Lindsay Gloade-Raining Bird

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (Riverhead Books, 2013)

We get bound up in each other. It’s inevitable. That’s what makes life interesting—the push and pull of people, especially the ones that you yearn for in one way or another, although not always the way that they want. We make promises in our youth that lack the follow through of day-to-day living. We love people but sometimes with limits, carefully placed for our own protection.

That’s what Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings made me ruminate on. Especially because the central relationships are friendships, of course, but also a little bit of envy, some obsession and love. That strange lingering love that pools itself in your most creative friends. They quench you—that aching need that lives behind your breastbone and never quite goes away. The parts of you that the people you love most might not even understand.

I like what Wolitzer says about honesty, about the secrets you carry with you forever, and the intimacy you sacrifice just by keeping them. It’s a book about a group of friends, sure, but it’s also about knowing and how there isn’t really such a thing, not completely, and how arrogant we are when we think we do. It’s about love but also about what real love lacks and how that’s OK, better even, because it’s not about finding everything but about choice—prioritizing. Which sounds clinical but isn’t. Not really, it’s about being real with yourself about what actually makes you happy.

I don’t talk much about art anymore. I don’t discuss writing, not in the way I used to, all tangled up with big ideas and theories. Plans. It’s not because I can’t, but more because I don’t need to. I’m sated with everyday happiness, the kind that comes from being with someone who has love that shores you up. The kind that passes through generations and lasts. I feel like Julz, really, deciding that I don’t need to be so creative, don’t need to define myself by it or feel like I have to be miserable to feed it. But we’re both still chasing something, a feeling we used to have, a worry for the future.

But maybe that’s just what life is.