Beach Reads: 'The Griffin Sister's Greatest Hits'

Bestselling author Jennifer Weiner's latest novel The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits follows sisters Zoe and Cassie as they skyrocket to early‑2000s pop stardom, only for a tragedy to end their meteoric rise and shatter their bond. Years later, after going their separate ways, Zoe's teenage daughter tries to engineer a reunion. Weiner talks about her new book.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Today, we continue our beach read series with a book that will have you laughing, crying, and screaming sometimes at the same time. Jennifer Weiner is back with her book called The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits. It tells the stories of two sisters, one talented, Cassie, and one pretty, Zoe, who have a giant hit in the early 2000s. The kinds where their fans tell them their song changes their life.

Fast forward to 2024, Zoe is a housewife in New Jersey, while Cassie is hiding in Alaska. They broke up, but what happens to them remains a mystery until Zoe's daughter, Cherry, joins a TV singing competition. In Cherry's journey to fame, she hopes to find her aunt, Cassie, and uncover the mystery of The Griffin Sisters. From her debut book, Good in Bed, to In Her Shoes, which became the 2005 film starring Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette, Jennifer Weiner writes stories about women who are complex, compelling, who challenge expectations around femininity. The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits is out now. Jennifer, it is so nice to speak with you.

Jennifer Weiner: It's nice to talk to you, too. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: In The Griffin Sisters Greatest Hits, you have two women, Zoe--

Jennifer Weiner: I know. It's a tongue twister, I guess.

Alison Stewart: I'll get there. I'll get there. We meet them through their mother's eyes initially, through Janice, because they're just born months apart. That's harrowing when you read that in the book. How did you see the mom as a way to set us up for how Zoe and Cassie what they would be like?

Jennifer Weiner: That's really interesting because in every book I write, there's this huge, shaggy, messy first draft. In the first draft of The Griffin Sisters, there was a lot about the mom. You learned all about her, all about her childhood and how she got married and how she decided to become a mother, and this whole big thing about what she wants out of her life, which, of course, my editor is just like, "Too much. Too much."

Basically, this is a woman who's decided, she's grown up with all of these brothers and sisters and parents who don't have a lot of money, so she wants control. She wants a neat, orderly, regulated life. She wants one kid because that's all they can afford. She gets pregnant with her second child when her daughter is basically still a newborn, which it was-- I don't write horror, but that was about the scariest thing that I could think of as a mom.

Alison Stewart: Seriously. Right?

Jennifer Weiner: Yes. Not only does she have this second child that she has not planned for, that she doesn't really want, this child is not a kid who is easy to understand or easy for her to learn love. That's the way in, is we've got this dynamic where there's the older daughter who lives up to parental expectations and is pretty and is agreeable and can make her way easily in the world. Then there's Cassie, who is a musical prodigy but also a hot mess.

Alison Stewart: Well, what is the relationship like between perfect Zoe and talented, but a hot mess, Cassie?

Jennifer Weiner: I have had occasion to think a lot about how parenting has changed since I was a kid. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of what my mother used to call benign neglect, where we were free-ranging kids. You just go outside and play. I'll see you at dinner time. Go ride your bike.

Alison Stewart: Come back when the lights are on. The street lights.

Jennifer Weiner: Exactly. Right. I'm one of four. I always joke that there were a couple of us who were expendable. There were more where we came from. The idea that Cassie and Zoe's parents have is that they know that Cassie is struggling and they make her Zoe's job. They tell Zoe, "Take care of your sister, help your sister, be her friend, sit with her at lunch, go to the birthday parties with her, go to the pool with her." Here is poor Zoe, who just wants to live her life, and she gets turned into her sister's emotional support animal in a way that I don't think many parents in our enlightened 2025 would allow to happen, but back in the day, that was what you did.

Alison Stewart: What were you trying to explore with this idea of sisterhood and these particular characters?

Jennifer Weiner: Sisterhood is so complicated, always. Even when you don't have pop stardom and a family act band layered on top of it. I wanted to play with the ideas of talent and obligation. If you have an ability, a skill, a gift, a talent, what are you then required to do with it? Zoe's genius is interpersonal skills, and so, is she then required to hold her sister's hand and lead her through the thickets of other kids? Cassie is a musical prodigy who wants a life in classical music, where basically, 20 people are going to hear her, maybe, and Zoe wants to be famous.

