“We’ll be Friends Forever, won’t we, Pooh?’ asked Piglet.
‘Even longer,’ Pooh answered.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
About Meg: the author bio
New York Times bestseller and book club favorite Meg Waite Clayton is the author of nine novels, most recently the instant USA Today bestseller Typewriter Beach and the international bestsellers The Postmistress of Paris and The Last Train to London. Her books have been featured on Good Morning America and the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice list, and in People and other newspapers and magazines all over the world. They have been IndieNext, Library Reads, LoanStars librarians, USA Today, Book of the Month Club, Costco and Target Book Club, and Amazon Editors’ picks, as well as finalists for the National Jewish Book Award, the Langum Prize, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her The Wednesday Sisters is one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. Clayton’s books have been published in 24 languages. Her screenplay for The Last Train to London was chosen for the Meryl Streep- and Nicole Kidman-sponsored The Writers Lab.
Meg’s novels draw on the history of real women facing the kinds of challenges women face, and women defying the odds to make differences, large and small, in the world. Inspirations include Mary Jayne Gold, Truus Wijsmuller, Beatrix Potter, Martha Gellhorn, and other journalists and photographers, and the women of Hollywood past and present.
Meg also writes for major newspapers, magazines, and public radio, mentors in the OpEd Project, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN, and the California bar. She divides her time between California and Connecticut.
A Bit More Personally…
For me, being a novelist meant being able to leap tall literary buildings in a single bound, so I went off to the University of Michigan thinking I would become a doctor, and emerged as a corporate lawyer in a tidy blue suit. I was thirty-two and pregnant with my second son by the time I worked up the nerve to give writing a serious try. He was eleven when my first novel was published. Writing, I’ve discovered, is a lot harder than it looks.
Along the way, I wrote short stories and essays. I had great luck on the first piece I ever published, an essay called “What the Medal Means,” which sold quickly to the only publication I could imagine it in: Runner’s World. My fiction was slower going, though. I sent stories out again and again, revising each time until they did finally start appearing in publications like Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Literary Review.
My fiction is not closely autobiographical, but I do draw heavily from my emotions and experiences as I write. Have a look at my Book Groups pages for details, but suffice it to say here that I’m blessed with remarkable friends who are forever helping me refill my emotional well, especially Jennifer Belt DuChene, Brenda Rickman Vantrease, Sheryl Cohen, Mac Clayton, and my current writing group, the Rough Drafts. Like Betts from The Ms. Bradwells, I miss sitting on that ratty old couch on our law school house porch with friends who, like The Wednesday Daughters, have known me since before I knew myself. My writing is certainly an homage to their love.
My dream since I was a child was to be a novelist. I feel incredibly grateful to be able to call myself one. I get to spend my days learning about what fascinates me, and reading and even watching old movies in the afternoon and calling it work! I love the process of writing, but I love as much steeping myself in the real details of whatever world I am setting my writing in. And I love the connection writing gives me with readers throughout the world. Thanks to all of you who, in giving a little of your busy lives to follow my characters, allow me the pleasure of this life. – Meg
Meg’s Favorite Quotes
“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” ―
“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” ―
“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”― Martha Gellhorn
“I would rather take a photograph than be one.” – Lee Miller
“[Success is]” a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.” – Lee Miller
“When a woman fails, it is much more serious than when a man fails, because the average person attributes that failure not to the individual, but to the fact that she is a woman.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Meg’s Favorite Quotes on Friendship
There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. — Jane Austen
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one. “— C.S. Lewis
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. — Mark Twain
And three from A.A. Milne:
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh?” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
“We’ll be Friends Forever, won’t we, Pooh?” asked Piglet.
“Even longer,” Pooh answered.
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
Meg’s Favorite Classic Books
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Meg’s Favorite Contemporary Books
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Last Orders by Graham Swift
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Three Junes by Julia Glass
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
Inventing the Abbots and Other Stories by Sue Miller
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr