybe until I started reading the Nora Ephrons and the Fran Leibowitzs and the Meg Wolitzers and the, and Judy Blume even, you know, who wrote Jewish characters as well. But I think that like for a lot of people, like Portnoy's Complaint is like, it's the Liberty Bell, it's the Statue of Liberty, it's the monument of like contemporary Jewish fiction and everything that followed was written either mimicking it or responding to it or echoing it or deconstructing it or in conversation with it in some way. So that is why I chose Portnoy’s Complaint.
That makes sense. As you say, it's like the original American pie scene.
Yes, yes, yes. Although, God, I just wish it was pie and not liver. So horrifying.
But, you know, he does, he writes about sex and about shame. I see that the thread of like writing about shame also, certainly even in this book and Cassie's character. But there also is a lot of misogyny. There's an attempted rape in there. So I was curious about that. I read in— a piece you wrote in your Substack and you noted that Carrie Bradshaw on an episode of Sex and the City had belittled an Erica Jong novel as irrelevant. And you called out the way that male authors don't get, and I quote, you “grouped and boxed and bundled into the same trends that women do.” And you reference John Cheever and Philip Roth as authors who wouldn't get that treatment. So I'm curious, given all of the shifts since then, do you think that Philip Roth is timeless? Do you feel like this book is a timeless book?
I would say that Portnoy's Complaint is more of a time capsule, right? I think that like that is the book you would look at to sort of see like what were all of the stereotypes really, what was sort of this foundational notion of what it is to be Jewish in America that we were either getting away from or moving back toward or whatever it was. But I mean, it's interesting like Philip Roth is a great American novelist. I think that he is celebrated and lauded and honored and not seen as a writer of a moment the way that Erica Jong is, was, you know. And I wonder if 100 years from now if we're not all brains in jars by then, if there's still college and people are still being English majors, if people are going to look back and see things differently, and maybe Fear of Flying was the real essential text, and maybe Portnoy's Complaint was just juvenilia that Philip Roth had to get out of his system before he could write The Plot Against America.
Yeah, and as you've pointed out, so much of the voices who have evaluated where those places are in the culture have been male voices doing the evaluating.
That is correct. That is correct.
I wanted to ask you about this question of categorization. You've written a lot about it and you kind of pulled the culture along behind you. And you, you were the voice who saying like, who are the, which are the books who are being reviewed and who is doing the reviewing? And then there was the data to back you up that it was so much more heavily men. I'm curious if you find the distinctions between commercial fiction and literary fiction valuable.
Well, I guess I see it two ways. When you write a book, it's like you are producing, hopefully, a piece of art. You're saying something that needs to be said, something that you want to put into the cultural conversation. But you're also creating a commodity that has to be sold in the marketplace. And that means marketing, that means packaging, that means labeling, right?
So I mean, I do understand the necessity for categories. I understand that booksellers need a shorthand for, somebody comes in and they're like, “I want a book to take on vacation. I want a book to take to the beach.” Well, here's a beach book. This is light. This is fun. This is entertaining. With the understanding that there's a lot of room in that category and there are beach books that are, that are leaning in more to the light entertainment part. Then there are beach books that are entertaining but are maybe also dealing with issues or the characters feel a little more nuanced or the situations feel a little more timely, whatever it is. So I mean, I guess the thing that I still push against is the gendered nature of the categorization, the fact that — no one is calling me “chick-lit” anymore. And that is nice. I appreciate that, even though like part of me is like, well, that's just ageism, know, like, because I'm no longer a chick, right? But it's like, I've graduated to this category of women's fiction, right? And I'm like, well, where's the men's fiction? Like, I don't understand, like, why are, why are women like the special, why are, why are men the default and women are this other thing?
And when you ask people, like, even is women's fiction? Like, no one can really tell you. It's like pornography, right? It's like, I know it when I see it. And that is something, I mean, it's, I don't know, I guess it's a little troubling. I wish that it were otherwise, but I do believe that there's been progress and I do believe that there's more awareness now of like, which books are getting reviewed, who's being assigned to review them, how do we talk about them? All of that, I think, you know, hopefully I was able to move the conversation a little bit.
