Books That Matter: Laura McGrath on THE WIFE by Meg Wolitzer
Welcome to Books That Matter. In this series, I’ll speak with writers I admire to learn about their lives as readers and deep dive into a book that matters to them.
is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. She also writes the popular publishing substack, TextCrunch.
In today’s episode, Laura joins me to talk about Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife. I absolutely loved reading this book and it is a novel that absolutely must be discussed so I was thrilled to get the chance to deep dive into it with Laura. We talked about what makes a good publishing novel and how this particular book illuminates gender disparities in the literary world, while saying something much broader about what it means to be a woman and a wife. Of course we also we dive into Laura’s book Middlemen, which is all about the unique role literary agents play in the contemporary American publishing landscape. This book is the very definition of a rich text. I found Laura’s discoveries fascinating and I think any reader of contemporary fiction will as well. While we do talk about the end of The Wife, we save that for the last few minutes of our conversation and give ample warning before we we into spoilers!
You can find Middlemen on Bookshop.org or wherever you get your books! This is a peek behind the curtain of a very opaque industry and if you love books, I think you’ll find it extremely interesting.
Connect with Laura: Website | Instagram | Substack | Middlemen on Bookshop
