Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [136]
2. Pretend that you are a casting director and that Then Came You is your latest project. Who would you cast to portray Annie, Jules, India, and Bettina? What about Frank, Kimmie, Darren, and Marcus?
3. Before meeting with your group, read “Meet the Twiblings” by Melanie Thernstrom, a feature that ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Discuss how the issues that Ms. Thernstrom grapples with are handled within Then Came You.
4. In the final scene of Then Came You we hear “the mythology of Rory’s essential beginnings.” Think about the kind of narrative that you were told to you as a child about your “beginnings”—and if you’re a parent, consider the narratives that you’ve crafted to tell your child. Share these with the group.
A Conversation with Jennifer Weiner
You’ve said before that each of your books has begun with a mental snapshot, a clear visual in your mind. Was that the case with Then Came You, and if so, what was that image? In general, what drew you to the topics of surrogacy and egg donation?
A few years back, the New York Times ran a story by a woman who was unable to carry a pregnancy and eventually hired a surrogate in Pennsylvania to carry a child for her. The infertile woman was married to an older man with adult children. The two of them were very well-off, and the story didn’t stint on the details of her wealth (I remember references to white-water rafting, bourbon tastings, and trips to the SuperBowl) while the surrogate was a woman of much more modest means, whose college degree and computer proficiency were met with condescending surprise.
The story was rich with subtext—about class, about cash, about the way you can get pretty much whatever you want in the world if you’ve got the money to pay for it—but it was the pictures that stayed with me. There was a shot of the new mother, standing in front of her estate in the Hamptons, with a uniformed black maid behind her, holding the baby, like a prize, in her arms…and, a few pages later, a picture of the surrogate on the porch of a falling-down farmhouse by a river, literally barefoot and pregnant.
I had several thoughts at the time, including, “I wonder if the writer had any idea that these were the pictures that would run with the story,” and “Wow. Barefoot and pregnant. Srsly, NYT?” And “have I really given dark spirits enough of a chance?”
But then I thought that there’s something unsettling about the notion of a rich lady paying a less-rich lady to carry her baby, the same way a rich lady might pay a less-rich lady to clean her house, or wax her legs, or do some other bit of grubby, less-glamorous business that the rich woman didn’t want to do herself. Does money belong in the equation when people think about how to build their families? If it’s a necessary evil; if pregnancy’s really just another service, with providers and consumers, how does that play out? All of these were questions that I wrestled with in Then Came You.
What kind of research did you do for Then Came You
I had read a lot about surrogacy for Certain Girls, so the research for this book involved reading a lot of first-person accounts from egg donors—what you go through physically, and what it feels like when the donation is complete.
Jules, India, Bettina, and Annie are such unique and distinctly defined women. As you were writing, did you find that you had a favorite character? Did you identify with one more than the others?
In this book more than any of my others, all of the characters delighted me, and all of them frustrated me. Which I think means that they’re fully realized. At least, I hope so!
The thing that I identified with most was the thing that ties the four of them together—the longing for what they don’t have; for what, in some cases, they can never have. Bettina and Jules both want their families back; India wants the promise of security, forever; Annie wants to race up the ladder of social status