You've written so many books and some of them are mysteries. I mean, you've written middle grade, you've written a memoir, but within your fiction, you know, let's say like Mrs. Everything, I think was taken seriously in a way that some of your earlier novels weren't. Did you set out to write it differently or is it just that it was perceived differently?
I— oh boy, that's a really good question. I mean, I always set out to write my books the same way. Like I'm always like, who are my characters? Where are they at the start of the book? Where are they trying to get like, what is their journey? What is their mission? So that's where everything starts. I mean, Mrs. Everything was definitely my, like, “swing for the fences” book. Like it's historical, it spans this big chunk of time. It was very much a tribute to my mom and my attempt to tell a version of her story. Because like we were talking about before, here's this woman, she's living in a suburb of Connecticut, she's married to a doctor, right? She's won, she's living the dream, right? Except was she? You know, because then my parents got divorced, like had this, like, really gnarly divorce. And ten years after that happens, my mom basically announces to the four of us, like, that she's in love with a woman. And we were just like, WTF Fran, like, when did this happen? Why weren't we told? You know, what does this mean? And were you ever happy with our father? And did you even want four kids? And lots of questions, you know, and lots of thinking about what was expected of women in the 50s, in the 60s, in the 70s, in the 80s. What were you allowed to become? What were the lines that you couldn't cross? And has anything changed? Has it gotten better? Like, is it better for my generation? Is it going to be better for my daughters? So there were some big questions in Mrs. Everything, but I like to think, and perhaps I am flattering myself, but I like to think there's some of that big question stuff happening in all of my books, and they're all sort of telling stories of women who start one place and are trying to get some place else.
Book Three: A book that changed your worldview — the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.
Okay, so The Dark Tower, it is eight books long, it's thousands of pages. There's this character called The Gunslinger, who is his real name's Roland, and he eventually gathers this sort of motley crew of people that he pulls from our dimension, and they are on a quest. And it is this giant, meandering, sort of picaresque, western — it's a quest story, it's a war story, there's romance, there's melodrama, there's everything. And I think it's one of the most immersive reading experiences I ever had. Like it is a masterpiece of world building and of developing these characters who feel so real that when bad things happen to them, you're just devastated. It was and is like a model to me of, like, what's possible to do with words on a page. And as a reader, it's also this, like, world that I go back to and can just lose myself in. Like, I love a standalone, like I love a big, long, juicy novel. I love a short, shocking novel. But there's something really, really amazing about a series that's seven or eight or nine books long. And you get to be with those characters and be in that world. Because sometimes you just don't want to be in this one.
I think many of us feel that right now for sure.
Yes, yes.
I mean, you share with Stephen King, the prolific writer, you, you're constantly writing. Do you see a series? I mean, your children's books are a series.
Yes. Yeah, the middle grade books, The Littlest Bigfoot, that's a series. It was my homage, I guess, to that idea of building a world and having these characters. I mean, boy, I would love to write something like that someday, and I just don't know if I can, honestly. I've tried speculative fiction, fantasy, science fiction-y stuff, and it hasn't gone so well. You know, maybe as I'm getting older and learning new skills and taking more in, maybe someday I'd be able to write that kind of thing. For now, I think I can just admire it as a reader and proselytize about it, like try to get other people reading it too.
Book Four: The Book You're Reading Now — Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley.
Okay so my quick recommendation, I am reading a new book by an author named Colleen Oakley, and the book is called Jane and Dan at the End of the World. I'm about halfway through it. Couple on their anniversary, their 19th anniversary, the marriage is foundering a bit, and they go out for this fancy dinner at this fancy restaurant, and terrorists show up to take it over. Hilarity ensues.
Hilarity ensues, it sounds like it. I’ll have to check it out.
Book Five: The Author's Latest Book — The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits by Jennifer Weiner.
So we meet Cassie and Zoe Grossberg in the late ‘90s after they have won a Battle of the Bands competition in Philadelphia and a record label executive has gotten wind of them and is like, I'm going to make you famous. So the Grossberg sisters become the Griffin sisters and they do indeed, top of the pops. They form a band, they go on tour, they have huge hits, they're on the cover of People magazine, they are the biggest thing going.
