The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

Cover of The Wednesday Sisters: A Novel

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton


Clayton's book opens in late 1960s Palo Alto, California and follows the lives of five very different women.

From the bookflap:

Defined at first mainly by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love.  These "Wednesday Sisters" otherwise 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 the women are bonded by a shared love of literature -- Fitzgerald, Eliot, Austen, du Maurier, Plath, and Dickens -- and the Miss America Pageant, which they watch together every year.

As I read this book, I realized how little I know about the 10 years before my birth (I'm 34) --- Clayton is great at including those exact tiny details that make me feel like I was right there -- and making me want to learn more.  Some examples:  Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics, the March for Peace in San Francisco, the protesters at the Miss America Pageant.  The way the characters respond to the events happening all around them helps us understand what it was like to be a part of the majority culture of the time, while at the same time showing us the ways that some people began to slowly change their way of thinking and their preconceived notions.


Clayton's portrayal of marriage and motherhood spoke to me at several points -- probably especially so as being a mother is a big part of my life right now and marriage stuff is really, really hard.  At one point, Frankie thinks about her children going off on their own:  ". . . though I would always be their mother, I would cease to be their mother in the every-moment way I was now, in the way that Danny would continue to be an every-moment engineer even without the children at home.  And who would I be then? "  Each woman's marriage is different from the others'.  It's amazing really, how many different types of relationships can exist between two people.  And what similarities remain.

I didn't love the two scenes of rough sex and I thought the mystery behind Brett's gloves was a little anti-climatic but finishing the book, in bed with my sleeping daughter, I wept and held her closer and closer.  The Wednesday Sisters has too much substance to be called chick lit.  Check it out for some insight into the late 60s and 70s and to ponder what has changed and what has stayed the same.