The Ten-Year Nap

Meg Wolitzer

Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen are friends in New York. Amy, Roberta, and Karen all have sons in a private school together. Jill and Amy have know each other since college and although Jill now lives with her husband and daughter in the suburbs, they are still best friends. All four women were raised to know they could do anything and had degrees in different fields. All are now stay at home moms by choice.

Now their babies are older, no longer dependent on them. They are starting to question themselves, their husbands, their homes, and their dreams. Are they happy where they are? What about those dreams from their twenties and thirties as they finished their schooling and became career women?

The Ten-Year Nap is a voyage of these women over a year or so when it is time to once again re-write their lives. (If you've lived long enough, you realize you re-write yourself numerous times over the years.) Each has different joys and problems. Amy is content being a mother but believes that perhaps she should be more. Jill is unhappy with her adopted daughter, wondering if she made a mistake. Roberta gave up her art to take care of their children and her struggling husband - the wanna be puppeteer who has to work a regular job to support them. Karen is the numbers whiz who can't understand her friends.

There is a forlornness of unrealized dreams underlying this novel. These women all believe what they "should feel" and are vaguely guilty when they don't. They were trained to "go somewhere, do something, be somebody." Instead they decided to stay home with their children. While an important job, they're not sure that's all they should be doing. Has life passed them by?

To contrast these four women, there is a fifth, Penny, who seems to "have it all". She is the curator of a small museum, has a successful husband, and three children, including her son in the private school. She seems to juggle the different aspects of her life well - but she has her own issues that the other women observe.

Meg Wolitzer looks at the American woman after feminism (in fact, Amy's mother has been a feminist activist all her adult life). What is needed to make life fulfilling? Is it a meaningful career? Is it happy, healthy children? Is it a happy family life? She shows that it's no easier now than it was 20 or 40 or 60 years ago. It's part of life.

Notice:  Suggestive dialogue or situations

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