When Zoe is a teenager and she's in this Spice Girls cover band and they're in a battle of the bands and somebody drops out because there's boy drama, and she says to her sister, "You owe me. You have to help because I did all these things for you, and I need you to do something for me." Then that gets super complicated because Cassie is so good that all of Zoe's dreams come true. The band gets signed. The band takes off. It's all happening just the way she wanted it, but it's not her doing. It's not because of her talent. It's not even her pretty face. Well, there's a lot of pretty girls who can shake a tambourine and look cute while they're doing it. I wanted to write about that.

Alison Stewart: Now, we know that something tragic happens to the sisters for causing them to be estranged, and won't give too much away, but how much did the pressure of fame, once they become famous, deepen the problems that were already there?

Jennifer Weiner: That was the other thing I wanted to talk about was what the world was like for young women and especially young famous women in the early aughts. Of course, that meant Britney. That meant reading Britney's biography, going back, and all of the total requests lives that live forever on YouTube, all of the tabloid covers that are there. It was shocking. The weight shaming and the body shaming and the like, "Britney's gone crazy. Jessica Simpson is fat now." Just all of this hysteria about these women and their bodies and their love lives and their choices, and it was just such a, you can't win, situation.

Here are Cassie and Zoe, and Cassie is larger. Cassie is a plus-size heroine. The record label, of course, is always trying to hide her behind something à la Carnie Wilson of Wilson Phillips.

Alison Stewart: That's right.

Jennifer Weiner: They were putting grand pianos and boulders where grand pianos and boulders don't belong just so no one will see--

Alison Stewart: In a music video. Right?

Jennifer Weiner: Yes. Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Just a big boulder.

Jennifer Weiner: Right. Even Zoe, who is beautiful, there's body checking going on where there's a record label executive who puts his arm around her and gives her a little pinch and is like, "We'll have a StairMaster sent to your hotel room." I wanted to talk about the body stuff. I wanted to talk about the envy and the rivalry. It's already so hard and so complicated between these two young women, and then adding a love triangle in there, and all of the scrutiny, all of the tabloid and paparazzi, and all of that pressure, and just the way that women got ground up like sausage meat back then. I say back then, and I'd like to think that things are like, "Oh, they're better now. We would never, ever, ever talk about a young woman that way." I'm so sure that's true.

Alison Stewart: I'm interested in you reading the Britney biography. What surprised you when you're reading the Britney biography?

Jennifer Weiner: Well, I think it was remembering back to that Diane Sawyer interview. It's the Britney Justin breakup has just happened, and the narrative that Justin's camp has put out there is that she cheated on him. There was the Cry Me a River video, and there was that whole thing. Diane Sawyer is grilling Britney, like, "What did you do to this poor young man? You broke his heart. How could you do this?"

Then you're reading the book, and you're learning there was cheating going on, but Justin was cheating on Britney. Then she was pregnant. This was when she was still walking the virginity line, and so that couldn't happen. They're arranging for this abortion, but she can't actually go to a doctor's office, so she's writhing in agony on the bathroom floor while Justin is serenading her on his guitar. I just wanted to be like, "Justin, that's not helping." That was not the story that you were getting if you were reading Us Weekly.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with author Jennifer Weiner about her new book, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits, as well as the Britney biography. I might have to check that out. Let's talk about another relationship in the book, Zoe and her daughter Cherry. Zoe's in Haddonfield, New Jersey, being a housewife. Cherry is hoping to pursue a music career. Of course she is. Right?

Jennifer Weiner: Of course, she is. Right.

Alison Stewart: Of course, she is. What is it about Zoe's experience in the music industry that has her worried for Cherry?

Jennifer Weiner: Well, having survived pop stardom in the aughts and all of the stuff we were talking about, the body stuff, the scrutiny about your love life, the idea that if anything happened in the band or in your relationship, the woman was going to get blamed. You can go back and see that happening over and over and over again with all of pop stars from the aughts. She's also been the victim of a sexual assault, which she, in her own head, isn't really calling a sexual assault. She hasn't quite gotten her arms around the language of what's happened to her and what a violation it was.

She knows what it's like to be a young woman and to want fame so badly that you will do anything. She can see her daughter getting ready to feed herself into the machine that chewed up Zoe and chewed up Cassie and left them these broken husks of people. Of course, she doesn't want that for her daughter, and of course, the more she tells Cherry, "No, no, no," the more Cherry wants it.

Alison Stewart: Well, Cherry is an 18-year-old girl. She's rebellious.

