Early one morning in November, five hundred clinicians gathered at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott for the twenty-third annual Renfrew Center Foundation conference, devoted to the understanding and treatment of eating disorders. The keynote speaker, Jennifer Weiner, the best-selling novelist, was there to offer a personal perspective on weight issues, with a talk entitled “The F Word: On Growing Up Big, Speaking Out Loud and Raising Betty Friedan Girls in a Britney Spears World.”
The Renfrew foundation’s Web site described Weiner’s 2001 début, “Good in Bed,” now in its fifty-seventh printing, as “the first ‘chick-lit’ novel featuring a large protagonist.” The character, Cannie Shapiro, established the template for a number of Weiner’s subsequent heroines: clever, quippy young women whose dress size tends to be well into the double digits. Her characters navigate the perils presented by lacklustre boyfriends or disappointing husbands, slender mean girls, dysfunctional families, and self-esteem issues. “Nobody’s going to date me looking like this,” Cannie tells the tall, handsome, kindly doctor who interviews her for a weight-loss study. “I’m going to die alone, and my dog’s going to eat my face, and no one will find us until the smell seeps out under the door.” Despite their travails, Weiner’s heroines arrive at happy endings that defy cultural prejudices while upholding the implausible conventions of a Hollywood romantic comedy. (Cannie’s tall, handsome, kindly doctor falls madly in love with her.) Weiner’s second novel, “In Her Shoes,” was actually made into a romantic comedy, in 2005; it starred Toni Collette, as the brainy, full-figured heroine, and Cameron Diaz—featured prominently on movie posters—as her skinny, feckless sister.
Weiner, who is forty-three, was outfitted as if for a cocktail party, in a scarlet sleeveless dress and nude stilettos. Her makeup had been applied, before dawn, by a professional; her long, dark-brown hair was loose and shiny. She looked pretty and polished but approachable, like a co-host on “The View.” Weiner, who has a degree in English literature from Princeton, is cognizant of the expectations that attend a writer of commercial women’s fiction. “Handbags are important signifiers,” she told me. (Lately, she has leaned heavily on an orange Givenchy tote.) Her outfit projected confidence, but it also gave her an opportunity to reveal a winning vulnerability. After ascending the podium, she began, “Good morning, Renfrew Center clinicians and therapists. Or, as I have been affectionately referring to you in my head, the people I don’t need to wear Spanx for.”
Weiner is a witty public speaker. “She’s like Kathy Griffin,” the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, who is a friend of Weiner’s, says. “She definitely deserves her own reality show.” Weiner devoted much of her speech to recounting a childhood in Simsbury, Connecticut, where her looks and her sense of humor were unappreciated. She described herself as “a beaky, busty, mouthy kid in a Dorothy Hamill bob . . . looking ungainly in an unflattering Esprit shirt-and-vest combination.” When the audience laughed, Weiner ad-libbed, “Don’t act like you don’t remember the eighties! Bitches.” She spoke of travelling to Israel the summer she was fifteen. “There I am in the Promised Land, and there were five Jennifers on this trip, so I became the fat Jennifer,” she said. “Here I am in this part of the world famous for its suffering, and I’m, like, ‘No one has suffered more than me.’ ”
With comic triumph, Weiner shared other anecdotes of being marginalized, the kinds of stories that therapists are accustomed to hearing in their consulting rooms. She also spoke about experiencing a more rarefied form of exclusion. In the spring of 2013, she explained, Claire Messud, the novelist, published her first book in seven years, “The Woman Upstairs.” Widely praised, it features a protagonist, Nora Eldridge, who becomes obsessively involved with her neighbors—a married couple and their son—whose domestic and professional contentment she seeks to partake in and disrupt.
Weiner described Nora Eldridge as “a twist on a familiar type: the Unhappy Singleton.” Messud, rather than representing Nora’s misfortunes as screwball comedy, and sending her on bad blind dates and the like, had created “a curdled version of Bridget Jones, notable mostly for her anger.” Weiner had been particularly bothered by Messud’s response to an interviewer who had suggested that Nora Eldridge was not the kind of character a reader might want to befriend. “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble,” Messud had replied, citing other fictional characters who were not B.F.F. material: Humbert Humbert, Mickey Sabbath, Hamlet, Oedipus, Antigone, Raskolnikov.
“Novels were absolutely, positively not there to serve the petty function of helping people feel connected,” Weiner went on. “And if you believed that—if you wrote that way, or if you read that way—then, by God, you were Doing Reading Wrong.” Messud’s comments had left Weiner with “a sinking heart, and an unhappy sense of recognition. Once again, as a reader and a writer, I was out of step, out of fashion.”
Jennifer Weiner has two audiences. One consists of the devoted consumers of her books, which have sold more than four and a half million copies. As Melissa Byers, a blogger, puts it, the novels are “filled with humor, touching moments, heartwarming scenes, and endings I adore.” Weiner’s books have spent two hundred and forty-nine weeks on the Times best-seller list, and more than fourteen thousand readers have rated her most recent novel, “The Next Best Thing,” on Goodreads. Weiner accommodates the demand for her books with hard work and good cheer: “All Fall Down,” her eleventh book in thirteen years, comes out this spring, and she supplies an e-book short story every Halloween, writes magazine articles, and maintains a chatty blog. (“My kids started school. Then they both got lice. I feel like my life has been an endless cycle of combing, rinsing, washing, and calling the professional nit-pickers.”) Weiner has almost eighty thousand followers on Twitter, to whom she live-tweets “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette.”
