Time With... Meg Wolitzer

Novelist Meg Wolitzer had fun at the Oscars but would rather avoid the news cycle.

- Lucy Feldman

“YOU STILL HAVE TO WALK ON THE RED CARPET, even if they aren’t looking at you,” Meg Wolitzer says, swiping through photos from the Academy Awards over breakfast the Tuesday after the ceremony. Less than 48 hours earlier, the novelist had taken her seat on the second mezzanine of the Dolby Theatre, in the same section as Rami Malek’s mother, who would watch her son accept the award for Best Actor. Wolitzer was herself hoping to witness someone important to her collect a trophy: Glenn Close, the star of The Wife, the movie based on Wolitzer’s 2003 novel of the same name.

Close had sailed through wins at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards and so was presumed a shoo-in to win her first Oscar after leaving six previous ceremonies empty-handed. But then Frances McDormand opened the envelope and read off the winner’s name: Olivia Colman, for The Favourite. “There’s nothing you can do,” Wolitzer says, squeezing lemon into her tea at a New York City bistro. “It was an extraordinary evening with a big pang at the end, but it was still extraordinary.”

Recent months have been crazed for the 59-year old novelist. She’s done press for The Wife since its opening last summer; published a middle-grade novel with her friend Holly Goldberg Sloan in mid- February, then traveled to promote it; and jetted to Los Angeles to bask in Oscar glory alongside Close, with whom she has bonded over, among other things, their pint-size Havanese dogs, Pip and Jet.