Jennifer Weiner and the Search for an Ex-Boyfriend

Posted on September 5, 2006

Bestselling author Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes) discusses her new short story collection, The Guy Not Taken (Atria), and why writing short stories is different from writing novels.

"An editor from Glamour wanted me to write a short story for them, so I send them 'Dora on the Beach' and they liked it, but the main character was too old for their target audience. So I told them I had this idea for a story about a woman who comes across her ex's online wedding registry, based on my experience of surfing www.theweddingchannel.com for the name of every guy I ever dated. I mean, what did God make the Internet for if you can't check up on your ex?"
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Of course, writing short stories is a far cry from working on a novel, Weiner said.
"There are good and bad things about it," said Weiner, a fan of the collected works of Lorrie Moore, Amy Bloom, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. "You're done with it, you can write a good short story in a couple of weeks, but with a novel, you're - at least I'm - stuck with that baby for a year. But the hard part is you have to think about the details that you use to get your point across in 20 pages vs. 400."

This is why Jennifer Weiner is a bestselling novelist: imagination, imagination, imagination. Ok, we admit it had never even occurred to us to search theweddingchannel.com for any reason whatsoever. Of course that could be because we're rather self-absorbed. But still, we're thinking that it's a teeny bit stalker-ish.