You claim not to be taking sides in the mommy wars...
Oh no, I would never.
But I can’t help but feel that a book that begins with the sentence, “All around the country, women were waking up,” is a pretty broad blow against those who have opted out.
Oh, you found me out! When I started writing “The Ten-Year Nap,” I was judgmental of women I had known and liked, who had given up careers when their kids were born, and somehow 10 years had gone by and they weren’t sure what they were doing. I thought to myself, “Why aren’t they driven? Why aren’t they guided by some singular purpose?”
But as I wrote and the characters became more complex, I thought, “Who am I to say?” I’m not writing a polemic. I really want to show what it’s like for women who stop working. And that hasn’t been done, as far as I could see, in fiction.
But there have been novels about working women, and about mothers.
Anytime you have intelligent women in a novel, they have jobs like “urban planner” or “architect.” It’s meant to show that they are smart. You never show them at that job, because that’s too boring, but you have to give them a job to assure the reader that they’re the kind of people the smart reader would like.
In fiction, stay-at-home moms have often been [subject to] mockery, and I think it’s very sexist: the stay-at-home mother whose children are oversubscribed, who has reduced her entire brain to trivial things. I mention a character in the book whose husband is so bored when his wife talks about her day that he has to take Ritalin in order to listen. And look, I have a bit of playfulness in this book because I don’t want it to be a somber meditation on motherhood versus work. I really want the novel to be about motherhood and work, and also about female ambition and what happens to it over time.
Previously, 
