Meg Wolitzer

`My parents let me walk everywhere ... Now the sense of freedom seems astonishing.'

By Dan Cryer | Staff Writer

Meg Wolitzer remembers Long Island in the '60s and early '70s as a safe place to be a child, a place where kids could come and go as they pleased.

``I see myself trudging along Jericho Turnpike endlessly,'' says Wolitzer, 39. ``It was the connective tissue between communities. My parents let me walk everywhere - past shopping centers and houses.

``Now the sense of freedom seems astonishing. We would play a game called `The Man From U.N.C.L.E.' [after the TV show]. We would all meet and be assigned missions and be gone all day, roaming around the neighborhood. I feel we were around for the last vestiges of freedom.''

Those early years in Syosset seem far away to Wolitzer now. The author of the novels ``Sleepwalking,'' ``Hidden Pictures'' and ``Friends for Life'' is raising her own children on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

For a girl with enough imagination, she recalls, a simple stroll could get the creative juices flowing. ``Streets in the neighborhood were named after women in the builder's family - Ann Drive, Leslie Drive, Harriet Drive. I used to wonder who was Harriet and so on. I turned it into something writerly in my head.

``Though it was a subdivision and all the houses were similar, I liked to try to figure out what the differences were. What about the house that had no books? And there was a house that had no furniture. The people who lived there kept saying that they had just moved in, but of course eventually they'd been there a long time. There was a story there.''

Stories, in fact, were a staple in the Wolitzer household. Meg's mother, Hilma, was an aspiring writer who published her first novel, ``Ending,'' by the time Meg was at Syosset High and her second, ``In the Flesh,'' when Meg was in college. Meg's father, Morton, worked as a school psychologist.

Every Friday night the book-loving Wolitzers followed a regular routine. ``After dinner we went to the Plainview Public Library, pillaging the new fiction shelf,'' Meg says. ``It had better new fiction [than the Syosset Library], and then we'd go to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream.''

It's not surprising that Wolitzer's sights were set on writing early on. She edited literary magazines in both junior high and high school.

Not for her the usual teen hangouts of mall or beach. ``We usually went to North Shore beaches, and they weren't very pleasurable experiences. And the Walt Whitman Mall still seems like the greatest oxymoron,'' though at age 12 or 13 she and her girlfriends would be dropped off there to shop for Huckapoo shirts and lip gloss.

As she grew older, Wolitzer's pleasures became more city-oriented. ``I was always on the Long Island Rail Road,'' she reports. ``My family went into the city a lot. When I got to be a teenager, I went by myself. We went to museums and first-run movies and Indian restaurants - things we considered exotic. I knew many families, though, who never went in.''

Still, the Island's imprinting left its stamp on her literary consciousness. ``Where you live early on just becomes it. It becomes a point of reference. Later you just add to the larder of knowledge.

``I didn't love where I lived. But when I go back to Long Island I have a particular feeling. I can't quite explain it. But it's a powerful locus of memory.''