Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [137]
In the past year, you wrote and co-produced a TV series, “State of Georgia,” which will air on ABC Family this summer. How has writing for television compared to writing a novel? Has it been difficult to go back and forth between the two mediums?
Television’s been refreshing because I have colleagues again. Turns out, I missed working with people, and being in a writers’ room is a lot of fun—you sit around with a bunch of like-minded people and make each other laugh all day long. So I like the camaraderie of television, but I also love the relative quiet of novels, where it’s just me and my thoughts and the characters, and there’s no network giving notes or saying, “Instead of casting the guy you wanted, how about this guy we like?” There’s a lot more independence with writing fiction, where you’re building a universe all by yourself…and then, of course, the excitement when you do get to work with people again—your editor, your publicist, the readers…
This is your first novel to feature a protagonist in a same sex romantic relationship. Did you know when you began writing that Jules and Kimmie would become more than friends?
I had no idea, and it really surprised me! I knew that Jules was a very closed-off, defensive, isolated character, and I knew that, in the course of the story, she’d become more open and more giving, and that the process would begin with her egg donation. I did not see Kimmie coming. Sometimes, you have to let your characters surprise you, and the two of them certainly did!
More so than your other novels, Then Came You tackles issues of class and money head on. Was this an inevitable consequence of writing about surrogacy and egg donation, or was this a deliberate decision?
One of the criticisms of chick lit that’s always bothered me is that the books don’t deal with questions of class and money—that they’re always about upper-middle-class women obsessing about their weight and soothing themselves at the mall. I think that any book about a young woman starting out in the world—first jobs, bad bosses—necessarily takes on questions of economics, whether it’s done in a comical, over-the-top way (see: Shopaholic) or a very poignant, realistic way (see: Free Food for Millionaires).
With Then Came You, I wanted to look at how larger questions of financial inequities inform the process of having a baby by surrogate—how it’s always women of means hiring less-well-off women to perform a physical task; how it is, at its core, a transactional relationship that sometimes morphs into a friendly or even familial one. I’m interested in questions of how people treat each other, and how money, and guilt over having it, or resentment over not having more, comes into play. I loved exploring India’s ambivalence at hiring a woman to do something she couldn’t do, and Annie wondering whether India secretly resented her for being able to do the one thing that she couldn’t.
The scene with Laurena Costovya, the performance artist, and India, is such a compelling and memorable one. What was the inspiration behind this?
I saw Marina Abramovic’s installation at the Museum of Modern Art last year. She performed a piece called “The Artist is Present” where, like Laurena, she sat at a table for eight hours a day, not moving, not speaking, and looked at whoever came to sit across from her. I chose not to be one of the sitters, but I wondered whether being viewed that way would have some kind of impact…whether the people in the hot seat would feel compelled to start blurting out their deepest, darkest secrets, or if they’d feel like they were being known and seen in some ways. It reminded me of the Nietzsche quote, about how when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.
Then Came You is very much about family—how the families we are born into might fail us and how the families we create might save us. Many of your previous novels have tackled this issue as well.