Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 novel, The Interestings, is a work of literary fiction that follows a group of six artistically talented teenagers who meet at a summer camp in 1974. The narrative spans several decades, tracking the friends as their youthful ambitions collide with adult realities, leading to vastly different levels of success and fulfillment. As their lives diverge, the bonds of friendship are tested by financial disparity, moral compromises, and personal secrets. The novel explores themes including Managing Ambitious Expectations of Adult Life, The Corrosive Impact of Envy on Friendship, and The Intertwining of Art, Commerce, and Morality.

Wolitzer is an acclaimed author known for her insightful examinations of contemporary life, ambition, and female relationships, as seen in novels like The Wife and The Female Persuasion. The Interestings was a New York Times bestseller and was named a best book of the year by numerous publications. The story begins in the summer of President Richard Nixon’s resignation, grounding the characters in the post-Watergate disillusionment of the 1970s. As the narrative moves to New York City in the 1980s and beyond, it maps the characters’ trajectories against the city’s economic transformation and the rise of a wealthy “creative class.” A television adaptation of the novel was developed as a pilot for Amazon Studios but was not picked up for a full series.

This guide refers to the 2014 Riverhead Books trade paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of mental illness, substance use, addiction, sexual content, rape, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, disordered eating, ableism, child abuse, graphic violence, emotional abuse, cursing, illness, and death.

Plot Summary

In the summer of 1974, 15-year-old Julie Jacobson arrives on scholarship at Spirit-in-the-Woods, a performing arts summer camp in Belknap, Massachusetts. Hailing from Underhill, New York, Julie is grieving over the loss of her father, who died of pancreatic cancer early that year. On her first night, she joins a gathering of teenagers who jokingly christen themselves “the Interestings.” The group includes Ash Wolf, a beautiful aspiring actress; her charismatic older brother Goodman Wolf; Ethan Figman, a physically unattractive but extraordinarily gifted animator; Jonah Bay, the quiet son of folksinger Susannah Bay; and Cathy Kiplinger, an emotionally intense dancer. Ash casually renames Julie “Jules,” a new identity that Jules instantly embraces.

Ethan develops a romantic interest in Jules and shows her his animated shorts set in “Figland,” a parallel world he has invented. She recognizes his genius, but when he kisses her, she feels no physical attraction. They attempt a relationship before Jules tells him she cannot continue. Meanwhile, she forms an enduring friendship with Ash and harbors a silent attraction to Goodman, who barely notices her and starts dating Cathy instead.

The narrative, which moves freely across decades, jumps to 2009 to establish the disparity between the friends’ adult lives. Jules, now a clinical social worker in her early fifties, lives modestly in Manhattan with her husband, Dennis Boyd, an ultrasound technician. Each year, Ash and Ethan’s Christmas letter triggers Jules’s envy. Ethan’s TV show Figland has made him enormously wealthy; Ash directs feminist theater at her company, Open Hand. They run an organization called the Anti-Child-Labor Initiative, host annual conferences called the Mastery Seminars, and have two children: Larkin, a Yale student, and Mo, who has an autism-spectrum disorder.

Returning to the past, the novel reveals Jonah’s secret trauma. When he was 11, Barry Claimes, a folksinger and Susannah’s ex-boyfriend, secretly fed Jonah hallucinogens, recording the song fragments the disoriented boy produced and rerecording Jonah’s melodies as his own single. Jonah never told anyone, and the experience left him estranged from music.

On New Year’s Eve 1975, a crisis shatters the group. Goodman, drunk and bitter after his breakup with Cathy, slips away from the Wolfs’ party with her. At Tavern on the Green, something happens between them in a storage room. Cathy says Goodman raped her; Goodman insists it was consensual. He is arrested and Cathy plans to press charges against Goodman. Ash asks Jules to visit Cathy, hoping to persuade her to drop the charges. Cathy describes what Goodman did and calls Jules weak for her loyalty to the Wolf family. When Jules tentatively suggests to Ash that Cathy might be telling the truth, Ash furiously sends her away. Ethan brokers their reconciliation, but the question of what happened remains unresolved. Before the trial, Goodman flees the country.

