Upon graduating from Brown, Wendy Walker ’89 had no intention of becoming an author. Walker left Brown with a degree in political science and economics and planned to enter investment banking after college. Literary arts did not seem to figure into her future.
Yet fast-forward to the present day, and Walker’s third novel, a psychological thriller entitled “All is Not Forgotten,” currently has a film adaptation underway — starring none other than Hollywood megastar Reese Witherspoon.
How does one go from investment banking to professional writing? The short answer: It’s not straightforward. After spending two years working for Goldman Sachs, Walker decided that a career in investment banking was not what she wanted, and she went on to obtain a law degree from Georgetown University. Before long, she was a practicing lawyer — and then, suddenly, a housewife.
“I met my future husband and ended up in New York,” Walker said. “One thing led to another, and I was married and with a baby out in the suburbs in Connecticut.” It was during this time that Walker, in order to smooth the transition to a homemaking lifestyle, decided to pick up the pen. “I just had this idea that, ‘Well, why can’t I do it?’” she said.
Though Walker only took one creative writing course as an undergraduate, studying at Brown prepared her for the literary world in many other ways. Her friends in college went on to pursue wildly different professions that were “totally outside the box.” This would later inspire her to take a professional plunge of her own and experiment with writing.
The influence of the liberal arts education she received at Brown cannot be overestimated. “The open curriculum, in my mind, is one of the greatest things about Brown,” Walker said. “I think that it really gave me the confidence to be creative,” she said. “It just gives you this sense that you can do something you haven’t done before. And if you come up with a character or a plot or a story, you can make it work.”
The belief that “you can make anything work” pushed Walker through early manuscript rejections and the relative anonymity of her first two published novels. Instead of quitting, she kept writing and refining. “I started deconstructing the novels that I liked, studying them and trying to figure out what it was (people liked) about them,” she said. Eventually, her work paid off; earlier this year, she found out Reese Witherspoon wanted to adapt her novel into a feature film.
Nonetheless, “All is Not Forgotten” is not purely entertainment oriented. The novel explores a variety of complex themes: memory and trauma, morality and justice, power and powerlessness. The plot centers on a case of sexual assault in suburban Connecticut — a teenage girl, Jenny Kramer, is raped at a local party by an unknown perpetrator. A memory-altering drug, which Jenny consumes a few hours after the assault, complicates the case. The story follows Jenny, her family and their suburban community as they deal with the aftermath of the attack and attempt to get justice.
Sexual assault is and has always been a widespread issue on college campuses, and Walker has found that college-aged women are often drawn to “All is Not Forgotten” because of the way it addresses this topic.
“The issues I find a lot of women want to talk about at events … is this whole topic of memory and sexual assault,” Walker said. Due to the importance and complexity of the subject matter, Walker spent a long time researching for her novel. She found that a lot of emotional trauma inherent in cases of sexual assault can result from “the feeling of not being heard, of being rendered powerless.”
“This process of getting justice can’t erase this, but it gives something back,” Walker said. “Getting justice plays into the recovery process and the ability to move on.”
Through this novel, Walker hopes that readers will “really think about the issues that are raised with these new treatments for trauma and sexual assault … (and) give thought to what it actually means to go through something like that.”
Walker’s fiction targets female audiences, and “All is Not Forgotten” is no exception. Walker traces her “female-centered stories” to feminist roots developed during her time at Brown. “I became a very vocal feminist there,” she said, participating in events like Take Back the Night, a march intended to support survivors of sexual violence.
Despite the heavy topics she writes about, Walker is happy with her job. She likened the writing process to that of building a house: Both are hard work, but ultimately incredibly rewarding. “When I’m printing out the draft, … that moment, to me, is really satisfying,” she said. And of course, she hopes her own story will prove inspiring: “I think this journey, and the ability to kind of reinvent yourself, is something I would like to share with younger women.”
