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Meg Wolitzer Facts & Worksheets

Meg Wolitzer is an American novelist and a New York Times Bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Wife, The Interestings, and The Uncoupling.

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Meg Wolitzer is an American novelist and a New York Times Bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Wife, The Interestings, and The Uncoupling. She wrote fourteen books during her forty-year writing career.

See the fact file below for more information on the Meg Wolitzer or alternatively, you can download our 24-page Meg Wolitzer worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE AND FAMILY

  • Meg Wolitzer was born on May 28, 1959, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the daughter of the American novelist Wilma Wolitzer and a psychologist, Morton Wolitzer. She grew up in Syosset, New York, and was raised Jewish.
  • Her mother always spoke to her about the importance of “feminism in action in the home.” She once brought her to a writer’s conference when she was younger. She remembered how different the treatment was of male writers to female ones like her mother.
  • Books surrounded her during her childhood. Her mother, Wilma, published two novels when she was still in school. She always looked forward to having a weekly trip to the library with her entire family.
  • While in high school, she served as an editor in the school literary magazine. She went to Smith College and studied Creative Writing. She then pursued a university degree and graduated from Brown University in 1981.
  • Wolitzer wrote 14 books. Her books often had themes involving relationships, men and women, ambition, sex, families, and friendship.
  • She wrote her first novel, Sleepwalking, while she was at the university and published it a year after graduating.
  • She was only 23 years old when the book officially began her acclaimed writing career. It was about three college students who shared a fascination with poetry and death.
  • She then published Hidden Pictures (1986), This Is Your Life (1988), and Surrender, Dorothy (1998). The last two books were made into a television movie in 2006. This is Your Life, which became This Is My Life, was helmed by Nora Ephron, who Wolitzer sees as Faith Frank of her life.
  • In 2003, she published The Wife, a story of a woman named Joan, played by Glenn Close, who wanted to stop sacrificing her literary talent for years to fan the flames of her husband’s literary career. It was adapted into a critically acclaimed film with the same name in 2017.
  • The Position is a book Wolitzer published in 2005, about one extraordinary family. The parents, Paul and Roz Mellow, penned a best-selling “joy of sex” type of book and how it affected their children during their school-aged years and thirty years after. USA Today hailed it as a “hilariously moving, sharply written novel.”
  • It was followed by another best selling novel, The Ten-Year Nap. It is about a group of women, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen, who had high powered careers but gave them up to focus on raising their children.
  • The Uncoupling is a provocative novel about female desire. Its protagonist, a new drama teacher, cast a strange spell in the school’s community by staging in a school play Lysistrata, a comedy by Aristophanes, in which women stop having sex with men to end a war. Wolitzer published it in 2011 and also received rave reviews.

WRITING CAREER

  • The Interestings, published in 2013, is a story about six teenagers who met at a summer camp for the arts and became inseparable. Their connection endured through time. The author let us follow them from the height of their youth through their adulthood when they realized that one’s creativity at age fifteen was not enough to get through life at age thirty.
  • In 2018, she published her latest novel, The Female Persuasion. The book was about a shy girl named Greer Kadetsky, who was mentored by a feminist icon, Faith Frank, and started to build a friendship.
  • It was released just a few weeks after the Harvey Weinstein scandal emerged, and the #MeToo movement broke out.
  • In 2012, Wolitzer released a middle-grade book titled The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman. She followed this endeavor in 2019 when she co-authored with Holly Goldberg Sloan with a book called To Night Owl From Dogfish, a humorous story about friendship and family, told entirely in emails and letters by a bookish Avery Bloom and the fearless and outgoing Bett Devlin.
  • Wolitzer also wrote a book for young adults called Belzhar in 2014. The book narrated a breathtaking story of Jam Gallahue’s first love, deep sorrow, and the power of acceptance.
  • Wolitzer also wrote short stories in 1998. One of them is titled “Tea at the House” and was featured in 1998’s Best American Short Stories collection.

RECOGNITIONS

  • Female Persuasion became a New York Times Best Seller. It was also recognized as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, one of People’s Magazine and USA Today’s Top Ten Books of 2018.
  • She also received recognition from the MacDowell Colony fellowship in 1981, Yaddo residency in 1983, National Endowment for the Arts in 1994, and the Pushcart Prize in 1998.

HOLLYWOOD MOMENT

  • The Wife movie’s critical success made Wolitzer’s books more appealing to the big Hollywood studios.
  • Nicole Kidman noticed her book The Female Persuasion and planned to co-produce and star in the film version of the book.
  • Her co-authored young adult novel, To Night Owl From Dogfish, was picked up by the Weitz brothers known for their films such as About a Boy and American Pie.

PERSONAL LIFE

  • Wolitzer is a faculty member of the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was also a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier program at Princeton University in September 2013.
  • She lives in New York City with her husband, a non-fiction writer, Richard Panek, and has two sons.
  • Wolitzer’s writing routine is not different from many authors. She does not force herself to write if it does not feel like a writing day for her. Instead, she reads a particular passage in another book that she loves and thinks about the excitement the author excitement when writing it. She learned that locating that excitement can help find excitement in her work and engage with it.
  • On the other hand, when she wakes up motivated and excited, she first goes out to walk her dog and think about her work. She will then go home and sit down at her laptop and type away the words in her head. Even if she needs to go out of her apartment for an extended period, she is still immersed in her book’s universe.
  • She thinks that the best advice given to her as a writer was when she was in college and her teacher and a writer, Mary Gordon, told her “Only write what’s important,” which to her means “to write what is important to you.”

Meg Wolitzer Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Meg Wolitzer across 24 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Meg Wolitzer worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Meg Wolitzer who is an American novelist and a New York Times Bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Wife, The Interestings, and The Uncoupling. She wrote fourteen books during her forty-year writing career.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Meg Wolitzer Facts
  • A Book Lover
  • A Great Writer’ Life
  • The Wolitzer Inquiry
  • Matching Books
  • Wolitzer’s Friends
  • Words from Novels
  • Wolitzer’s Wisdom
  • The Need for Inspiration
  • Missing Pieces
  • Your Most Important Thing

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Use With Any Curriculum

These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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