Meg Wolitzer: I think everyone is always measuring themselves against...

But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.

Meg Wolitzer

parent teacher children

Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.

Meg Wolitzer

anxious unhappy children

To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.

Meg Wolitzer

mosaics pieces self

But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.

Meg Wolitzer

college art thinking

And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?

Meg Wolitzer

essentials people jesus

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.

Meg Wolitzer

stronger powerful age

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

Meg Wolitzer

wells stills people

New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them.

Meg Wolitzer

teaching teacher long

People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.

Meg Wolitzer

enough lost people

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.

Meg Wolitzer

adapted people way

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

Meg Wolitzer

filled-in fire book

Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.

Meg Wolitzer

groups important mother

When I wrote The Interestings, I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.

Meg Wolitzer

giving book moving

In The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.

Meg Wolitzer

writing people fall

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

Meg Wolitzer

one-day taken world

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

Meg Wolitzer

being-an-artist ties artist

And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

Meg Wolitzer

envy self interesting

But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.

Meg Wolitzer

soulmate play sleep

Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.

Meg Wolitzer

microphones said hands

The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.

Meg Wolitzer

creative lifetime busy

I think everyone is always measuring themselves against other people to a certain degree; it happens automatically, and it's hard not to be this way at least some of the time.