park-slope-street-0909.jpgThe Times gets up close and personal with Prospect Park West author and Park Slope resident Amy Sohn today, talking playground politics and parenting roles. The book has garnered its fair share of attention, not only because it was snapped up by Sarah Jessica Parker who plans to turn it into the Brooklyn version of Sex in the City, but because it plays with and on so many of the stereotypes that abound about Park Slope. From The Times…

“The attractive female characters deem themselves too cool for the neighborhood (one thinks of it as Park Slob), while those who embrace the area are often characterized as smothering and semi-pathetic, reading self-help books like Great Sex For Moms: Ten Steps to Nurturing Passion While Raising Kids. Park Slope’s liberal values are also lampooned; a controversy erupts at the local food co-op over racial profiling.

Other true-to-life tidbits—like the ad for swingers posted on the Park Slope Parents message board—also make it into the book, which is sure to make it a guilty pleasure for anyone who loves, or loves to hate, the Slope. Anyone actually read the thing? Sounds like guilty-pleasure, end-of-summer reading to us.
A Park Slope Novel Seems a Little Too Real [NY Times]
Photo by Robert Catalano


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. Amy Sohn may live in the neighborhood, but she doesn’t know the neighborhood – or has chosen not to really know it. I mean how hard is it to find the Tea Lounge. She simply wanted to design characters around out of date stereotypes because she thought it would sell books. The fact is Park Slope has plenty of yuppies and working moms.

    She claims she struggles to make friends in the neighborhood — that from a woman who tried to join a moms group under her husband’s last name so no one would know who she was and then use their musings as fodder for her book.

  2. Yes, infinite, but then you realize you’re a New Yorker when you are in those places and can’t stop complaining about all the stuff they don’t have like New York.

    Phoenix is almost as scary as Fresno.

  3. Huh, Heather, sounds good.

    I don’t think people across the country even know what the hell Park Slope is. I tell people who have sons and daughters living here where I live, they don’t recognize the name although their adult children obviously do.

    The thing about New York – you live here and it feels like the only place to ever live. Then you go to like Phoenix or Dallas and they don’t even think about New York, other than as some place in America.