Meg Waite Clayton is the nationally bestselling author of The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, and the Bellwether Prize finalist The Language of Light, all published by Random House's Ballantine Books and all major national book club picks. Her fourth novel, The Wednesday Daughters, will be released in 2013. Her books have been published in six languages. Her essays and stories have aired on public radio and appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, Writer's Digest, Runner's World, and The Literary Review. A graduate of the University Michigan Law School, she lives with her family in Palo Alto.
About Meg - Version 2.0
I didn't start out being a novelist, I started out as someone who wanted to be a novelist but had no idea how one went about that - much less any faith in my own talent. I went off to the University of Michigan thinking I would become a doctor, one of the few educational and career paths I understood. I emerged after seven years as a corporate lawyer in a tidy blue suit, and it was years later - and only at my husband's gentle reminder that I wasn't getting younger - that I got up the nerve to give writing a serious try. I was thirty-two by then, and pregnant with my second son, who was eleven when my first novel was published. Writing, I've discovered, is a lot harder than it looks.
Along the way, I wrote short stories and essays, and more than a few pages that are in the proverbial drawer. I had great luck on the first piece I ever published, an essay called "What the Medal Means" which sold quickly to the only publication I could imagine it in: Runner's World. The other short nonfiction I've published has also placed relatively easily, but my fiction was slower going. I sent stories out again and again before they began to sell, revising each time before I mailed them until they did finally start appearing in publications that include Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Literary Review.
My fiction is not closely autobiographical, but I do draw heavily from my own emotions and experiences as I write. If you're interested, you can find quite a bit about how I've drawn from life for my writing on the Book Groups pages for each book. For starters, anything clever any child has done in anything I've written was likely first done by my sons, Chris and Nick. Like Nelly in The Language of Light, I moved with them to the Maryland horse country that is fictionalized in that novel, to a farm that looked much like hers. Like the Wednesday Sisters, I've been raising them all the years I've been writing, developing the ability to write anywhere and anytime. Like Frankie, I moved a few times in my writing life, from Los Angeles to Baltimore to Nashville and now to Palo Alto, California. Growing up, I lived in ten different houses in Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Jersey before I went off to college. Like Betts from The Ms. Bradwells, I went to the University of Michigan and Michigan Law, where I lived in a house with a ratty old couch on its porch that, again, looks remarkably like the Ms. Bradwells' law school home. Sadly, unlike Betts, I have yet to be nominated for the Supreme Court - but I'm still willing!
I find, having written three novels now - and started a fourth - that friendships are at the core of my writing. I certainly am blessed with remarkable friends who fill that particular emotional well for me, and support me as I write. Jennifer Belt DuChene, my lawschool roommate, remains among my closest friends in the world, as does my Tuesday sister and fellow novelist, Brenda Rickman Vantrease, and my Tuesday brother and husband, Mac Clayton. My writing is certainly an homage to them, and to all my friends.
As much as I loved practicing law, my dream for as long as I can remember was to be a novelist. I feel incredibly grateful to be able to call myself one. Thanks to all of you who, in giving a little of your busy lives to follow my characters, allow me the pleasure of this life. - Meg
The video interview below was done by Lisa Van Dusen and Rachel Hatch for Palo Alto Online. More video, including book trailers here.
Favorite Classics
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Middlemarch by George Eliot Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger Excellent Women by Barbara Pym The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Contemporary Novels:
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Last Orders by Graham Swift A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Three Junes by Julia Glass Bel Canto by Ann Patchett Empire Falls by Richard Russo Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler Inventing the Abbots and Other Stories by Sue Miller
And Short Story Collections:
You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