During their final summer at camp in 1976, Jules discovers that Ash and Ethan have become a couple. She lies awake listening to their murmured intimacy, stunned and jealous. The pairing seems improbable, but their bond proves genuine. After high school graduation, the Wolf family invites Jules to Iceland, where she discovers the family’s secret: Goodman is alive and living in Reykjavik, supported financially by his parents. Gil Wolf, Ash and Goodman’s father, extracts a promise from Jules never to tell anyone, especially Ethan. Jules agrees, becoming complicit in the deception.

In 1981, Jules meets Dennis at a dinner party. He is shy and has experienced depression since college. Dennis takes an MAO inhibitor, an antidepressant that requires strict dietary restrictions because certain foods could trigger a fatal reaction. Jules and Dennis fall in love. Jules gives up acting after her teacher tells her the world does not need to see her perform and studies social work at Columbia. She and Dennis marry in 1986; Ash and Ethan marry the same year. Gil, acting as a surrogate father to Ethan, advises him to pitch Figland to a network. The show is picked up, marking the start of Ethan’s meteoric success.

The financial divide between the couples widens. At a dinner celebrating Ash’s theater work, Dennis collapses after unwittingly eating food contraindicated by his medication and experiences a mild stroke. Taken off the MAO inhibitor, Dennis experiences depression again and proves resistant to treatment. He loses his job and becomes a stay-at-home father to his and Jules’s daughter, Rory, while Jules works as the sole breadwinner. Ash, meanwhile, takes over providing financial support for Goodman from her aging parents, funneling money from Ethan’s fortune without his knowledge.

After visiting a factory in Jakarta where children produce Figland merchandise, Ethan begins a campaign against child labor. He gives Jules and Dennis $100,000 and cosigns their mortgage on a better apartment. Dennis agrees to try an experimental drug called Stabilivox to treat his depression, and he returns to work. Meanwhile, after graduating from MIT, Jonah is drawn into the Unification Church and must be deprogrammed by his friends. He later enters a long relationship with Robert Takahashi, an HIV-positive lawyer, but Robert eventually leaves him. At the Mastery Seminars, Jonah encounters Barry Claimes, who is performing a song he stole from Jonah. Jonah confronts him, strikes him with his own banjo, and confides in Ethan for the first time about what happened.

Jules and Dennis become directors of the declining Spirit-in-the-Woods. The summer runs smoothly, but Jules realizes the job is about preservation and logistics, not the creative electricity she once felt. When Goodman appears in the woods near camp, Dennis orders him away. Jules calls Ash to report the encounter, not realizing the phone is on speaker in a car in Prague, where Ethan hears everything. The revelation that Ash has maintained contact with Goodman for decades, and that Jules knew, triggers a devastating fight. Ash and Ethan separate. Jules and Dennis decline a contract to continue running the camp and return to New York, their marriage strained by Dennis’s accusation that Jules is more invested in her friends’ lives than in their own.

Ethan invites Jules to dinner and reveals he has melanoma that has spread to his lymph nodes. He kisses her, and for a moment the decades collapse, but Jules pulls away, recognizing, as she always has, that she does not want him. She tells him to reconcile with Ash, and he does. Jules finds new work running adolescent therapy groups, discovering an enormous affection for teenagers seeking emotional support.

Ethan’s treatments fail. He dies of a heart attack at 52. In the aftermath, Ash sends Jules a storyboard Ethan drew decades earlier: an unproduced animated short of himself and Jules as teenagers at camp, walking through the trees, hearts and stars exploding above their heads. Jules places it in a chest alongside her camp yearbooks and an aerial photograph in which Ethan’s feet rest on Jules’s head and Jules’s feet rest on Goodman’s head, physically representing the strange but fascinating connections between them.