Prospect Park West

My new novel, Prospect Park West comes out on September 1 and is available for preorder on Amazon now. The site also has the final cover, which I am thrilled with – a Park Slope brownstone with Bugaboo passing. The book focuses on four mothers in the Slope, all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Insert joke: (As though there is any other kind of Park Slope mother.) I will be touring in September and October to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Decatur, Georgia, and you can see some of my dates now. My novel has been optioned by HBO and Sarah Jessica Parker’s production company, for half-hour television, which is very exciting. I am writing the pilot episode now. There will also be a sequel to Prospect Park West published in 2011. The book has been blurbed by such luminaries as Gigi Levangie Grazer, A.J. Jacobs, Lauren Weisberger and Kurt Andersen.
Recently I gave an interview for the novel in which I found myself talking about my neighborhood and some of the themes of the book. I was asked whether I would always live in the Slope and I said that I hoped to, as long as we weren’t priced out. The good things about the neighborhood far outnumber the bad things. To the extent that my book has a darker take on the Slope, it is because I have observed firsthand the perils of aspirational living in my four years. So many of the businesses on Seventh Avenue are realtors. The Corcoran ads are particularly hilarious – scruffy bohemian dad, adorable baby on Flokati rug. Everything is about moving up in life and boy does that company know how to sell improvement. I am not knocking Corcoran – which found my family its apartment after all – but I do think it’s interesting that the most common pastime on Seventh Avenue is staring at real estate photos imagining how things could be better.
I was also asked about sex in the Slope. I gotta say, I have very little idea which of my peers are banging on a regular basis. In Park Slope it is trendy to pretend to have no sex, but I think this is facile and probably false. It’s a kind of reverse modesty. Mothers like to say what they think other mothers will agree with so they talk about how low their drive is. I think a lot of them are lying. I did have lunch with a PS dad who told me that a male dad friend had said to him, “I’m more attracted to my wife than I’ve ever been before, but I can’t get laid for my life.” To this I say, at least he’s more attracted to his wife than he’s ever been before. And to the wife I say, give it up! Mercy sex is underrated. Use it or lose it. There’s a great book about this that I read in research for an article that never materialized.
My friend’s point in sharing this story was that he would never confide in a male friend about his own sex life. He thinks it’s too personal. Maybe men are more circumspect in this regard than women, or maybe this guy is just particularly loyal to his wife. I think it’s interesting though how shy parents are about talking about this. Myself included. The only parent in whom I confide about my sex life on a regular basis is a gay dad. I have had conversations with women where they discussed the horrifying details of our children’s problems, their precise salary, how much they paid for their apartments, and their preferred method of birth control – but not their sex lives.
In terms of what I guess about sex in the Slope, I imagine that people in Carroll Gardens are shtupping more but I am basing this only on my personal degree of attraction to Carroll Gardens dads versus Park Slope dads. Rob Corddry used to live in CG, for chrissakes. FILF city. If neighborhood-parent hot factors are of any interest to you, you might want to check out this link to a story I wrote about flirting in the playground. The hottest dad I ever saw in an NYC playground was a dead ringer for Brad Pitt in the Bleecker Playground. He looked like Brad in the Nazi alp movie. And the guy would not speak on the record. Come on, Brad, I know it was you.