The Author of The Wife Just Had Her First Oscars Experience. But Her Hollywood Days Are Far From Over / Lucy Feldman. In: TIME February 28, 2019

“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.
The Wife, about the inner life of a woman married to a revered novelist, was optioned soon after it was published, but the movie wasn’t made for more than a decade. One problem had to do with the tension central to the book–the power imbalance between a talented woman and her childish but esteemed husband. “It was very hard to get a man to play a jerk in a film called The Wife,” Wolitzer says. “He has to seem like a jerk but also get second billing.” (Jonathan Pryce took the role, and played it well.) ... [mehr] http://time.com/5540871/the-wife-author-meg-wolitzer/