The Ten Year Nap
Riverhead Books, March 2009
From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, motherhood, and marriage -- and four friends who confront the choices they've made.
For a group of four New York friends the past decade has been defined largely by marriage and motherhood, but it wasn't always that way. Growing up, they had been told that their generation would be different. And for a while this was true. They went to good colleges, and began high-powered careers. But after marriage and babies, for a variety of reasons, they decided to stay home, temporarily, to raise their children. Now, ten years later, they are still at home, unsure how they came to inhabit lives so different from the ones they expected -- until a new series of events begins to change the landscape of their lives yet again, in ways they couldn't have predicted.
paperback | ISBN: 9781594483547 | Publication Date: March 2009
Reviews:
"About as real as it gets. A beautifully precise description of modern family life: the compromises, the peculiarities, the questions, the
reconciliations to fate and necessity . . . written with the author's trademark blend of tenderness and bite."
--Chicago Tribune
"Vividly, satisfyingly real."
--Entertainment Weekly
"Wolitzer is as precise and rigorous an observer of social status as
Tom Wolfe; she is as incisive and pitiless and clear-eyed a chronicler
of female-male tandems as Philip Roth or John Updike."
--Chicago Tribune
"Very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can
nail a contemporary type, scene, or artifact with deadeye accuracy."
--The New York Times
"Everyone has an opinion about stay-at-home mothers. With her new
novel, Meg Wolitzer has just one agenda -- to tell the truth about
their lives. An engrossing, juicy read."
--Salon
"Wolitzer perfectly captures her women's resolve in the face of a
dizzying array of conflicting loyalties. To whom does a woman owe her
primary allegiance? Her children? Her mother? Her friends, spouse,
community? God forbid, herself?"
--The Washington Post
"Charming, provocative . . . another winner for Wolitier . . . [She] is
as precise and rigorous an observer of social status as Tom Wolfe; she
is as incisive and pitiless and clear-eyed a chronicler of female-male
tandems as Philip Roth or John Updike. [Wolitzer is] as real as it
gets. . . . A beautifully precise description of modern family life:
the compromises, the peculiarities, the questions, the reconciliations
to fate and necessity. And plenty of lost socks. You'll find the quiet
yearning of mothers and fathers as they seek to balance work and home.
Wolitzer is terrific at depicting the ambiguity of modern family life,
its murky moral choices and thorny dilemmas. Written with the author's
trademark blend of tenderness and bite, The Ten-Year Nap is as up-to-the-minute about contemporary America as a YouTube video."
--Chicago Tribune
"With a light but needle-sharp touch and a tone at once thoughtful and
witty . . . all of Wolitzer's characters are so articulate and
insightful that it's a pleasure to listen to them think. Whether
depicting the subtle cues lovers emit to drive away intruders, or
worries about a child who for no specific reason doesn't seem quite
right, or the distinct motivations different women have for opting out
of the workforce . . . Wolitzer's scenes are intensely observed and
nuanced."
--The Atlantic
"An entertaining spin around the mommy track. [Wolitzer] plumbs the
issue of the 'ten-year nap,' that possibly permanent hiatus in many
women's working lives, through a probing examination of four
middle-class, contemporary fortysomething New York wives and mothers.
[She] reveals the interior seesaw many young mothers experience, their
unwijlingness to abdicate either motherhood or careers, and a deeper
ambivalence about whether work can provide happiness and satisfaction
as well as a paycheck. Wolitzer's great ear for dialogue and for
insinuating humor into seriousness make this novel a thought-provoking
pleasure to read."
--The Seattle Times
"The ultimate peril is motherhood, loving someone more than you love yourself. Meg Wolitzer nails it with tenderness and wit."
--O, The Oprah Magazine
"Provocative . . . Wolitzer's intimate look into these women's
subsequent quests for validation is both liberating and poignant, as
she deftly explores the relationships among family, friends, husbands,
and lovers that shape her heroine's views of their pasts and the
uncertainties of the future."
--Elle
"[Wolitzer's] smart, funny, and deeply provocative novel takes
the lives of its women very seriously. . . . She follows the inner
workings of the minds of a group of friends in hilarious detail without
condescending or judging. . . . It's a marvelous jungle in there,
especially when written with Meg Wolitzer's unsentimental compassion
and wit."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune
"What determines a
woman's worth? Meg Wolitzer turns her laser gaze on the rarefied world
of New York City moms wealthy enough to stay home with their kids,
but intelligent enough to feel the tugging lack of purpose that
results. In The Ten-Year Nap, she hopscotches through time,
occasionally dropping in brief vignettes of the main characters' own
mothers as well as of high-achieving women like Nadia Comaneci and
Margaret Thatcher -- a risky gamble that somehow works. Wolitzer's
middle-aged moms are flawed: selfish, neurotic, and occasionally
petty. But they -- and their conflicts -- feel vividly, satisfyingly real."
--Entertainment Weekly
"Immensely enjoyable . . . Wolitzer . . . brings an amused, sympathetic
but beady eye to bear on the convoluted, restless, privileged yet
endlessly perplexing lives of her New York City wives, members of a
generation told it could do anything it wanted, yet [who] have ended
up, through choice, as socially invisible drill sergeants to their
children."
--Miami Herald
"Wolitzer isn't being judgmental even as she interjects the stories of
older women who took strides, and made sacrifices, to change the world
for their daughters. She's just looking closely at what goes into the
choices women make and how they play out."
--New York Daily News
"Everyone has an opinion about stay-at-home mothers. With her new
novel, Meg Wolitzer has just one agenda -- to tell the truth about
their lives. The Ten-Year Nap
is an engrossing, juicy read about girlfriends, marriages, jealousies,
and money. But it's also an occasionally brutal dissection of the
habits and hang-ups of a rarefied group of mega-mamas. Scenes in which
someone breast-feeds another woman's child, or an anorexic stay-at-home
mother devises a plan to launch a chain of SlimGyms for people with
'eating differences,' are hilarious but uncomfortable in their detailed
apprehensions of what it means to find your artistic and professional
ambitions rechanneled or derailed."
--Salon
"[A] riveting tale . . . She examines the lives of highly educated
professional women who take a ten-year break from their careers to
raise children only to realize after a time that they need to examine
their inner lives to see if a former career, or something completely
different, beckons. Beautifully written and cleverly paced, this novel
has a great story with messages on many levels."
--Library Journal
"A wise, witty assessment of the contemporary dilemmas of middleclass
mothers (in particular: to work or not to work) . . . Wolitzer uses
modern domesticity as a lens through which to scrutinize mixed feelings
. about ambition, marriage, aging, money, and the peculiar results of
the women's individual choices . . . a perceptive, highly enjoyable
novel."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Brings some much-needed compassion and a rare wit to the contentious
divide separating mothers who work from those who don't . . . It's a
rare novelist who can transform domestic fiction into a sustained,
smart, and funny inquiry into the price of ambition, the value of work, issues of class, and the meaning of motherhood -- Wolitzer is thatnovelist."
--Booklist
