Meg Wolitzer

A story of three college students' shared fascination with poetry and death, and how one of them must face difficult truths in order to leave her obsession behind

Sleepwalking

Isabella 

it was completely different from what i expected it to be. i was really interested on how it will go, but it was alright. not bad, but i wasn't fully into it as well. i was expecting more.

marie

i simply love reading books about depressed girls obsessed with dead poets. 5 stars

alex 

** spoiler alert **
           3.5~ rounded down

First loose thoughts:
- I needed this book around in high school when it would’ve been more relatable. 

- Felt like the death girls plot got lost/dropped somewhere in the middle? Would’ve liked to see how each character played out over time instead of the expansion of grief in family dynamics. 

- Not the ending I would’ve wanted, but it worked itself out (and i enjoyed it) nonetheless.

kate humphreys 

*chefs kiss* i’m going to let this sit for a few days and decide whether or not it’s a five star for me. this was just so damn beautiful, especially for a debut novel. the other novel by wolitzer that i have read i absolutely adored so i’m not surprised i love this one too. the way that she was able to capture grief and so many other important aspects of life is truly incredible. claire’s connection to lucy was so relatable for me and something i don’t often find in what i read. please read this.

Eloise

This book is highly explicit in its depiction of self-harm and suicide, yet it is not romanticized. The Death Girls do so at first, but this alters over time. While the wording is poetic and beautiful, it does not depict the issues in the same way. It makes the small, everyday and boring things beautiful, and it also makes recovery and moving on beautiful, which is so unusual in YA and NA books. The cast of characters is rather limited and centered on families; it is not particularly diversified. The Danziger family is Jewish, and it's well incorporated into the book. The portrayal of people of various ages was something I particularly liked – from childhood to middle age, they all appeared real and vibrant, and the middle-aged characters weren't written with scorn, as they sometimes are in works centered on young adults. Their anguish and recuperation are taken as seriously as Lucy's and Claire's.

A Swathmore college student is torn between her affair with an upperclassman and her devotion to the poet Lucy Ascher and leaves school in a desperate move

i feel like i wound up more invested in the themes of this book than the characters themselves which lessened my enjoyment of and investment in it. i was primarily looking forward to see the dynamics between the characters, the advertised death girls but i feel like they wound up being barely featured.

that being said, i found the exploration of the themes of the death and loss of a loved one, survivor's guilt and the impact this may have on an another's life plenty interesting. i like that wolitzer chose to make this a book about healing and choosing to connect with one another instead of remaining insular in one's sadness.

all in all, it was a good read - it just my preference for drama, grandness and more dynamic plot that let me down.

Fraser Simons

https://medium.com/springboard-though...

“Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.”

The ‘death girls’ of Swarthmore are a notorious trio of women on the Swarthmore campus. They are utterly consumed with the work of particular poets. They dress in black, hold seance-like rituals where they read from Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and a fictional poet: Lucy Asher.
They each go so far as to take steps to look like their chosen poet.

But unlike her friends, ostensibly, Claire Danziger has experienced the loss of her younger brother and that loss has molded her in ways she hasn’t yet unpacked. As she falls headlong into a relationship with Julien, she starts to question her death girl identity, distancing herself from her friends, though she has considered it vital to her being — until now.

“She had seen that look on the faces of lovers in restaurants, on the secret: a secret, meaningful glance exchanged between two people. There seemed to be a conspiracy of passion in the world.”
This internal schism only gets worse and Julien, though well-meaning, doesn’t have the tools to help Claire.

When her friend suggests a restorative cure she had tried herself when away from her friends, where she, for a short time, abandoned her life to connect with her poet by trying to encroach, however slightly, into the real life of her chosen poet, Claire, desperate to try anything, goes to the house where Lucy Asher’s parents live.

Amazingly, seeing something of their daughter in Claire, the pair hire her as a cleaner, and the new trio proceeds to reflect on their grief via the interactions with one another. These can be on a subtle, micro-scale; observing the ways in which each is different from the people in their own lives with the same roll: wife, father, mother, daughter, etc.

“It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days.”
Undoubtedly, it’s a strange concept for a book, but it ends up working.

While dwelling in the Ashers' grief, Claire seems able to achieve a kind of catharsis in that environment, where she is simply accepted by a family, in contrast to her own, which are described as having been ‘hardened’ by the death of their child. In a symbiotic way, the parents, too, being to process their grief — something which neither party realizes they were unable to do previously, and why they were shades of their former selves.

Sleepwalking is about empathy.

“It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn’t count, because in a way it was nothing; there wasn’t anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open empty space.”
Even when the actual actions of the characters are opaque, the description of what a character is feeling in regards to the action manages to resonate and inform the scene.

Sometimes what a person needs in order to fully realize the complexities of internalized trauma and grief, is just not something the majority of people around us provide — unintentionally stymying whatever it is a person needs to move on, and grow.

I imagine most people are familiar with the feeling of being inadequate to the task of giving what a person needs in situations regarding grief and loss. But framing it is as something as odd as this while contrasting it with the easy acceptance between Claire and the parents, ushers this notion into a more realized, more complete perspective.

It is more compelling for people who can remember what it’s like to be young and to think there is no one else who could feel like you do. Or to be in that place yourself. Surely everyone has felt that their pain or fear or terror or sadness is keener than anyone else; that your cup runneth over. And nobody could possibly understand.

Sleepwalking’s concept, then, becomes no more peculiar than the impenetrable nature of a person’s subjective inner workings. Why should it be so wild that the cure is any less atypical?

“Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.”

Camila 

This book wasn't what I was expecting.
I did enjoy it, however, the abstract pretty much tells you the story about the three "death girls", and we only follow Claire, barely getting to know Naomi and Laura. 
I liked Julian, I liked Helen and Ray and the bits we got of Lucy, nonetheless, I feel I would have enjoyed this so much more if the abstract wouldn't have let me believe this story was about the three girls.

daisy

Olivera Mitić

U mnogo navrata vidi se da je ovo debitantski roman i da Meg Volicer možda nije bila sigurna šta je konkretno htela da napiše. S druge strane, isto tako se vidi i da ima talenat, te u nekoliko scena ubada direktno u centar.

Kler je kontradiktoran i iritantan lik, ali dopalo mi se što na kraju zapravo prevazilazi melodramu na neki način. Džulijan i Naomi su zaslužili bolje, samo ću to reći.

Fun fact ovo je stota knjiga koju sam pročitala ove godine. Nice.

mis ⋆˚꩜｡

The debut novel from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion, a story of three college students’ shared fascination with poetry and death, and how one of them must face difficult truths in order to leave her obsession behind. Published when she was only twenty-three and written while she was a student at Brown, Sleepwalking marks the beginning of Meg Wolitzer’s acclaimed career. Filled with her usual wisdom, compassion and insight, Sleepwalking tells the story of the three notorious “death girls,” so called on the Swarthmore campus because they dress in black and are each absorbed in the work and suicide of a different poet: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and 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 and her past begins to shift uncomfortably and even disturbingly. Finally, Claire takes drastic measures to confront the facts about herself that she has been avoiding for years.

Sleepwalking

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