And then there is a tragedy that happens, there's a death. The band breaks up. The sisters are estranged. One of them runs away to Alaska. The other one becomes a housewife in Haddonfield, New Jersey. And twenty years later, the daughter of the housewife in Haddonfield, New Jersey wants to be a star herself and goes looking for this aunt she's never met, and trying to find out whatever happened to the Griffin sisters. So that's the story.
There's so much here. Okay, to start with, I want to ask you about the names. And as you said, they start out as the Grossbergs, they become the Griffin Sisters, and I think the record executive says to them, “it just makes breaking through a little easier.” So I wanted to ask you about that, especially as someone, your first novel, your first character, Cani Shapiro, you know, she was named, and very clearly Jewish. So many of your characters are Jewish characters. Talk to me a little bit about names.
So in the music industry, in Hollywood, there is a long and perhaps not very proud tradition of people with Jewish names sort of, I don’t know what the word is, de-Jewifying themselves, like picking names that are less specifically Jewish, right? And so Bob Zimmerman becomes Bob Dylan, there's a bazillion examples out there. I wanted to sort of call that out a little bit. Like, why couldn't they be the Grossberg sisters? I mean, probably because Grossberg's a really hilarious name, maybe a little bit. And also, my God, the name of it all. Like, when your name is Jennifer Weiner and you've just heard every single joke that there is to hear, you know, I wanted to sort of… I don’t know, maybe it's a little tiny Easter egg for me to just call out the ludicrousness of what it is to move through the world with a very Jewish name.
And the fact that you have written so many of your characters with these very Jewish names allows other people with their names in the real world, maybe to move through the world with them a little bit easier too.
Yes, that would be my hope. That's the dream is just to make it the tiniest bit easier for the next generation of Grossbergs and Weiners and whatever else you've got.
Shapiros.
I mean, Shapiros. Yes. I mean, my siblings and I joke about it all the time. We're like, the name builds character. I don't know if that's true, but that's what we tell ourselves.
For sure. So you write about sisters here. It's a paradigm relationship you've revisited many times. Your mother is a sister, you have a sister, you're raising sisters. A lot of the sisters in your books are sisters who are very different from each other. I'm wondering if you have any wisdom for us of what makes the difference between sisters who get along and sisters who are estranged in the way that Zoe and Cassie are.
I think it has to do with how tightly you feel bound by the label that you got, right? I'm sure you've probably seen some of the TikToks, like, “if you were the oldest daughter and you've got this many siblings, how's the marathon training going?” And it's like, oh my God, I am training for, or whatever it is. I think that it's natural. I mean, like, how could you not like, you know, you're the smart one, you're the pretty one, you're the popular one, you're the sporty one, you're the one who takes care of other people, you're the one who needs taking care of, you know? And then you grow up and it's like, okay, are those labels serving me? Like, are the things that I was taught and told about myself as a sister, as a daughter, as a woman, are they helping me or are they holding me back? And I think just understanding that all of us got put into a box. And sometimes I think being able to have a good relationship with a sister is just being able to say, hey, this was my box, that was your box, but maybe we've moved past that now in adulthood.
And I'm sure in your parenting, trying not to assign those boxes in the same way.
Yeah, but man, it's hard. It really is. It's really, really hard. Especially because I think some of the stereotypes are a little bit true. Like I think that oldest daughters set the bar very high for themselves because your parents want you setting a good example for everybody else. And you internalize some of that pressure. And I think that maybe younger children are a little more easygoing because mom was holding on a little less tightly. I mean, certainly that was true with me. When I had my first daughter, I read every book and I did everything and I was really, really stressed about, am I doing this right? Is she going to be okay? Am I doing okay? Is this all going the way that it should? With my second kid, I was like, oh yeah, she's eating dirt, whatever. It'll help her immune system.
For sure.
And that's just how it goes.
I understand. I want to ask you about Cassie, and Cassie's body is almost like a separate character in the novel. You've written a lot about living in a larger body, in characters. Many of those characters that you've portrayed have felt happily living in bigger bodies and at ease in that, and that is not the case for Cassie. I wondered about that choice.
