In the publicity copy for the novelist and broadcaster Jennifer Weiner’s new autobiography/essay collection Hungry Heart, her publisher promises that “no subject is off-limits”.
And yet, though Weiner writes movingly about being an unpopular kid who never got to sit at the cooler lunch tables, as well as some of the heart-wrenching times she was called fat or made fun of for her less-than-stylish clothes, it’s more than 300 pages before she mentions that she’s ever heard anyone make fun of her last name. Perhaps she grew up in a different time or a more genteel place than I did, but I find it hard to believe that not one Connecticut mean girl cracked a joke about her last name until her father, struggling with addiction late in his life, found himself in the hospital with a serious scrotal injury that made the national press.
If it seems like a little quibble, it is. But it also isn’t: Weiner recounts in excruciating detail the slights of her childhood and young adult years, and in hilarious detail her family’s road trips, her cousin’s closet, her outfit while giving a speech about Princeton’s infamous eating clubs and even the setting in which she lost her virginity. So it’s hard not to wonder why her divorce from her first husband didn’t require more than a couple of lines (they divorced, she said, over “our mutual inability to reconfigure our roles in the wake of my success and his brief professional stumble”) in the last 60 pages, or why she is so brief about her mid-20s break-up with the man who became her second husband in her 40s (she says little more than that he wasn’t ready to get married). Meanwhile, her compiled tweets about The Bachelor fill a whole chapter.
In other words, sometimes the absence of detail in an autobiography can be revealing.
It’s not that the book isn’t a fun read: Weiner is an engaging writer. As she will readily tell you, her college writing professor, the New Yorker staff writer John McPhee, told her that she does know how to tell a story. There are laugh-out-loud funny moments, and ones with which I identified so strongly that I caught myself tearing up.
But the book suffers from a pacing problem. Though it is positioned as a collection of essays, the first half is more or less a straight and engaging autobiography. The second half is a series of disconnected essays, which appear to follow no chronological order, and tracing Weiner’s life after she has kids. As if that were not confusing enough, Weiner reverts to a more standard autobiographical format for the last couple of chapters. As a reader, it’s a bit disconcerting to go from reading an autobiography in which one chapter naturally leads to the next, and then find oneself reading a listicle about parenting, or a printed-out Storify of the author’s tweets about a reality dating show.
She leaves so many questions unanswered. I wanted to know, really know, how the teenage girl so desperate to be liked and who, by her own admission, had but few friends, went from copying other girls’ hairstyles to leading feminist campus protests and writing under the pseudonym Liz Sistrata for her college paper. I wanted to know how she came to her central thesis – “Women’s stories matter”, and how that’s political – and why she can’t get off Twitter and how she dealt with fame and being the breadwinner in her family. And, if she doesn’t write about her ex-husband, I want to know how she went from excoriating one ex in her first novel, Good in Bed (“I follow Salon columnist and memoirist Anne Lamott’s advice to women writers using their exes in fiction, and I gave him a tiny little penis”) to respecting the desire for privacy of the person with whom she had two children.
Is it too much of a pun to say that the book left me hungry for more, though not always in a good way?
As difficult as it is for women to admit to being – let alone reveal themselves as – less than appealing, I ultimately wanted her not to care in the slightest if the readers of her autobiography/essay collection disliked her. I wanted that mostly because I suspect, like all of us, it’s Weiner’s least likable moments that make people really love her.
