Barely glancing at the menu, the novelist Meg Wolitzer ordered some scrambled egg whites, seven-grain toast and a Coke at the Three Guys diner on the Upper East Side one recent morning. As she scanned the room for mothers fresh from dropping off their children at one of several private schools in the neighborhood, she pointed out a pair of 30-something women in jeans and sweaters talking earnestly, heads together. “I think they’re planning a school event,” Ms. Wolitzer said.
A few tables away, two white-haired women sat chatting over coffee mugs. “Their children are in 80th grade,” Ms. Wolitzer said, smiling, “and they’re waiting for them to finish.”
Ms. Wolitzer, whose eighth novel, “The Ten-Year Nap,” is being published by Riverhead Books this week, did a lot of research by osmosis at the diner. Here she spent many mornings hanging out with other mothers post-school-drop-off.
Those encounters, some with women who did not work, provided the genesis of the new book, a multicharacter meditation on a group of upper-middle-class women, mostly in Manhattan, who have stayed home for a decade to raise their children.
