Amy Sohn: Brooklyn Parents Behaving Badly
An Amy Sohn essay — at first we thought it was fiction — in The Awl has Brooklyn parents steamed — or perhaps just bemused. “The 40-Year-Old Reversion” “paints a frightening picture of hitting the big 4-0 while with family in the borough of Kings,” as the Brooklyn Eagle put it. So far, the article…
An Amy Sohn essay — at first we thought it was fiction — in The Awl has Brooklyn parents steamed — or perhaps just bemused. “The 40-Year-Old Reversion” “paints a frightening picture of hitting the big 4-0 while with family in the borough of Kings,” as the Brooklyn Eagle put it. So far, the article has garnered 453 comments. Here’s a choice excerpt:
When “Girls” hit this spring, I was shocked by how true the show rang to my life—not my old life as a post-collegiate single girl but my new one, as a married, monogamous, home-owning mother. My generation of moms isn’t getting shocking HPV news (we’re so old we’ve cleared it), or having anal sex with near-strangers, or smoking crack in Bushwick. But we’re masturbating excessively, cheating on good people, doing coke in newly price-inflated townhouses, and sexting compulsively—though rarely with our partners. Our children now school-aged, our marriages entering their second decade, we are avoiding the big questions—Should I quit my job? Have another child? Divorce?—by behaving like a bunch of crazy twentysomething hipsters. Call us the Regressives.
Goodness, how Sohn can find titillation in the most seemingly mundane behavior. And we can’t help but wonder if some of the less-mundane excess she describes is really as widespread as she claims. What really surprised us, though, is the big deal she makes out of failing to hail a cab on Smith Street. Everyone knows you have to walk over to Court Clinton Street to find a ride. Does Sohn’s narrative describe the Park Slope and Carroll Gardens you know? (By the way, her next novel about Brooklyn, “Motherland,” comes out Aug. 14.)
The 40-Year-Old Reversion [The Awl]
Author’s Portrayal of Slutty, Pothead Parents [Brooklyn Eagle]
Photo by martinprine
Go out, have fun and tell your husbands to suck it if they have a problem. it’s been working that way for us men forever and it’s totally fine.
Actually, unless you’re going to Red Hook, everyone knows you have to get a cab on CLINTON. not Court. And actually, since about 2005, it’s been much easier to get a cab on Smith.