My son is thirty now, but I’m still drawn to books that recreate the highs and lows of parenting littles: toddlers that won’t sleep, friendships with other moms, school drama, competitive sports. There’s a universality to these experiences that make them natural fodder for novels in every genre. But time and distance has also given me perspective on how unique some of my experiences were, and how privileged our options. I’m starting to see these books in a slightly different light.
In reporter Sophie Brickman’s first novel, Plays Well With Others, NYC mom Annie Lewin is headed for a nervous breakdown. With three kids under five (two in preschool), a nanny, a two-story penthouse apartment, a husband who works constantly at his own fund, and a part-time job writing an advice column for moms, Annie is pushed to the brink by the process for finding her genius son Sam a place in one of NYC’s amazing and competitive private schools. Her friendships start to fray: she’s jealous of wealthy divorce lawyer Belinda even though their sons are best friends; she hallucinates that a black hole is trying to suck her down. But as her advice columns become more unhinged, Annie earns the 21st century’s most coveted status: She goes viral. Will her new popularity help Annie and her family… or blow up in her face?
Plays Well With Others is very well-written, which is not surprising considering Brickman’s long list of publication credits. Annie is a funny woman who, at least in the beginning of the book, has a wry voice and some perspective about her situation. Her descent into irrationality—along with her crush on a dad at her kids’ pre-school—is something that any woman who stayed up all night to design her son’s PTA directory can appreciate.
And yet, Annie is not someone that every mom can connect to. She and her husband both went to Harvard. Annie was an arts reporter for the New York Times before taking on the advice column gig. Her husband makes so much money that specific amounts are never mentioned. Her nanny might live in or not; a scene from later in the book implies that either she lives in or Annie is fine with her children being alone in the apartment overnight.
Plays Well With Others has been compared to Fleishman is in Trouble, another novel about how parenting in NYC can make a woman lose her mind. (Fleishman, however, is not told from the point of the view of the mom who actually does have the nervous breakdown.) No one in these books ever mentions moving to New Jersey or Long Island or Connecticut or any town within train distance to the city that has an exceptional public school system, except as a mean joke. Nor does anyone think about working with the neighbors to turn around their public school.
New York City is still the sun in the publishing universe, so it’s not surprising that editors and acquisition teams would connect with these characters. Who doesn’t like to read about themselves? For most women, though, sympathizing with a woman because her brilliant son might get into a “safety” school that features numerous playgrounds, small classes, and lots of chances for a child to be himself is almost impossible. This is not a criticism of Brickman’s writing talent, which is strong, but a plea for publishers to realize that a reader’s ability to connect to characters should be the most important factor in a book’s marketability.
Truthfully, I did connect with Annie, because I was a privileged mother who struggled to get her son into private school, and when that didn’t happen, we moved to a better school district. And it wasn’t until I moved to Florida and got out of the Washington D.C. bubble that I realized how unusual our experiences really were, in comparison with the rest of the country’s families. As for Annie, an epilogue written fifteen years in the future adds further twists to her story that I would have liked to see play out. Losing her status, however, didn’t seem to be one of them.
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