So I think that—when I wrote my first book, I remember there was a lot of anxiety in the publishing world about like, is anybody gonna want to read a book with a fat protagonist? And I remember there was an agent when I was doing my agent search who said like, you know, I like the story and I like the characters, but like I've shown this to, like, a movie person and they're like, no one will make this movie because she's fat. No one wants to see a movie about a lonely fat girl. So maybe what you should do is just give her like fifteen extra pounds like Bridget Jones.
This was the only agent who'd been interested in working with me and she was and is a very big deal. And so I was just like, maybe I should change it. Maybe she knows what she's talking about. Like maybe I'm dooming myself by, like, writing this size 16 woman who starts the book as a size 16, becomes thinner when she's at her absolute lowest point and is miserable and then ends up sort of living happily again in her larger body. And I, looking back, I do not really know where I found the courage to, like, stick to my guns and be like, no, I want this character this size, I want the story this way. Because there's a saying, there's a very famous Toni Morrison quote that says, “if there's a book that you need to read, and it's not on the shelf, it is your job to write it.” And that was the book that I needed to read as a young woman. Like, I needed to see someone who looked like me as a romantic protagonist getting a happy ending. And I think all through the aughts and all through the 2010s, I was sort of writing versions of that girl, writing her for myself to begin with and writing her for my daughters as time went on.
And with Cassie, I feel like we moved through this brief and shining moment of body positivity, where there was this idea that you could live happy and healthy in a larger body, right? You know, there was Lizzo, there were plus-size models, there was Old Navy saying, we're going to have every size of jeans in our store. You know, all of these retailers sort of finally embracing plus-size women. And then Ozempic happened and the pendulum swung all the way back. And I wanted to write about Cassie's body stuff in the aughts just as a way of reminding everybody how toxic the discourse was and hopefully making some of them see, like, nothing changes. We are right back to that moment of, like, you look at a red carpet and everyone is thin, so thin. And it's like, no, this is really the only way to be healthy and happy is to be thin. And it's like, here we are again. We've been here before and now we're back.
That's so interesting. You talked about Eden Village Camp. One of the things I know about them is their no body talk rule. Recently they had this no body talk week, national week. I've heard mixed reviews of it in practice. I'm just curious what you think of it.
So I think that body talk as a concept is, I mean, it's interesting, it's important, it's important to interrogate, it's important to think about the words that we use and how we compliment our daughters and what we say about them versus maybe what we're saying about our sons. Kids hear what you say, but like a thousand times more than that they notice what you do, right? So if you're doing no body talk day, no body talk week, no body talk whatever, like that is fantastic. But if your daughters are watching you weighing out four ounces of chicken breast, like they're gonna get a very different message. So I think no body talk is a place to start. That's what I'll say. And it's important and it's meaningful. But more than that, it's like, let's let our daughters see us just living in our bodies. Like that to me would be the most important thing.
I also want to ask you about fame in the book. For Zoe, she says she got everything she ever wanted, and yet she feels like an imposter. She's not the one with the raw talent the way that Cassie is. Cassie just sort of loves the art of it, the singing, the performing. And in part, because of how she feels about her body, she has a much harder time being in the spotlight. And then you also write about, in such a powerful way, the energy of the crowd, the way the sort of back and forth between the performer and the audience fuels the performers. I just wondered how you relate to any of that, given this, you've become a public figure.
Yeah, and it's really, really interesting the way that being in the world and in conversation with people who are consuming your art can really fill you up in a way that I don't think I always expected. When COVID happened and everything got canceled, including everybody's book tours, right? And we were doing, like, virtual events and Zoom events and every event we could manage, but it wasn't the same. And I have gotten used to like, you know, I love when I'm just in my little office, like in my book, in my characters, just like telling their story. And I'm so happy.
And every time I have to go on book tour, I'm like, oh my God, not this again. I just want to be writing. I don't want to have to do this, I don't like it. And then I go and I start speaking and talking to people and hearing that a character that I wrote or a story that I told meant something to them and it fills my buckets. And then I get to go home and take all of that and pour it into my next story. So I think that that's something that I gave to Cassie, who is very much an art-for-art’s-sake kind of person. She doesn't think she wants to perform, she just wants to play music and make music. And she ends up on stage being fulfilled in a way that she never imagined. And that's been true for me.
