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Written Off: Jennifer Weiner’s quest for literary respect.

Jennifer WeinerJanuary 13, 2014

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INSTAGRAm

I’m home!!!
(At least for the time being… I will be taping @npr’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” here in Philadelphia on Thursday, doing an event with the Metro Library Network in Cedar Rapids Friday, hanging with the JCC of Indianapolis on Sunday, and on to my beloved Free Library of Philadelphia Tuesday, July 9.)
I loved seeing so many of you on book tour. I loved hearing how much this book in particular has meant to you.
So now I’m going to ask a favor: if you liked the book, please post a review! Reader reviews are more important than ever, so if you don’t mind heading over to @barnesandnoble, @amazon or @goodreads, I would be very grateful.
And now that MRS. EVERYTHING is two weeks old, and I know a bunch of you have finished, I’d love to take your questions about it, or about anything else you want to know.
Post them below (if you haven’t read the book, look away!) And if you want a real, in-person discussion, MRS. E is the Barnes & Noble book club pick for June, sos you can head to your local B&N the second week in July and find other humans who’ve read it). #mrseverything #readersofinstagram #amreading #bookclub

Who else swiped copies of Judith Krantz novels off their mother’s bookshelves and read them way too young?
Krantz died today, at the age of 91...and, unsurprisingly, the obituaries have had a certain tone. “one of the world’s best-selling novelists if not one of the most critically acclaimed,” wrote the New York Times, archly noting that hundreds of Krantz’s readers pointed out a discrepancy in the karat count of a heroine’s diamonds but ignored an error about the start date of World War Two. The Washington Post quoted a 1990 review of Krantz’s “Dazzle”: “Sometimes reviewers lament that good trees have been felled to produce a book. In this case, I even feel bad about the ink and glue.”
I don’t imagine Krantz getting terribly upset by the tepid assessments.
For one thing, Krantz never pretended she was writing literature. “It’s not Dostoevsky,” she told The Washington Post in 1986. “It’s not going to tax your mental capacities. It’s not ahhrtt.” But Krantz also believed that you didn’t need to want to be Dostoyevsky in order to have something to say. Once, she told an interviewer, she believed that if she couldn’t aspire to literature, she shouldn’t write at all. “Now, I would say to young women, do something you have a true feeling for, no matter how little talent you may believe you have," she added. "Let no masterwork be your goal — a modest goal may lead you further than you dream."
I unapologetically loved Krantz’s stories (even if her fat heroine, Billy Ikehorn, has to lose weight to land her prince). Her books centered women’s pleasure, instructing a generation of young readers what they could, and should, expect in the bedroom. Plus, they were fun, as purely pleasurable as a soft-service ice-cream come in a hot day. And writing engrossing, sexy page-turners is no easy feat (if it was, I imagine a lot more people would do it). Rest In Peace, Judith. Thanks for the stories.
#judithkrantz #amreading #readersofinstagram #sexandshopping

If you’re going to end the first leg of your book tour on a personal-is-political note, talking about how entertaining novels can be Trojan horses for progressive, and even subversive ideas, Berkeley, CA is the place to do it!
I’m so grateful to everyone who came out and heard me discuss MRS. EVERYTHING, and what it means to be a woman in America. I have been telling audiences from Philadelphia to San Francisco how I hope this book finds its way into plenty of beach age, and keeps plenty of readers entertained on the sand or by the pool...but I hope they won’t just be entertained. I hope they’ll be moved, and occasionally angered. I hope they’ll be provoked, and prompted to think about their own lives, and the lives of their mothers and daughters and sisters, and everyone in their life who has been ‘othered’ for not fitting the straight white male mold. I hope readers will consider what it will take to keep moving forward, and how to be an ally, and what we should do with all of this anger. Because that’s my biggest question right now. (That’s me with activist and Supreme Court litigant/victor Gavin Grimm, who came to the event. No biggie...). I’m on the road again next Friday — Cedar Rapids and Indianapolis, here I come! Then back to Philly for some hometown events. Links in the bio. Hope to see lots of you there.
#mrseverything #amreading #readersofinstagram #feminism #metoo #believeher #transrights

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© Jennifer Weiner 2018