Meg Wolitzer’s The Ten-Year Nap

I listened to Meg Wolitzer’s 2008 novel The Ten-Year Nap on audio and liked it a whole lot. This is my second Wolitzer novel (after last year’s The Interestings), and I think she’s so good! The ten-year nap of the title is the main character Amy’s ten years spent as a stay-at-home wife and mother. She now feels pressure to go out into the world and “do something”: volunteer, get a job, something besides “stay at home.” She worries about people asking her what she does all day. She knows she does a whole lot, but people in careers are always skeptical. Amy is the main character, but there are so many other lives Wolitzer tracks: other mothers, many of whom have chosen not to work outside the home and some who have. She also tells the stories of women’s lives from earlier generations, in some cases stories of the mothers of her main present-action characters and in other cases, stories of famous women and what influenced their careers and decisions about family. Wolitzer is going for a broad view of women, feminism, and family, tracking how things have changed from the early days of modern feminism in the 1960s and 70s up until the early 21st century — what women have gained and what they haven’t. It’s very much an issue novel in the sense that it’s clear what Wolitzer set out to do, but the characters are so well-drawn and interesting, and the satire is so sharp and funny that the issues don’t get in the way of the fiction. Anyone who has tried to balance work and family life will appreciate this. The book made me feel, on a personal level, SO HAPPY to have a job, and also SO HAPPY to have a lot of time at home with my son and SO LUCKY to have the husband I do. Wolitzer does a great job of showing just how complex it is to sort out one’s life as a modern mother, while at the same time recognizing that these are very privileged problems to face.