The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer is imperative reading for any woman who has ever, with a heart so full it hurts, gazed lovingly at her sleeping child only to then glance at herself in the mirror and see a woman she no longer recognizes. It’s a story of four women. Four mothers. They are intelligent and educated and all held powerful positions before leaving the workforce to have children. Yet, even despite the comfortable privilege of their middle/high income New Yorker lives, each in her own way is suspended between who she is and who she always thought she would be.
For those wanting a light-hearted read, this is not it. Wolitzer is a brilliant - and complex - writer. The stories of these women and those with whom they live are not simple snapshots. They are portraits with the deep angles and dark shading of reality and the consequences of choices we all make as mothers, daughters, and wives. The consequences: they brim with both gratitude and regret.
There are several themes that run throughout the novel, but perhaps the most encompassing is feminism. The women – one a daughter of a prominent feminist, one a bohemian artist, one a statistician, and another who was voted the most promising in her college graduating class – have lived their lives expecting great things of themselves. Wolitzer flashes back throughout the book to stories of the girls’ mothers. Although I felt these flashbacks interrupted the flow of the contemporary issues, they did provide a historical context and framework for the ways the girls were shaped, purposely and unwittingly, by their mothers’ struggle for equality.
Perhaps most refreshing about this novel is the complete absence of judgment in the stay-at-home v. working mom debate. Instead, Wolitzer seamlessly addresses a larger dilemma: even in this day and age, women (particularly mothers) are not in fact provided equal opportunities or equal expectations. Society’s mindset may have changed, but the system in which it operates has not. That neither the author, nor the characters, has a simplistic answer authenticates the story, because as we know, there just isn’t one.
This book is exceptionally good. As I was reading, I felt a keen sense of recognition. It is one of those reads that encourages the use of post-it notes and highlighters. It is rich with short passages that illuminate the heart’s struggle to live up to our own expectations, to balance the fullness of being as we are with the hope of being more, and to maintain that hope especially in the times of flux and transition that besiege us when we least expect it. No, it isn’t a light novel, but it is lush and savory, and upon finishing it, you will feel as if you have found a friend in Meg Wolitzer.
