Wednesday Sisters (Clayton)

The Wednesday Sisters 
Meg Waite Clayton, 2008
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616791216


Summary 
Five women, one passion, and the unbreakable bond of friendship.

When five young mothers—Frankie, Linda, Kath, Ally, and Brett—first meet in a neighborhood park in the late 1960s, their conversations center on marriage, raising children, and a shared love of books. Then one evening, as they gather to watch the Miss America Pageant, Linda admits that she aspires to write a novel herself, and the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society is born.

The five women slowly, and often reluctantly, start filling journals, sliding pages into typewriters, and sharing their work. In the process, they explore the changing world around them: the Vietnam War, the race to the moon, and a women’s movement that challenges everything they believe about themselves.

At the same time, the friends carry one another through more personal changes–ones brought about by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success. With one another’s support and encouragement, the Wednesday Sisters begin to embrace who they are and what they hope to become, welcoming readers to experience, along with them, the power of dreaming big. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in the USA: Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago,  
  Los Angeles, and New Jersey  
• Education—J.D., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in Palo Alto, California

Meg Waite Clayton is the author of The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Runner’s World, Writer’s Digest, and literary magazines. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and their two sons. (From the publisher.)

More
Her own words:

I didn't start out being a novelist, I started out as someone who wanted to be a novelist but had no idea how one went about that—much less any faith in my own talent. I went off to the University of Michigan thinking I would become a doctor, one of the few educational and career paths I understood. I emerged after seven years as a corporate lawyer in a tidy blue suit, and it was years later—and only at my husband's gentle reminder that I wasn't getting younger—that I got up the nerve to give writing a serious try. I was thirty-two by then, and pregnant with my second son, who was eleven when my first novel was published. Writing, I've discovered, is a lot harder than it looks.

Along the way, I wrote short stories and essays, and more than a few pages that are in the proverbial drawer. I had great luck on the first piece I ever published, an essay called "What the Medal Means" which sold quickly to the only publication I could imagine it in, Runner's World. The other short nonfiction I've published also placed relatively easily: another short essay in Runner's World, as well as pieces that appeared in Writer's Digest, Virginia Quarterly Review, and an anthology titled Searching For Mary Poppins.

My fiction, though, was slower going. I sent stories out again and again before they began to sell, revising each time before I mailed them until they did finally start appearing in publications that include Shenandoah, Other Voices, and Literary Review.

I've also been raising children all the years I've been writing, as the Wednesday Sisters do, developing the ability to write anywhere and anytime. I moved a few times in the interim as well, from Los Angeles to Baltimore to Nashville and now to Palo Alto, California. I'm used to moving, though; I'd lived in ten different houses in Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Jersey before I went off to college. Despite all those moves, though, like Frankie in the opening scene of The Wednesday Sisters, I get nervous every time I move away from old friends.

Although my fiction is not closely autobiographical, I do draw heavily from my own emotions and experiences as I write. If you're interested in more information on how I do that, please visit the links on the right or the Writers page." (From the author's website.)

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Book Reviews 
Clayton captures the evolution of a decades-long friendship in an highly accessible narrative. She grabs the reader's attention—while introducing compelling and quirky characters that are easy to identify with. The Wednesday Sisters is a refreshing alternative. —Jessica Harrison
Salt Lake City Deseret News

The Wednesday Sisters poignantly illustrates the way it really was back in the days when the glass ceiling was more like the roof of a marble tomb—Though all their hopes aren't realized, the friendship these women share provides a haven for each one anyway—and for the readers of this novel. —Faye Jones
Nashville Scene

In her light second novel, Clayton chronicles a group of mothers who convene in a Palo Alto park and share their changing lives as the late 1960s counterculture blossoms around them. Linda is a runner who tracks women's progress at the Olympics. Brett has one eye on the moon, where men are living out her astronaut dreams. Southern belle Kath isn't convinced she has dreams outside the confines of her marriage (but she's open to persuasion), while quiet Ally only hopes for what the other women already have: a child. Frankie, a Chicago transplant who has followed her computer genius husband to a nascent Silicon Valley, is the story's narrator and the ladies' ringleader, inspiring them all to follow her dream of becoming a writer. They write in moments snatched from their household chores and share their stories in the park. Though the narration and story lines are so syrupy they verge on hokey, Clayton ably conjures the era's details and captures the women's changing roles in a world that expects little of them.
Publishers Weekly

Readers will be swept up by this moving novel about female friendship and enthralled by the recounting of a pivotal year in American history as seen through these young women’s eyes. —Aleksandra Walker.
Booklist

Meg Waite Clayton's stirring novel will appeal not just to those who secretly wish to be writers, but to anyone with a love of great books; anyone who has felt truly moved by a book or an author; and anyone who has had their dreams bolstered by good and faithful friends. It will speak volumes to fans of The Friday Night Knitting Club and The Jane Austen Book Club. You'll want to share The Wednesday Sisters with anyone who believes in the power of a good book—to inspire those close to us, and for those who inspire.
Bronwyn Miller - BookReporter

