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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of this beautifully written, poignant, and sweeping novel of five women who, over the course of four decades, come to redefine what it means to be family.
"This generous and inventive book is a delight to read, an evocation of the power of friendship to sustain, encourage, and embolden us. Join the sisterhood!"--Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club
For thirty-five years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967. These "Wednesday Sisters" seem to have little in common: Frankie is a timid transplant from Chicago, brutally blunt Linda is a remarkable athlete, Kath is a Kentucky debutante, quiet Ally has a secret, and quirky, ultra-intelligent Brett wears little white gloves with her miniskirts. But they are bonded by a shared love of both literature--Fitzgerald, Eliot, Austen, du Maurier, Plath, and Dickens-and the Miss America Pageant, which they watch together every year.
As the years roll on and their children grow, the quintet forms a writers circle to express their hopes and dreams through poems, stories, and, eventually, books. Along the way, they experience history in the making: Vietnam, the race for the moon, and a women's movement that challenges everything they have ever thought about themselves, while at the same time supporting one another through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success.
Humorous and moving, The Wednesday Sisters is a literary feast for book lovers that earns a place among those popular works that honor the joyful, mysterious, unbreakable bonds between friends.
Author Notes
Meg Waite Clayton is an American author, and a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Runner's World and public radio, frequently on the particular challenges that women face.
Her first novel, The Language of Light, was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (now the PEN/Bellwether). She has also written The Race for Paris, The Wednesday Daughters, The Four Ms. Bradwells, and The Wednesday Sisters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Wednesday Sisters look like the kind of women who might meet at those fancy coffee shops on University--we do look that way--but we're not one bit fancy, and we're not sisters, either. We don't even meet on Wednesdays, although we did at the beginning. We met at the swings at Pardee Park on Wednesday mornings when our children were young. It's been thirty-five years, though--more than thirty-five!--since we switched from Wednesdays at ten to Sundays at dawn. Sunrise, whatever time the light first crests the horizon that time of year. It suits us, to leave our meeting time up to the tilt of the earth, the track of the world around the sun. That's us, there in the photograph. Yes, that's me--in one of my chubbier phases, though I suppose one of these days I'll have to face up to the fact that it's the thinner me that's the "phase," not the chubbier one. And going left to right, that's Linda (her hair loose and combed, but then she brought the camera, she was the only one who knew we'd be taking a photograph). Next to her is Ally, pale as ever, and then Kath. And the one in the white gloves in front--the one in the coffin--that's Brett. ••• Brett's gloves--that's what brought us together all those years ago. I had Maggie and Davy with me in the park that first morning, a park full to bursting with children running around together as if any new kid could join them just by saying hello, with clusters of mothers who might--just might--be joined with a simple hello as well. It wasn't my park yet, just a park in a neighborhood where Danny and I might live if we moved to the Bay Area, a neighborhood with tree-lined streets and neat little yards and sidewalks and leaves turning colors just like at home in Chicago, crumples of red and gold and pale brown skittering around at the curbs. I was sitting on a bench, Davy in my lap and a book in my hand, keeping one eye on Maggie on the slide while surreptitiously watching the other mothers when this woman--Brett, though I didn't know that then--sat down on a bench across the playground from me, wearing white gloves. No, we are not of the white-glove generation, not really. Yes, I did wear them to Mass when I was a girl, along with a silly doily on my head, but this was 1967--we're talking miniskirts and tie-dyed shirts and platform shoes. Or maybe not tie-dye and platforms yet--maybe those came later, just before Izod shirts with the collars up--but miniskirts. At any rate, it was definitely not a white-glove time, much less in the park on a Wednesday morning. What in the world? I thought. Does this girl think she's Jackie Kennedy? (Thinking "girl," yes, but back then it had no attitude in it, no "gi-rl.") And I was wondering if she might go with the ramshackle house beyond the playground--a sagging white clapboard mansion that had been something in its day, you could see that, with its grandly columned entrance, its still magnificent palm tree, its long, flat spread of lawn--when a mother just settling at the far end of my bench said, "She wears them all the time." Those were Linda's very first words to me: "She wears them all the time." I don't as a rule gossip about people I've never met with other people I've never met, even women like Linda, who, just from the look of her, seemed she'd be nice to know. She was blond and fit and . . . well, just Linda, even then wearing a red Stanford baseball cap, big white letters across the front and the longest, thickest blond braid sticking out the back--when girls didn't wear baseball caps either, or concern themselves with being fit rather than just plain thin. "You were staring,̶ Excerpted from The Wednesday Sisters: A Novel by Meg Waite Clayton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.