Jennifer Weiner: Yes. As the mother of teenagers, I can tell you that the surest way to get your kid to do something is for you to tell them, "Don't do that because here's how it went for me." Because they're going to be like, "Well, I'm not you and I'm different and things have changed and it's better now. What do you know anyhow?" That sort of thing.

Alison Stewart: How much did you pull from your own 18-year-olds when you were writing Cherry?

Jennifer Weiner: I think any 18-year-old thinks that she's bulletproof, and thinks that anything the world did to the women who came before her, whether they're her mother or her teachers or her mentors or just people that she knows in the world, that's not going to happen to her. She knows better, she is stronger, she is aware she's going in with her eyes open, and she's not going to let any of this happen.

For Cherry, I think some of that is true, but some of it is not. I think that Zoe knows more than she does about just how bad it can be. Because really, it's a supply and demand issue. If you're not willing to do X or Y or Z to make the band, there are a thousand girls in line behind you who will do X and Y and Z and all of it to get where they want to go.

Alison Stewart: Many of the characters in this book are struggling on some level with their mental health. What was it like to get inside the head of a character like Cassie, who is battling depression and self-blame?

Jennifer Weiner: Cassie was really really interesting to me because I think if she had been born more recently, she would have had a diagnosis. Instead of just being like, "She's socially awkward or she's weird," or she's whatever she is, I think that people would recognize that she's somewhere on the spectrum and needed support, but there wasn't that support in the 70s and in the 80s.

She is missing some innate abilities. She didn't get the support that might have helped her. She feels just incredibly guilty. She blames herself for this tragedy that's happened. She thinks everything is her fault. She thinks that the way to make it right is to do penance and to take herself as far away from everyone she's hurt as she can get, which ends up being Alaska.

It was really interesting. My husband and I traveled to Alaska, in part just because I'd always wanted to go there, but also because I knew part of this book was going to be set there. When you talk to people, or actually when you eavesdrop on other conversations, you hear, a lot of people in Alaska seem to have left some previous version of themselves behind for some kind of reason. There are native Alaskans, but there are also a lot of people who flamed out some other place. I wanted to write about that landscape and just how far away Cassie feels, and how well it fits with her sense of herself. It's dark 20 hours a day, and that's how she feels.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits. It's by my guest, Jennifer Weiner. Jennifer, someone might choose your book to read as part of our Summer Reading Challenge here at WNYC. We've invited you to fill out our list of books you would recommend for our list. A classic that you've been meaning to get to. What did you pick?

Jennifer Weiner: I picked Middlemarch, but, man, I don't know if it's going to happen. I want to be a person who has read Middlemarch, but I understand for that to be true, I'm going to have to read Middlemarch, and I just can't. Every summer I try, I do.

Alison Stewart: How about a book that's set or about New York City?

Jennifer Weiner: I picked American Psycho because, yeah, I read that book in college, and it really made an impression. I think that the New York that that book describes is not a New York that exists anymore. I think it would be interesting for young people who never got to see that part of New York before Times Square felt like a Disney ride, to remember what it was like.

Alison Stewart: That's by Bret Easton Ellis. A memoir or a biography that has your interest.

Jennifer Weiner: I picked Graydon Carter's When the Going Was Good. Graydon Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair when you could spend $100,000 on room service for a story.

Alison Stewart: So true.

Jennifer Weiner: As a former journalist, I was so, so interested in that high life. The absolute height of, like, "Oh, we're going to get Annie Leibowitz to take the cover photo, and it's going to cost $500,000," and sign new houses like, "Okay, all right." It's like a fairy tale.

Alison Stewart: A recent debut novel. This is one of my favorites of the year. I love this book. Blob.

Jennifer Weiner: Blob: A Love Story. Young woman working in a cheap hotel discovers what she thinks is maybe a blob fish outside of a bar and brings it home as one does. It starts turning into a man.

Alison Stewart: The perfect man.

Jennifer Weiner: Yes. A hot man. I think it's like a modern spin on Frankenstein. Because she's creating this guy, but he's also pushing back on her, and there's this hilarious section where he's like, "I'm a slave and slavery is illegal," which he knows because he's been watching PBS while she's at work.

Alison Stewart: We've got 30 more, and I do want to get your last one. A book published in 2025 by Mia McKenzie.

Jennifer Weiner: These Heathens. Young woman in poor rural Alabama, unexpectedly pregnant in the days before Roe versus Wade. She and her teacher go on an adventure to solve her problem. Very timely.

Alison Stewart: Jennifer Weiner, thank you for your time.

Jennifer Weiner: Oh, this was fantastic. Thank you so much.