According to Bellafante, “each of the two books revolves around the broader community of a highly ranked public elementary school: P.S. 321 in Park Slope and what is obviously P.S. 234 in TriBeCa, places so readily linked to an image of concerned liberal affluence that to a certain kind of New Yorker they hardly require annotation. Here the image of family wholesomeness gives way to a picture of acute marital anomie and rampant infidelity. Stereotypes endemic to the city populate: the entrepreneurial chef, the yearning screenwriter, the drifting vintage clothier, the gay father desperate for a second child, all of them sharing an aversion or mounting indifference to the partners with whom they’ve purchased their co-ops, renovated their kitchens and shared the enervating burdens of modern child rearing.”
A book that will surely inspire conversation, debate and even secret late night reading Motherland comes out on August 14th. Mark your calendar.
Many of the women I know were stunned by the death of Nora Ephron earlier this week at the age of 71. Their status reports on Facebook reflect this. Their columns, their blog posts, and emails.
Talking to my mother, in the midst of a longer conversation she exclaimed, “Oh, and Nora Ephron.” And in a phone call with another woman friend this morning I heard this non-sequitur. “And I’m so upset about Nora Ephron.”
I think the reason she touched so many of us is because she was so many things. And so are we.
We could admire and aspire to her talent and celebrity, as she was surely one of the most successful female movie directors and screenwriters in Hollwood with films like Heartburn, Silkwood, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally, Bewitched and You’ve Got Mail on her IMDB page.
We could revel in her wit and wisdom as she was a comic essayist of enormous gifts, a novelist, a blogger, and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other magazines.
She made us laugh time and time again.
We could relate to her personal life, which seemed sophisticated and messy and real. She was a mother and a wife (three times over) and also, reputedly, a great cook and a tasteful homemaker. As a daughter and a sister, we had the sense that she struggled like the rest of us to navigate the tangle (and the treasure) of those familial relationships.
We also sensed that she understood the power and complexity of female friendship. She said as much in her book of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck: “My friend Judy died last year. She was the person I told everything to. She was my best friend, my extra sister, my true mother, sometimes even my daughter, she was all these things.”
We could relate to her (and envy her) as the quintessential New Yorker born and bred in Manhattan, who at one time occupied an enormous rent controlled apartment in the Apthorp. You half expected to run into her at Zabar’s shopping for smoked salmon or at Laytners shopping for high thread count sheets. And when she moved to the Upper East Side, you could imagine her lunching at Eat or browsing turtleneck sweaters at Agnes B (she didn’t much like her neck but she had a great sense of style).
Those of us north of fifty could relate to her as she grappled with the indignities of age and openly laughed at the ways we obsess over the crow’s feet and neck jangle we can’t bear to see.
Back when I was in public school I used to know it was Veterans’ Day because we had a day off. Now I know because of NPR. On 5th Avenue in Park Slope at 8pm last Thursday, the street felt the same as ever–sushi shops and happy hour crowds collecting in the usual numbers. But back in the Old Stone House in Park Slope, a place that is known for withstanding centuries of gentrification, not to mention the savage beginnings of the Revolutionary War, Louise Crawford, curator of Brooklyn Reading Works, knew what kind of mood to set for the latest installment of her series, “Writing War.” “Indeed the sight of the Battle of Brooklyn,” she announced as she welcomed the crowd, “one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War, is an appropriate setting for this literary event which will highlight writers who know war first hand.”
Amy Sohn’s Motherland will be out next week but already the buzz begins. Today in the New York Times, Ginia Bellafante’s article For a Spicier City, Turn the Page?, bundles Sohn’s sequel to her bestselling Prospect Park West with a first novel by Karl Taro Greenfield called Triburbia.