The Female Persuasion

289 Pages·2018·1.89 MB·English

by  Meg Wolitzer

ALSO BY MEG WOLITZER
The Interestings
The Uncoupling
The Ten-Year Nap
The Position
The Wife
Surrender, Dorothy
This Is My Life
Hidden Pictures
Sleepwalking

RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2018 by Meg Wolitzer
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wolitzer, Meg, author.
Title: The female persuasion / Meg Wolitzer.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017031394| ISBN 9781594488405 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525533221 (epub) Classification: LCC PS3573.O564
F46 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031394
p. cm.
International edition ISBN: 9780525535058
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
This book is dedicated to:
Rosellen Brown
Nora Ephron
Mary Gordon
Barbara Grossman
Reine Kidder
Susan Kress
Hilma Wolitzer
Ilene Young
without whom . . .
CONTENTS
Also by Meg Wolitzer
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE: The Strong Ones
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
PART TWO: Twin Rocket Ships
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
PART THREE: I Get To Decide
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
PART FOUR: Outside Voices
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART ONE
The Strong Ones
ONE
G
reer Kadetsky met Faith Frank in October of 2006 at Ryland College,
where Faith had come to deliver the Edmund and Wilhelmina Ryland
Memorial Lecture; and though that night the chapel was full of students,
some of them boiling over with loudmouthed commentary, it seemed astonishing
but true that out of everyone there, Greer was the one to interest Faith. Greer, a
freshman then at this undistinguished school in southern Connecticut, was
selectively and furiously shy. She could give answers easily, but rarely opinions.
“Which makes no sense, because I am stuffed with opinions. I am a piñata of
opinions,” she’d said to Cory during one of their nightly Skype sessions since
college had separated them. She’d always been a tireless student and a constant
reader, but she found it impossible to speak in the wild and free ways that other
people did. For most of her life it hadn’t mattered, but now it did.
So what was it about her that Faith Frank recognized and liked? Maybe,
Greer thought, it was the possibility of boldness, lightly suggested in the streak
of electric blue that zagged across one side of her otherwise ordinary furniture-
brown hair. But plenty of college girls had hair partially dipped the colors of
frozen and spun treats found at county fairs. Maybe it was just that Faith, at
sixty-three a person of influence and a certain level of fame who had been
traveling the country for decades speaking ardently about women’s lives, felt
sorry for eighteen-year-old Greer, who was hot-faced and inarticulate that night.
Or maybe Faith was automatically generous and attentive around young people
who were uncomfortable in the world.
Greer didn’t really know why Faith took an interest. But what she knew for
sure, eventually, was that meeting Faith Frank was the thrilling beginning of
everything. It would be a very long time before the unspeakable end.
• • •
She had been at college for seven weeks before Faith appeared. Much of that
time, that excruciating buildup, had been spent absorbed in her own
unhappiness, practically curating it. On Greer’s first Friday night at Ryland,
from along the dormitory halls came the ambient roar of a collective social life
forming, as if there were a generator somewhere deep in the building. The class
of 2010 was starting college in a time of supposed coed assertiveness—a time of
female soccer stars and condoms zipped confidently inside the pocket of a purse,
the ring shape pressing itself into the wrapper like a gravestone rubbing. As
everyone on the third floor of Woolley Hall got ready to go out, Greer, who had
planned on going nowhere, but instead staying in and doing the Kafka reading
for her freshman literature colloquium, watched. She watched the girls standing
with heads tilted and elbows jutted, pushing in earrings, and the boys
aerosolizing themselves with a body spray called Stadium, which seemed to be
half pine sap, half A.1. sauce. Then, overstimulated, they all fled the dorm and
spread out across campus, heading toward various darkish parties that vibrated
with identically shattering bass.
Woolley was old and decrepit, one of the original buildings, and the walls of
Greer’s room, as she’d described them to Cory the day she arrived, were the
disturbing color of hearing aids. The only people who remained there after the
exodus that night were an assortment of lost, unclaimed souls. There was a boy
from Iran who appeared very sad, his eyelashes clustered together in little wet
starbursts. He sat in a chair in a corner of the first-floor lounge with his computer
on his lap, gazing at it mournfully. When Greer entered the lounge—her room, a
rare single, was too depressing to stay in all evening, and she’d been unable to
concentrate on her book—she was startled to realize that he was merely looking
at his screen saver, which was a picture of his parents and sister, all of them
smiling at him from far away. The family image swept across the computer
screen and gently bounced against one side, before slowly heading back.
How long would he watch his bouncing family? Greer wondered, and though
she didn’t miss her own parents at all—she was still angry with them for what
they had done to her, which had resulted in her ending up at Ryland—she felt
sorry for this boy. He was away from home on another continent, at a place that
perhaps someone had mistakenly told him was a first-rate American college, a
center of learning and discovery, practically a School of Athens nestled on the
East Coast of the US. After managing the complicated feat of getting here, he
was now alone and quickly becoming aware that this place actually wasn’t so
great. And besides that, he was also pining for his family. She knew what it was
like to miss someone, for she missed Cory so continually and pressingly that the
feeling was like its own shattering bass vibrating through her, and he was only
110 miles away at Princeton, not across the world.
Greer’s sympathies kept collecting and expanding, while in the doorway of
the lounge appeared a very pale girl who stood clutching her midsection and
asking, “Do either of you have something for diarrhea?”
“Sorry, no,” said Greer, and the boy just shook his head.
The girl accepted their responses with a grim weariness, and then for lack of
anything else to do she sat down too. Curling through the porous walls came the
smell of butter plus tertiary butylhydroquinone, alluring but inadequate to the
task of cheering anyone up. Moments later this was followed by the source of
the smell, a big plastic tub of popcorn conveyed by a girl in a robe and slippers.
“I got the kind with movie theater butter,” she said to them as an added
inducement, holding out her bowl.
Apparently, Greer thought, these are going to be my people, tonight and
perhaps every weekend night. It made no sense; she didn’t belong with them,
and yet she was among them, she was one of them. So she took a hand span’s
worth of popcorn, which was so wet that her fingers felt as if she’d draped them
through soup. Greer was about to sit down and attempt a conversation; they
could tell one another about themselves, how bleak they felt. She would stay in
this lounge, even though Cory had encouraged her earlier not to stay in tonight,
but instead to go out to a party or some sort of campus event. “There has to be
something going on,” he’d said. “Improv. There’s always improv.” It was her
first weekend at college, and he thought she should just try.
But she’d said no, she didn’t really want to try, she would rather get through
it her own way. During the week she would be a super-student, working in a
carrel in the library, her head bent over a book like a jeweler with a loupe. Books
were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She’d always been one of those girls
with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost
doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating
corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran’s bouncing family. She had
learned to read before kindergarten, when she’d first suspected that her parents
weren’t all that interested in her. Then she’d kept going, plowing through
children’s books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually
into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing
both backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of
God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even
physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long,
unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in
bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the
past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of
protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in
adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she