Sleepwalking

Published when she was only twenty-three & written while she was a student at Brown, Sleepwalking marks the beginning of Meg Wolitzer’s acclaimed career. Filled with her usual wisdom, compassion & insight, Sleepwalking tells the story of the three notorious “death girls,” so called on the Swarthmore campus because they dress in black & are each absorbed in the work & suicide of a different poet: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, & Wolitzer’s creation Lucy Asher, a gifted writer who drowned herself at twenty-four. 

At night the death girls gather in a candlelit room to read their heroines’ work aloud. But an affair with Julian, an upperclassman, pushes sensitive , struggling Claire Danziger—she of the Lucy Asher obsession-–to consider to what degree her “death girl” identity is really who she is. As she grapples with her feelings for Julian, her own understanding of herself & her past begins to shift uncomfortably & even disturbingly. Finally, Claire takes drastic measures to confront the facts about herself that she has been avoiding for years.

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Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, The Female Persuasion, This is Your Life, Surrender, Dorothy, Sleepwalking, & Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel, Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City.

megwolitzer.com