WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 27Author Profile
17-year-old Lucy and 13-year-old Phoebe—as additional impe-
tuses behind the novel, not to mention ground research for
Daisy’s teenage daughter, Beatrice, who’s not afraid to stand up
for what she feels is right. “I think a lot about what it was like
for me as a young woman in my teens, in my 20s, navigating
the world, and what it’s going to be like for Lucy and her sister,”
Weiner says. “Have we come far enough? The deck is stacked
against women in so many ways.”
Weiner explains that, at the start of the #MeToo movement,
she mentioned to her husband casually that “every woman has
a story like this.” For her, it was the older waiter who harassed
her when she was a 16-year-old bus girl at a restaurant. “I don’t
think I had thought about it at all until Lucy was talking
about applying for summer jobs,” she says. “That was when I
was like, ‘Oh shit, that happened to me. Probably something
like that is going to happen to her at some point, because it’s
happened to every woman I know.’ ”
Weiner has made it part of her job to
challenge stereotypes and gender biases
in publishing, including the inherent
sexism in the term “beach read”—a
phrase that, she wrote in a piece for
Entertainment Weekly in 2019, she’s “tried
to make peace with”—as well as the way
the literary community has all too often
promoted white male writers while
diminishing the efforts of women and
people of color.
Writing for the New Yorker in 2014,
Rebecca Mead called Weiner an “unlikely
feminist enforcer,” perhaps because she’s
such a marvelously prolific success story.
Her novels feature heartwarming humor,
romance, female friendship, and pleasur-
able journeys of escape. But they also
tackle issues like sexual assault, fat
shaming, and postpartum depression.
“All of my books are sort of a balance between heavy and
light,” Weiner says. “There’s some big issue that the heroine is
grappling with, or there’s some family stuff or societal stuff or
whatever stuff, but there’s also funny things, like a drag queen
named Heavy Flo—which, if I ever do drag, that is going to be
my drag name.”
After she graduated from Princeton, Weiner worked as a
journalist before shifting to full-time book writing following
the success of her 2001 debut, Good in Bed. That novel now has
more than two million copies in print, according to Atria. To
date, she’s written 14 novels, a few children’s books, an essay
collection, and a short story collection. Atria says she has more
than 15 million books in print overall, and, according to her
agent, she’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for 258
weeks, or nearly five years, throughout her 20-year career.
Weiner has also been a favorite in Hollywood, with her 2002
novel In Her Shoes made into a 2005 movie starring Toni
Collette and Cameron Diaz. Her 2019 novel Mrs. Everything
was optioned by the production studio Sister and is currently
in development as a TV series, and, last year, it was announced
that Mindy Kaling will produce and star in an adaptation of
Good in Bed for HBO Max. And, never one to waste time,
Weiner has also been a contributing opinion writer at the New
York Times since 2015.
Weiner’s previous novel, Big Summer, which came out in May
2020 and was described by Good Morning America as the “per-
fect quarantine read,” actually began a series she’s continuing
with That Summer. She calls it her “little Cape Code trilogy,”
since each book is “at least partially set on Cape Cod,” and
she’s working on the final installment now. Weiner has a per-
sonal connection to the area: her parents used to rent a two-
bedroom cottage on the bay when she was young and, as an
adult, she purchased her own summer
house so she could return each year with
her family.
Writing That Summer became, in some
ways, her pandemic escape, Weiner says.
Stuck at home in Philadelphia, she started
thinking longingly of Cape Cod again.
The best way to return to it? Set another
novel there.
“It was just wanting to write a place
that I love and dogs and food and all that
good stuff, and falling in love,” Weiner
recalls. “The Cape’s amazing and it’s
beautiful and it’s special. And I want to
make readers feel like they’re getting to
experience some of that.”
But writing is about more than simply
entertaining, or at least, in Weiner’s eyes,
it should be. At the same time that she
was immersing herself in a world of
escape, she was struggling over what her
role should be in helping others during a global health and
political crisis. “It’s like, what’s my job right now? What am I
supposed to be doing right now with my talents such as they
are?” she asks. “It’s a hard question.”
That Summer was Weiner’s answer. “I can tell you a story and
I can hopefully entertain you and transport you,” she says. “But
I can also say to you, ‘Hey, look, we got some stuff to deal with
in America.’ Because I think that even in the midst of escape,
you can’t ever get away from what the world is serving you. And
if what I’ve written helps one woman somewhere in the world
feel more visible, feel more recognized, feel more seen and more
at home in her own skin, then I have done my job.” ■Jen Doll is the author of the YA novel Unclaimed Baggage (FSG) and
the memoir Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial
Wedding Guest (Riverhead).