Jules, her heroine in The Interestings, attempts and fails to become an actor, retrains as a therapist, and – in a piece of sly positioning – marries an ultrasound technician who has no desire to be anything other than what he is, to her alternating relief and exasperation. Wolitzer, whose mother was a writer and father a school psychologist, had a family who supported her aims, and after graduating from Brown University in 1981, she published her first novel, Sleepwalking, a year later. I knew that it had to open there, and open then.' 'I went off to a summer camp and became immediately pretentious and all that. This was the era before 'specialness' in children became thoroughly fetishised, nonetheless, Wolitzer succumbed to the notion that talent was all, and set about daydreaming a romantic future for herself. The Interestings – the title refers to the name the adolescent friends ironically give themselves – grew out of her own experience at a hippyish summer camp in the early 1970s, where for the first time, she had a notion she might become something artistic. We are in Manhattan, where Wolitzer lives with her husband, a science writer, and their two college-age sons. 'Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something,' she writes of the least successful in the circle, 'before you give up forever.' It is a novel about envy, but not in the grand sense. Rather, it unpicks the insidious resentment that grows between friends who start out in the same place and whose fortunes diverge.

The novel deserves acclaim, but it is a surprising hit, perhaps, given its subject matter and the downbeat nature of the heroine. It has done very well in the US, so that at 54, Wolitzer has become, as a friend joked to her recently, 'a 30-year overnight success'. The Interestings, Wolitzer's ninth novel, is more ambitious than any she has written so far, tracking a group of friends from the moment they meet, at summer camp, up through the decades of their lives. 'The anxiety makes me a stronger writer.'

It's a nervy thing to ask.' She asks it of herself every time she sits down to write – 'What fiction ought to do' – and the answer had better be good. F iction asks a lot of people, says Meg Wolitzer, 'to tell them that you need to learn about these characters, to take time out in your day from being frightened for your livelihood and your children, to think about Susan and Bill, who don't exist.

The interestings