NYC Sentinel

Social satire: Sohn's novel takes a knowing jab at Park Slope mommies

New York media types gathered on Wednesday night at Ochre, a design store in Soho, where publishers Simon & Schuster set up a makeshift bar alongside shelves of expensive home décor. Vanity Fair contributing editor Leslie Bennetts sipped white wine a few feet from Michael Solomon, features editor at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast. Nearby stood New York Observer reporter Doree Shafrir and writer Sloane Crosley, author of the recent essay collection ‘I Was Told There’d Be Cake’. Former Washington speechwriter and newly published novelist Grant Ginder tried not to break any vases or candlestick holders.

The book launch was for Amy Sohn, one-time ‘Naked City’ sex columnist for New York magazine, now a Brooklyn-dwelling 35-year-old mother of one. Sohn’s social satire ‘Prospect Park West’ has enjoyed some great critical reviews, but there were a few whispers among the Chardonnay-drinking crowd in the Broome Street shopfront about the blog backlash. Some guests had read the critical web posts and bitter Tweets from Park Slope parents, who feel Sohn’s knowing novel, about a sex-starved mom and her neighborhood contemporaries, cuts a little too close to the reality of that quinoa-eating, Brownstone-living corner of Brooklyn.

Sohn, looking like a sexier Carrie Bradshaw with loose blonde curls and a skintight maroon and gold mesh dress, read a few pages aloud. Her widening smile as she described the anxieties of her protagonist Rebecca Rose made it clear she’s in on the Park Slope joke. Characters name-drop parental self help guides, long for organic food co-ops and fret about their own inability to be perfect urban mommies. Sohn, herself a Park Slope resident, knows why this hasn’t gone over well with her neighbors.

“Motherhood is the last sacred cow,” she said later in the evening, leaning against a shelf in the corner of Ochre, sipping her wine and surveying a table stacked with her hardcover. “And I’ve seen a lot of sacred cows in Park Slope.”

— Clare O’Connor