A story of female friendship in Palo Alto evokes the '60s, including the stirrings of second-wave feminism. Beauty-pageant protests, inequality for female athletes, daughters denied educational opportunities and many other not-so-subtle reminders of how far we've come pepper Clayton's predictable second novel, which brings together Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett and Ally in a Californian park in 1967. Their friendship inspires a writing group, the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society, and also a support network as crises come and go: There are Ally's miscarriages; Linda's health scare; Kath's marriage problems. The women share confessions, rifts and revelations which edge them toward greater achievement, while behind them a stream of iconic '60s moments—the Olympic Black Power salute; the moon landing—and books (Love Story, The French Lieutenant's Woman) add period flavor.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. What do you think draws the women together in the opening scenes of The Wednesday Sisters? Is it, as Linda suggests, a shared love of books, or is it a shared fascination with Brett’s white gloves, or is it both or something else?

2. Twice in the novel, Linda attempts to ask about Brett’s gloves, but she is cut off by one of the other Sisters. Why are they reluctant to cross that line? What do you think the gloves symbolize? Do you think young women meeting Brett today would be as gentle about her gloves? Are there generational differences in the ways women relate?

3. Ally enters the group in part based on an unspoken assumption that Carrie is her daughter, when the child is in fact her niece. Why do you think Frankie keeps this secret rather than sharing it with the others? Do you think Ally’s life would be different today, given the existence of fertility treatments and support groups?

4. Why does Kath go so far in trying to win Lee back? Did this surprise you? Do you think she would have acted differently if the success of her marriage weren’t so important to her parents? If divorce had been as prevalent then as it is now? If she had been able to provide for herself financially? Would you, like Kath’s friends, be reluctant to counsel her to leave her husband? Or can you imagine giving her different advice?

5. Linda’s breast cancer and Ally’s fertility issues cause each to doubt her own femininity, and leave their friends at a loss as to how to help them. Have you or a friend ever been through a similar crisis? What has helped you hold on to your sense of self through tough times? How have your friendships affected this experience?

6. Why do you think Frankie finds it so difficult to tell Danny she’s writing a book, when she has no trouble at all confiding this fact to her husband’s boss? Why are we sometimes reluctant to admit we have dreams?

7. The old abandoned mansion–“a Miss Havisham house,” as Frankie’s husband, Danny, calls it, after the moldering mansion in Dickens’s Great Expectations–is a haunting presence through most of the novel. What does this house seem to symbolize? Does it mean something different to each of the Sisters? What does its destruction mean?

8. Published books are mentioned throughout the novel–from The Great Gatsby to The Bell Jar to To Kill a Mockingbird. What role do these titles play in The Wednesday Sisters? Why do you think each of the Sisters chooses the “model book” she does? What model book might you choose yourself?

9. The writing group the Sisters form in The Wednesday Sisters helps its members grow in self-awareness and self-confidence. Have you been a part of a group–perhaps even a reading or writing group–that has had a similar effect on you? What do you think of the author’s message that writing doesn’t have to culminate in a book deal; that it can feed the soul of anyone who works hard at it; that with hard work, it is possible to get better; and that writing can help one make sense of one’s life?

10. In one memorable scene, the Wednesday Sisters gather in a funeral parlor and imagine what they can accomplish in their lives that will not perish with their deaths. Did this make you think about writing in a new light? What about motherhood?

11. The women’s movement provides an evolving backdrop to the lives of the women in The Wednesday Sisters. How did you relate the experiences of the Wednesday Sisters to events in your own life or in the lives of women you know who lived at that time?

12. The Wednesday Sisters make a tradition of watching the Miss America Pageant every year. How do their reactions to the pageant change over time, and why? How does the pageant itself change?

13. If the Miss America Pageant is one recurring motif in the novel, the space program is another. What similarities and differences do you see in the way the author uses these two iconic slices of Americana?

14. Brett’s novel, The Mrs. Americas, posits a future in which a spaceship crewed by women and carrying a cargo of frozen sperm takes off on a mission to propagate the human race beyond the confines of our solar system. Why do you think Clayton chose to have Brett write this particular novel?

15. In addition to exploring the empowerment of women and the prevalence of sexism, The Wednesday Sisters addresses other social issues. In what ways are race and class raised in the novel? What did you think of the Sisters’ reactions to the fact that Ally’s husband, Jim, was from India?

16. Why do you think the author chose to set the climax of her novel on the set of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson? How does this scene compare to the Miss America Pageants described in the novel?

17. Throughout the novel, the Wednesday Sisters’ friendships are complex, constantly evolving, and occasionally downright messy. Yet even as their bonds are tested, the group endures and grows stronger. What do you think keeps their friendships growing stronger rather than breaking apart?

18. In an interview, author Meg Waite Clayton once said, “If an author makes me weep, I am theirs–though why so many of us like books that make us cry puzzles me to no end.” Do you share this sentiment? Why do you think readers respond to novels that make them cry?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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