New Yorker Profile: Jennifer Weiner
On the cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine, the lions outside the New York Public Library morph into polar bears in Bruce McCall’s image of the city currently in a deep freeze.
In the issue, author Jennifer Weiner gets a warmer reception in a profile by Rebecca Mead, who says this “unlikely feminist enforcer … has waged a campaign against the literary media for being biased against female writers, and against books written for women … In 2010, when Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was published, Weiner and Jodi Picoult, another best-selling novelist, objected to the attention garnered by Franzen and his work.”
Meade gives Weiner’s work serious, if not completely admiring, consideration, “Sometimes the reversals of fortune and the discoveries of love in Weiner’s books can feel forced, given the anger and hurt that precede them. Her characters can appear to be mouthing lines they have read in self-help books rather than expressing authentic emotions. It often seems that inside these calculatedly lightweight books there is a more anguished, and possibly truer, work trying to get out.”
Weiner’s next novel, All Fall Down (S&S Atria; S&S Audio) is scheduled for release in April.