How Britney Spears influenced Jennifer Weiner’s ‘Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits’

Go ahead and call contemporary women’s fiction “chick lit” or just a light summer beach read. Jennifer Weiner knows it’s really a Trojan horse.

Weiner has penned bestseller after bestseller since 2001, when her debut novel “Good in Bed” reached the stratosphere of popularity among female readers. Within the compulsively readable and entertaining pages of all her stories, Weiner loads complex issues that resonate in women’s lives – body image and weight shaming; motherhood and infertility; infidelity; addiction and substance abuse, just to name a few.

Weiner’s newest release, “The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits,” her 22nd novel, is no exception.

Set against the glitzy world of pop music stardom in the early aughts, this affecting saga of two sisters explores the destructive power of fame and inequity in the music business. The main characters Zoe and Cassie Grossberg grow up in working-class Philadelphia, where many of Weiner’s stories are set.

Zoe is the conventionally beautiful, popular sister who dreams of becoming a pop star despite her minimal talent. But Cassie, plus-size, plain and awkward, has an immense gift for singing. Zoe persuades Cassie to enter a local battle of the bands, where they catch the attention of a music executive and soon become a pop duo phenomenon. But things, of course, become tragically complicated.

In a starred review, Booklist called “The Griffin Sisters,” which hit book retailers on April 8, “a story about the ways those closest to us can hurt us the most deeply, the destructive power of guilt, and the rough road to forgiveness. This is an irresistible, multigenerational tale from a master of her craft.”

“I think that a lot of the stuff that gets called women’s fiction, or chick lit, or beach books or whatever, are sometimes like Trojan horses, where there’s a pink cover, there’s Hollywood, there’s this, there’s that. But when you crack that spine, there is some serious stuff going on,” said Weiner via Zoom from her office (famously located in the walk-in closet of her bedroom in her Philadelphia home).

“My books are kind of sneakily political, because I don’t think that everything has to be like a speech or a screed or a march.”

In advance of her appearance Monday, April 14, in Tustin for A Slice of Literary Orange, Weiner spoke to me about the dynamic among sisters, what the music industry has in common with publishing, and how Britney Spears’ memoir served as literary inspiration. This exchange has been edited for clarity and length:

Q. You have a sister, the actor Molly Weiner. I wonder what, if anything, about that relationship informs this book?

Jennifer Weiner: I wouldn’t say that there’s anything specific to that relationship. I think it’s more universally about sisters and about roles that women get assigned in families. So when you meet Cassie and Zoe, you’re going to see pretty quickly they’ve been put into their boxes. And some of it is based on real reasons, on their strengths and abilities and weaknesses and needs. And then some of it is just, you know, the thing families do to these kids – this one is the smart one, this one’s the funny one, this one’s athletic… Now I have daughters, so I’ve been able to try to heal this dynamic.

I feel like any woman who’s been in a family, whether you’ve got a sister or not, we all got put into some kind of box. I think for many of us, adulthood has been trying to get out of it.

Q. What about the world of this story? You’ve written about Hollywood and about many different worlds in your stories, but I think this is the first time in the music industry.

JW: This is the first time in the music industry, yes.

Q. Why this? Why now?

JW: Well, the ‘why now,’ I think, is probably Britney Spears. I was watching the ‘free Britney’ of it all, and then reading her memoir, being able to look back at the early aughts and the way that we talked about young women. If you go back and watch Diane Sawyer’s interview with Britney Spears, Sawyer was like, ‘You did such terrible things to that poor young man. You broke his heart. Why did you do that?’ And then you read Britney’s book, and you realize that she had been pregnant and more or less forced to have an abortion at home because they didn’t want to take her to the clinic. So they’re like feeding her Misoprostol, and she’s writhing in pain on the bathroom floor while Justin [Timberlake] is serenading her on his guitar…which I’m sure was a lot of “help.”

