Living Room Starred

Time Out New York gave our fabulous neighbor Rachel Sherman's Living Room four stars and a neat review:

Multigenerational female-centric novels often involve bonding over ethnically specific formulas, or the shedding of copious, cleansing tears when a long-buried family secret comes to light. Not so Rachel Sherman’s Living Room. Mining territory she explored in her 2006 debut, a short-story collection called The First Hurt, Sherman turns her unflinching, unsentimental eye once again on deepest suburbia, where personal history festers rather than heals. Here we meet teenage Anna, tackling adolescent humiliations under the tutelage of a new bad-girl best friend. Anna’s mother, Livia, narcissistic and profoundly depressed, fantasizes about being a successful interior designer and develops an unhealthy attachment to the first client she manages to land. And twice-widowed Headie, Livia’s mother-in-law and Anna’s grandmother, crawls about her empty home (it’s easier than standing up) and mulls over the expanse of life behind her in occasionally graphic sexual detail.
The entertaining plot hums along, its heavier moments tempered with plenty of dark humor and incisive language; but it’s the intimate character sketches that truly resonate. Point of view rotates among the three women, who share a fascination with the treacheries of the body. Anna, excited and a bit overwhelmed by her awakening sexuality, contemplates the acne on her au pair’s face and the unwelcome hair on her own. Livia rues the inevitable softening as she slouches toward middle age, stuffing her face with junk food to fill the void she feels inside. Even Headie, barely clinging to the land of the living, wishes that she’d taken care of her feet, which she imagines were once her most perfect part. These inner monologues would be mortifying if bared in real life, but in Sherman’s skilled hands, they render the characters sympathetic, if still disturbing.—Carolyn Juris
Sherman reads Sun 25 at 440 Gallery and Wed 28 at KGB Bar.

You can hear her read today from 4:40- 6:40 at the 440 Gallery in Park Slope (440 6th Ave @ 9th Street, F to 7th Avenue). Admission Free.