How The Interestings Shaped Sara Bareilles’s Work
What Meg Wolitzer’s novel gave Bareilles as an artist and adapter
Direct Answer
Sara Bareilles has said that Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Interestings influenced her creative outlook and songwriting. The novel helped her work through themes of grief, mortality, talent, and nostalgia, and later became the basis for her adapting the story into a stage musical.
Why the novel mattered to Bareilles
How a book opened a new creative door
Bareilles has described discovering Meg Wolitzer’s novel after it was sent to her as a possible adaptation. Reading the book unlocked a style of storytelling and music she had not pursued before and served as the catalyst for returning to theater writing roughly a decade after her work on Waitress.
Personal timing and emotional resonance
The novel arrived during a difficult five-year span in which Bareilles experienced several close losses. She says engaging with the story helped her process that grief by connecting the pleasures of love and creativity to the inevitability of loss.
How the book shaped specific projects
Bareilles credits The Interestings with shifting both her songwriting approach and her choice of projects. It inspired her to adapt the novel into a stage musical and influenced the emotional register of music she produced in this period.
Where you can hear her discuss this
The full conversation about the book and its impact appears on the Books That Changed My Life YouTube channel, where she explains the connection between the novel’s themes and her artistic choices.
Key takeaways from Bareilles’s reflections
| Area | How The Interestings influenced it |
|---|---|
| Songwriting and storytelling | Opened a new narrative and musical sensibility that Bareilles pursued in her adaptation work. |
| Theater work | Prompted her to return to composing for the stage and to take on a book-to-musical project. |
| Emotional processing | Helped her navigate a multi-year period of grief and integrate loss into creative practice. |
| Central themes | Mortality, nostalgia, talent, friendship, and the braid of love and loss (her words). |
| Primary source | Interview on the Books That Changed My Life YouTube channel. |
Notable quotes and context
“Great love and great loss are just braided together.” — Sara Bareilles
That line encapsulates how Bareilles described the emotional lesson she took from Wolitzer’s novel: that joy and grief are entwined, and embracing that truth reshaped how she writes and connects with material.
Frequently Asked Questions
What book did Sara Bareilles discuss? She discussed The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.
How did the book affect her career? Reading the novel moved Bareilles to adapt it for the stage and influenced the tone of music she created while processing personal losses.
What album of hers reflects these themes? Bareilles’s album that centers on loss and transformation is called Good Grief.
Conclusion
Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings provided Sara Bareilles with both a creative blueprint and an emotional framework. It helped her reorient her songwriting toward stories that accept sorrow as part of life’s texture, and it prompted a return to composing for theater through a stage-musical adaptation.
About the guest
Sara Bareilles is a singer, songwriter, actress, and Broadway composer. Known for hit pop songs and her Tony-nominated score for the musical Waitress, she has earned multiple Grammy awards over her career. She continues to write, record, and adapt theater projects on the East Coast.
Related links
Related reading on techieclouds.com: Sara Bareilles on Adapting The Interestings and Good Grief; How I’m With the Band Shifted Margaret Cho’s Cultural Eye.
