Sitting Down with Prospect Park West Penner
The 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…
The 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
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 She simply wanted to design characters around out of date stereotypes because she thought it would sell books.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.
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.
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.
I actually thought her New York Press column was amusing, (being about the same age probably helped), but those two pages excerpted in gawker really turned me off. I think the description of the subservient nanny is what really got to me.
Now, I am reading “A Fortunate Age” and trying to decide if a paragraph-by-paragraph redux of Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” set in mid-nineties Williamsburg is brilliant or absurd. Still can’t decide, but it’s an improvement over Sohn.
Of course, the funny thing is that the book must have been easy to write, because it’s not really fiction!
I completely agree with Kris. I’m reading it now, and while it’s fun to see so many familiar places from my daily life portrayed in the story, the satire is a bit too broad for me — so far, at least (I’m about half way through the book), everyone comes across as overly stereotypical and fairly loathesome. I can’t believe that Sohn expressed surprise in the Times article that people think she portrays the neighborhood and its inhabitants in a negative light, since she clearly went to great lengths to do exactly that.
While I understand the source of the satire, and can laugh at it along with everyone else, I’m also curious about how this comes across to people elsewhere in the country. Could you write the same book about yupster parents in Marin County or Brookline or Hyde Park? Or do we seem like complete aliens?
wow i read the article about her in page six today. she’s all quoted as actually calling out people in the neighborhood with her husband and calling them fat and frumpy. what a biotch. grow up lady. youre writing blows. you lucked out in life.
*rob*
God, I hope the book flops and they will never make a series out of it. And if they do, they should film it all in Brooklyn Heights.
Seriously, SATC has been done, 30 somethings has been done, this is a really shallow well at this point.
I read the excerpt you can read on Amazon. Looks horrible. Also have read her NY Mag columns–or as much as I could read w/o gagging, and some of the crap she’d write in the NY Press or whatever it was. Agree with Rob, she’s way overrated, just a bad annoying writer who exaggerates everything for attention.
Also: Not everyone in Park Slope is forced to belong to the damn co-op! Just walk down the street to Union Market…