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Living Room is a disarmingly direct portrait of a family in trouble. With the tone of a modern-day Jewish Ice Storm set in Long Island, imbued with Alice Munro’s fascination with personal history, this is a deep exploration of the ripple effects of mental illness and a wry, wise take on suburban angst.

The novel’s perspective carousels between three generations of women. Abby, a wise teenager, strives to keep her parents’ dysfunction at arm’s length while navigating the unfamiliar terrors of high school. Her mother, Livia, a housewife with unfulfilled career aspirations and an eating disorder, is consumed by a daily struggle to keep herself together while helplessly watching her family fall apart. And then there is Headie, the grandmother, whose oncoming senility brings vivd dreams and hallucinations of her younger life and whose main link to reality is a new computer with which she writes cryptic missives to her family.

With her highly praised debut story collection, The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman became known for her laser-sharp view of adolescence; here she takes it two generations further, bringing together a fascinating array of experiences with unusual frankness, humor, and wisdom.

The First Hurt
link to The First Hurt

In this brilliantly original story collection, Rachel Sherman evokes the wonders and horrors of a young woman’s life, from girl to teenager to adult, through crushes, sex, family, and the agonies and ecstasies of finding one’s way. The First Hurt heralds the arrival of a singularly fresh and remarkably assured new voice.

Sherman’s beautifully direct and deceptively simple prose produces accessible, shockingly real narratives that combine a disarming sexual edge with great sensitivity and humor. From a high-school girl’s crush on her female teacher, to a family’s serenity threatened by a sexy Danish au pair, to a girl’s sexually outrageous soldier penpal, all the way to a young couple’s horrifying yet life-affirming experience of learning to love their brain-injured newborn twins, this collection wends its way around the deepest of struggles with unusual frankness and wisdom.