She was so mistreated by her family, by her boyfriends, by her label, by the press, and by people like me, who were consuming all that stuff about her, every twist and turn of the story – ‘Oh, my God! She’s shaving her head. What’s going on?’ ‘Oh, my God! Quickie marriage!’  I really wanted to take a good hard look at that moment in time, and set it in the present, with the question in the background of, Are we doing any better?

Q. You have been a huge advocate for women’s parity in the publishing industry. Just this year, there was a report that said women are publishing more than men. Does that mean success to you?

JW: No. I mean, it was never about publishing more. We know that women are the consumers of fiction, right? If a book is on the bestseller list, women put it there. So we’re writing fiction. We’re reading fiction. We’re talking about fiction. We’re having book clubs about fiction. We’re in community about fiction. The issue is are the books that we’re reading, aren’t being talked about with the same level of respect as books that men are writing and reading. Does being a young woman author, or having a young woman at the center of your story, automatically disqualify it from literature, and put it into some other like romance or chick lit, or women’s fiction?

I mean, things have gotten better, and the thing that I like to point to is that for years and years and years the New York Times did not review any romance. The book review section acknowledged the genre – which is, by the way, by far the best-selling and most profitable genre – once a year on Valentine’s Day, when they would exhume some ancient male literary professor to opine on how crappy these books were, and then he’d go back to his crypt. But now they review romance. They have a romance columnist, who is very knowledgeable about the genre, and can discuss it in a serious way. That was all I ever wanted, for my books to be taken just as seriously as they would have been if my name had been Jonathan, and my heroines had been dudes.

Q. And you’re reviewed there now. It only took, what, 15 novels for that to happen, but, hey.

JW: Exactly. You know I’m playing the long game here, playing the long game…

Q. In some respects, we can make a parallel between women in publishing and women in the music business, as you write about it.

JW: Well, that’s the thing. Another really interesting thing was the whole one step forward, two steps back of it all, especially in this pop culture moment in which we find ourselves. I’ve been calling it the era of the incredible shrinking starlet, where it just seems like women on the red carpet are getting tinier and tinier and tinier. And you watch as world leaders are doing increasingly outrageous things. Our rights are being taken away and these huge, terrible things are happening. And meanwhile in pop culture it’s all ‘trad wives’ and Ozempic, and that’s not an accident, I don’t think.

Q. What can contemporary literature do in the face of this?

JW: I think about that a lot. So what can fiction do? The first thing I would say is that joy is an act of resistance, whether it’s a story that is transporting you and allowing you to escape, or cooking, or sewing, or playing the piano. Joy is political, the personal is political, and I think that in this fraught moment, we all need to be taking care of ourselves. If we get depleted, that does nobody any good, right? So whatever self-care looks like for you, whether that is reading romantic novels or baking sourdough, or, like me, starting piano lessons again after a 35-year hiatus. True story. I’m still terrible, still lousy.

Q. Did you do it as research for this book? 

JW: No, it was before it was before I wrote the book, but I was very, very glad that I at least had some kind of musical language when I went to write this.

Q. Getting back to the bigger issue…Not that I’m an expert on your oeuvre, but I never get the feeling in your stories that you’re creating an argument for anything. All of the problems are growing organically out of who these characters are, contemporary women dealing with our culture right now.

JW: Absolutely. And first of all, I thank you for saying I have an oeuvre!

Q. Well you do!

JW: Means a lot; I love it. But yeah, I mean, I think if you are a woman in the world today, you are facing political issues, whether or not you’re identifying them that way. Just moving through the world, hour by hour, minute by minute, you’re confronted with choices and with questions. This is what it means to move through the world in 2025 in a female body. Is it better than it used to be? Is it as good as it could be?

Q. Let me ask a little bit about research for this book – I’m curious about how much time you spend researching and what that looks like for you.

JW: Yeah, I mean, so I mean, I don’t even know what people did before the Internet. And I was alive before the Internet, so I really should remember… Anyway, a lot of it was just going back and watching old episodes of ‘Total Request Live’ on YouTube and remembering, like, Oh, my God, Carson Daly, that’s a name I haven’t thought of in a really long time!

