In Weiner’s other novels, too, a sometimes uneasy balance is maintained between light comedy and heavier themes. “In Her Shoes” charts the problematic relationship of two sisters: Rose, the older, clever, heavy one, who works as a lawyer, and Maggie, the younger, thin, pretty one, who suffers from learning disorders and works as a waitress while struggling to become a performer. Weiner’s sister, Molly, who is now a singer and a comedienne, suffered from learning disabilities, and Weiner’s depictions of Maggie’s difficulties are often acutely drawn. After Maggie experiences a sexual encounter that verges on date rape—another motif in Weiner’s stories—she senses “how slippery a thing her own power was, how fast it could turn in her hands, like a knife in the sink, slick with soap, how quickly and deeply the blade could cut her.” Maggie’s eventual career success, as a personal shopper, is much less interesting. Sometimes the reversals of fortune and the discoveries of love in Weiner’s books can feel forced, given the anger and hurt that precede them. Her characters can appear to be mouthing lines they have read in self-help books rather than expressing authentic emotions. It often seems that inside these calculatedly lightweight books there is a more anguished, and possibly truer, work trying to get out.

“Goodnight Nobody,” Weiner’s fourth best-seller, is a cartoonish satire. Its protagonist, Kate Klein, an acid-tongued former reporter, is a bored stay-at-home mother in the suburbs. When a female neighbor is murdered, her response is less fear than excitement, and she turns amateur detective. In a departure, Weiner provides no tidy ending: the book concludes with Kate traumatized, and torn between her husband and an ex-boyfriend. “I wanted to see what it was like to write literature,” Weiner says. “Not that anybody perceived it that way. But at this point in my career I could write the Odyssey and people would say, ‘Chick lit in Greece.’ ” Some readers hated the book’s inconclusiveness, and wrote to Weiner to complain. She didn’t like the ending much, either. In later novels, she decided to “give my characters the thing that none of us get, which is the promise that it’s going to be O.K.” Weiner describes her books as modern fairy tales that provide the satisfactions she sought as a teen-ager, when books such as “Shining Through” and “Almost Paradise,” by Susan Isaacs, helped her imagine a happier future. “There is so much antipathy today toward the idea of fiction existing for pleasure or escapism,” she says. “I just have a very hard time seeing entertainment as a bad thing. The things that come up again and again in my books, like a man who thinks that you are beautiful just as you are: is that sentimental, wish-fulfillment bullshit that isn’t ever going to happen in real life? I feel like it’s something that we want, and I believe in it, even if it is sentimental.”

On the likability scale, Weiner is closer to Bridget Jones than to Messud’s Nora Eldridge. Warm, funny, and frank, she can also be charmingly self-deprecating. “My assistant just sent me a packing list,” she e-mailed me before an out-of-town event. “The list includes underwear. I don’t know who I am any more.” But her humor can be aggressive. One day, she told me about a passage that she was working on: “There is a husband and wife, and they are not getting along, and every time the wife looks at the husband she thinks that he’s looking at her like he’s trying to figure out how he can set her hair on fire. My editor is, like, ‘That is a horrible thing for someone to be thinking!’ And I am, like, ‘I think people think that way sometimes.’ Not all the time, not everyone. But who hasn’t wanted to set somebody’s hair on fire? Who hasn’t wanted to kill her husband and make it look like a shaving accident? You?” My face must have betrayed a lack of kinship with this sorority. “You wouldn’t want him dead every once in a while?” she said. “Or maybe just . . . away?”

When writers ask Weiner for career advice, she tells them that the most important thing is to have had an unhappy childhood. “Mine was grim,” she told me one day, over lunch at a restaurant off Rittenhouse Square. The eldest of four, she was bookish and socially isolated. Her mother, Fran Weiner, recalls, “She was always reading. She would get off the school bus reading a book, with one shoe on and one shoe left on the bus.” There were few other Jewish families in their neighborhood. “At Christmas, you looked down our street and it would be full-on decorations in the yard, tree lights, a playable Santa on the roof, and then our house would be blank,” Weiner says. “It would be the missing tooth in the smile of the neighborhood.” Her mother, Weiner says, was consumed with feeding and clothing the family, and didn’t notice that she was friendless and unhappy; her father, a child psychiatrist, had different priorities. “He read to me—Shakespeare, the Aeneid,” she says. “He cared about books, and he cared about learning.” But she felt valued by him only when she achieved academic success.

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When she was fifteen, her parents announced that they were getting a divorce. “I had friends whose parents had got divorced, and what would happen is the dad would move to a condo in town—there was a condo complex where a lot of them washed up—and you would see your dad on weekends, and he would very diligently show up at your soccer games or your crew meets,” she says. “My dad just left, and really renounced us. He said he didn’t want to be married, but he also didn’t want to be a father anymore. He was just gone.” In “Good in Bed,” Cannie’s father tells her “that he wanted to be less like a father, more like an uncle,” the words that Weiner’s father said to her and her siblings as he made his exit. Fran Weiner says, “I would say he had a psychotic break and he never got put back together. He floundered. I think he lost control of things. It was depressing and sad and bewildering.” Later, Weiner discovered that her father had abused drugs and alcohol. At one point, he went to prison for failure to pay child support.

At Princeton, she took a seminar with John McPhee, writing nonfiction pieces in which she included her sister Molly as a comic foil. Upon graduation, Weiner followed McPhee’s advice to work at a local newspaper, becoming a reporter in State College, Pennsylvania. Her father attended her graduation, but she rarely saw him otherwise. In 2001, after “Good in Bed” became a best-seller, the Hartford Courant ran an article about her; upon seeing it, he called her and asked for money.

“I asked him if he was in treatment, and he got really mad, and yelled at me and called me names and hung up the phone,” Weiner says. It was the last time that she spoke with him, though he showed up at a group reading a few years later. “One rule of doing a reading is, Don’t ever call on the crazy homeless person,” Weiner says. “But this other novelist at the reading was, like, ‘Sir?’ And my dad stands up and delivers this screed about the nature of art, and how art comes from suffering, and because he caused me to suffer I owe him everything and lots of money.” He died five years ago, from an overdose. “I didn’t really imagine, like, crack,” she says. “It is not something you tend to think about when your dad’s a doctor, and you grow up in a nice suburb in Connecticut.” After her father’s death, Weiner discovered that he had another young son, now nine, whom she has been helping to support.