How beautiful. One of the things I also have appreciated over the last few years, you've written and said that you've never felt more Jewish than you have in the last few years. So I wondered what, tell me about that.
Well, I mean, not to bring down the mood, but I think like after October 7th, I think like for a lot of Jewish people in America, when you described yourself, when you talked about who you were, it was like, “I'm an American, I'm a woman, I'm a Philadelphian, I'm a bike rider, I'm a piano player, I'm an author, I'm a storyteller, I'm a this, I'm a that.”And after that happened, I think “I'm a Jew” just like shot to the top of everybody's list, you know? And however you felt, well, I mean, I think there was only one way to feel about what happened. But however you regarded the subsequent events, I think that every single one of us had to really own our Jewishness and just think about it and put it in the foreground in maybe a way it hadn't been in the foreground before. And I think it was a reminder also that however we might see ourselves, however we might call ourselves, “I'm an American, I'm a novelist, I'm a Philadelphian, I'm a feminist, I'm a mother,” to the world, to a lot of the world, like I'm a Jew and that's what they see before they see anything else, for better or for worse. It's been a really interesting time and I'm sure that at some point I'm going to write a novel that's gonna incorporate some of what we've been through recently as a community.
I can't wait.
It’s scary, but I'm gonna do it, I think. I don't see how I couldn't.
Wow, so tell me what feels meaningful to you about Judaism right now.
I think what feels meaningful to me right now is the idea of Tikkun Olam and the idea that the world is broken and that all of us are called to repair it. Like all of us have a mission, all of us have a role to play, and none of us can turn away from that work. And I think like a lot of conversations and a lot of reading and a lot of interrogating and investigating like what is the work? What is my role? What does repair look like? Those are all going to be the questions. But to me, the most meaningful, the most essential piece has always been this notion that all of us have a job to do in repairing the broken world.
I started out talking about some of your activism. So I'm curious, what are you thinking about in your tikkun olam or just in your activist role of what are the issues you're caring about right now or even cultural blind spots?
There's so much. There's so much happening. I think every day can feel overwhelming. Reading a newspaper can feel like an assault. I think about women, and I think about reproductive rights and reproductive justice and being defined by our bodies, being controlled by our bodies. I think about that a lot. I think about the fact that my daughters, depending on which state they end up living in, are going to have possibly less reproductive freedom than I had as a young woman. I think about climate change. I think about what each of us can do and how it just feels overwhelming and we're just one person and our efforts are so small and it feels like it won't change anything. And how do you get past that, feeling overwhelmed and feeling powerless. You know, and I guess I tell myself when I get frustrated, when I get overwhelmed, when I feel like there's too much, there's too much that's broken and the job is too big. And no matter what we do, we always end up going backwards. Like I will tell myself that progress is not linear. It's always one step forward, two steps back. It's always the pendulum swinging one way or another. And we are not called to do every piece of the work, but we are not allowed to do nothing. We are not allowed to desist. We are not allowed to sit on the sidelines. And so that's what I tell myself.
I'm glad you do. And you also, you, you have this amazing platform. I was thinking like, you have however many millions, how many millions of books do you have in print? You know, they're certainly from a Jewish perspective, like there are only, what, seven million Jews in America, 15 million Jews in the world. You have many more books than that in print. So your voice is very loud and powerful and we're all grateful for it and enjoying it. And this book is such a great, it's a fun book, but it really just pulled me in and had me, I think the two characters also in midlife reconsidering their whole life. There's just so much there. So thank you so much for writing it and for sharing and for being here today.
You're so welcome. Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Jennifer Weiner, discussing her new novel, The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits. You can find a link to the book and all the others Jennifer discussed in our show notes. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Reading and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also now find us online with transcripts at www.fivebookspod.org. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team@fivebookspod.org. And you can find us on Instagram @fivebookspod and on Facebook at the Five Books Podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dena Friedman.
Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
