Meg Wolitzer Writes on Weekends, With Time to Loll Dave Sanders for The New York Times In novels like "The Wife"and "The Ten-Year Nap," Meg Wolitzer has explored themes of marriage, sex, gender politics and family. Her real domestic life is spent on the Upper East Side, where she lives with her husband, Richard Panek, 54, who is also a writer; their younger son, Charlie, who is 18; and the family's dog, Jet, a 5-year-old Havanese. The couple's older son, Gabriel, 22, is a senior at the University of Chicago. Ms. Wolitzer, 53, said she usually treated Sundays as a lighter writing day, carving out time for rest, Mexican food and an occasional cheap massage. Her newest book, "The Interestings," was published this month by Riverhead Books. FIRST ONE UP I wake up before anybody else, probably by 8-something on a Sunday. If I can, I'll rouse my son to come for a walk with me and the dog. My parents live around the corner, so it's sort of "Everybody Loves Raymond" - they like to meet us in the park and we walk the dog together. My friends tease me that the secret to me being prolific is the Snapple diet, and I do drink a lot of Snapple. But I switched years ago to an unsweetened Japanese tea. I definitely need something to drink in the morning, but it's not going to be coffee. GATHERING We live in a not very big apartment, and everybody collects in the living room in the morning, in various states of loll. My son will get up and make eggs for himself. ALWAYS AVAILABLE Being a writer, work is pretty much never-ending. You have to keep the hours of a Kwik-E-Mart. You always have to be available to your own work. Ideas don't arrive with a 9-to-5 regularity, and I sometimes let them collect and on a weekend will answer them. I don't like the idea of an enforced day of rest - I've never been big on that. I sometimes work in the afternoons on Sundays in the New York Society Library - it's the most beautiful mansion on East 79th Street. It's a great lending library, and it has a great writing room where a lot of writers you know work. ALONE TOGETHER My husband, who is a science writer, works from home, too, and we sort of ignore each other during the week. We'll walk past each other like colleagues in a law firm. We just kind of leave each other alone. You have to respect what the other person does when you're both working from home. It really can be like cats in a bag. SONG SESSION In the afternoon, I sometimes go downtown and sing with my friend Suzzy Roche. She can sing and play anything with her guitar - it's very Joan Baez, circa 1966. I love to sing, and I used to carry around a guitar. When I went to Yaddo when I was in my 20s, I took my guitar with me. It had a "No Nukes" sticker on the case. This is so embarrassing to me, but in the middle of the workday I could be found sitting under a tree singing "The Water Is Wide." STOREFRONT STOP An indulgence on a Sunday, once in a while, is that I will go for one of those really cheap Chinese massages. They're $55 for 60 minutes, pretty much everywhere, in these storefronts that look pretty dubious. But they're really amazing. There's almost nothing else like that, and I appreciate the fact that you can just appear there. DINNER WITH FRIENDS I do look forward to the times when I can go out with this group of friends. There are four of us, and we go out for Mexican food and margaritas, usually at a place called Toloache. It's like being a family, sort of an inviolable thing. I hope it wasn't inspired by "Sex and the City" - one of us is not Samantha. EVENING SPRAWL I don't think I've ever really done any writing work on a Sunday night. It's really very aimless in a very nice way. The day sort of ends the way it began, with us sprawled around in the living room with various reading materials and screens around us.