And I have friends in the business; one who is a singer-songwriter, sort of more like a folky chick singer, who talked to me about songwriting and performing and breaking through. I have another friend who is a record label executive, who talked to me about when this industry was back in the early aughts, like when radio was still much bigger than streaming platforms. The way you would break out a new artist is you would send them on road trips, where they would just go across the country from radio station to radio station to radio station, and they would haul their keyboard or their guitar, you know, into the conference room. They would do like a little tiny desk concert, give their spiel, and leave the single, hoping it got played. Then they’d go down the stairs, back to the car, and off to the next station. My friend actually did this with Sarah Bareilles back in the day, driving her around.

I had no idea – I didn’t know that that was how it happened. I just thought, Well, you make a record and you put it in the mail, so learning about that process was really interesting. Then, for the reality show part of it, I talked to Diana DeGarmo, who was an ‘American Idol’ contestant back in the day, who walked me through the whole audition process, which was fascinating. The most interesting thing that I learned is that they shoot auditions over a period of two or three or four days, but then they edit it to make it look like it’s all happening on the same day, which means you can’t change your clothes. You have to wear the same clothes every day for three or four days.

You know, research is fun, getting all those little details that really make something feel real is. I like that.

Q. You were a newspaper reporter for 10 years before you became a successful novelist. How does that skill set influence your writing? 

JW: I think, like learning to see with a reporter’s eye, right? Like learning to look for details, listening to how people talk, watching, what they are wearing and how they’re standing, and just all of that stuff. And learning to write quickly and learning to write on deadline and learning how to not be precious about your prose. I go to college, and I’m an English major, and I study creative writing with some really amazing, super highbrow people. Of course, I want to be a novelist, that’s the dream, but I realize no one is hiring entry-level novelists…I went to my parents, ‘Would either of you be interested in being a patron of the arts and supporting me for several years while I write a novel?’ And they were like, ‘No, no, we won’t be doing that.’

So what am I going to? I need a j-o-b. What are the jobs where you get paid for writing? And that was newspapers.

So I get this job at the Center Daily Times, this tiny newspaper in State College, Pennsylvania. One of my job duties is typing the school lunch menus for five school districts.

So here I am: I have studied with Toni Morrison and John McPhee and Joyce Carol Oates, and I am typing in ‘bun, tater tots, fruit cup, your choice skim or chocolate milk.’ I mean, in retrospect, it was great. Nothing will knock the pretension out of you faster than having to go cover the sewage board hearing and having to type the school lunch menus.

Q. One of the things about your work that shows you have that kind of background is that you’re always writing with the reader in mind, not writing for the sake of being writerly.

JW: Right? Which is another thing newspapers teach you. I remember using a phrase like ‘sans’ or ‘in lieu’ of something, and my editor just writing in the margins, ‘Why French?’ And I was like, Why French, exactly. I mean I can appreciate literary fiction, I can appreciate a beautiful sentence, a beautifully crafted paragraph, choosing the right word. But there is something about a very clean-lined prose. You’re telling the story, and it gets the job done.

What is the job for ‘The Griffin Sisters’? What do you hope readers get out of it? 

JW: The thing I want readers to take away is the thing I always want: I want them to be entertained. I want them to feel that sense of escape and transport and joy, getting to live in another version of reality – because this one’s kind of sucky right now, so that’s important. But also the book asks some questions about creativity and the price of living a creative life, especially for women. And so I would love it if readers came away thinking about that, thinking about what do we do to young female artists? Is it the same as what we do to young male artists? Is it worse? Is it better? Is it different? Where have we come, and how far do we still need to go?

Jennifer Weiner is appearing Monday, April 14, at 6:30 pm at Clifton C. Miller Community Center, 300 Centennial Way, Tustin, CA 92780. Complimentary books are available, while supplies last. No registration required. Early arrival suggested. For more information, call (714) 566-3034 or email ocpl.programs@occr.ocgov.com .