Brooklyn's famed neighborhood of Park Slope has it all: the sprawling, majestic Prospect Park; acclaimed public schools; historic brownstones; and progressive values. The more upwardly mobile New Yorkers discover its virtues, the more that claiming a stake in Park Slope becomes a competitive sport.In the park, the coffee shops, and the playgrounds of the neighborhood, four women's lives collide one long, hot Brooklyn summer. Melora Leigh, a two-time Oscar-winning actress, frustrated with her career and the pressures of raising her adoptive toddler, feels the seductive pull of kleptomania; Rebecca Rose, missing the robust sex life of her pre-motherhood days, begins a dangerous flirtation with a handsome local celebrity; Lizzie O'Donnell, a former lesbian (or "hasbian"), wonders why she is still drawn to women in spite of her sexy husband and adorable son; and Karen Bryan Shapiro finds herself split between two powerful obsessions: her four-year-old son's well-being and snagging the ultimate three-bedroom apartment in a well-maintained P.S. 321-zoned co-op building. As the women's paths intertwine (and sometimes crash), each must struggle to keep her man, her sanity, and her play dates.
Amy's new novel, Motherland, was published in August 2012 by Simon & Schuster. Beyond that . . .
In 1973 Amy was born in Manhattan. Raised in Brooklyn Heights, Amy went on to attend Hunter College High School. In 1995 Amy graduated from Brown University, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and with Honors. That year she returned to Brooklyn to continue the acting career she had started as a child. It didn't go well, though she did appear in an episode of "Law and Order" called "Girlfriends."
In the summer of 1996 she became a columnist at New York Press, writing her autobiographical "Female Trouble" column, a chronicle of dating below Fourteenth Street that elicited loads of invective from readers and shamed her parents at dinner parties. This column was satirized in a cartoon by Anthony Haden-Guest that featured a blond and brunette talking, with the brunette telling the blond, "I'm the new you." This was thought to be based on Amy and Candace Bushnell, though Anthony never admitted it outright.
In 1999, Simon & Schuster published Amy's first novel, Run Catch Kiss, which has since been translated into four languages. According to the New York Times review of the book, "A little-known event that took place around the time that Richard M. Nixon was resigning as President was the birth of Amy Sohn, who has emerged as a representative of her generation." The review included the words "concomitant," "concupiscence," and "Spenglerian," three words that do not appear in the novel but should have.
In 1999 Amy became a columnist at the New York Post, where she enraged management by comparing Mayor Giuliani to Hitler and writing an expose on the Yankees locker room from the point of a view of an oversexed single woman looking for naked guys. Though the point of the column was that female sports journalists could not see anything prurient in modern clubhouses even if they wanted to, the column was attacked by female sports journalists and debated on WFAN.
In 2000, Amy co-created, wrote and starred in a television show for Oxygen's "X Chromosome" animated series entitled "Avenue Amy" that ran for two seasons alongside shows starring Laura Kightlinger and Wanda Sykes.
In 2001 Amy landed at New York magazine, where her first column, published that August was called "Intern Season" and used the gory disappearance of Chandra Levy as an opportunity to discuss dating and romance among summer interns in Washington, DC. This inaugurated her "Naked City" column, whose original title was "Sex Matters." After a few years "Naked City" became "Mating" and after a few more it became "Breeding."
In 2004 Simon & Schuster published her second novel, My Old Man, about a May-December relationship between a rabbinical school dropout and an aging screenwriter. It took place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
In 2008 she became a columnist at England's Grazia magazine, where she wrote a column called "Diary of a Recessionista." The recession soon took over and the column was axed.
Over the years, Amy has also written for Harper's Bazaar, Premiere, Playboy, Elle, The New York Times, and Details. She is a recipient of a reader award from Playboy called the Golden Bunny and was voted one of Park Slope's 100 most influential people. She is certain she is the only individual to have received both honors.
In 2009 Simon & Schuster published Amy's third novel, Prospect Park West, about four Park Slope mothers on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It has since been translated into ten languages.
As a pundit on popular culture, Amy has appeared on such networks as VH1, MTV, Fox News, CNN, Lifetime, MSNBC, and PBS. She has written television pilots for ABC, Fox, Lifetime and HBO.
She grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives today. She has a brother, five years younger. She voted for Barack Obama and raised money for him. Her favorite writers are Laurie Colwin, Hilma Wolitzer, Charles Bukowski, Nathanael West, Mary Gaitskill, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Her favorite films include Gregory's Girl, The Landlord, The Apartment, My Life as a Dog, and Together.
She had her seventh birthday party at Kramer versus Kramer but not all the children were permitted by their parents to come. As a child she was taken to the films Heartland, Splash, Heart Like a Wheel, The Magical Mystery Tour, and Mr. Hulot's Holiday and is glad about it. She thinks Wainwright elevates Apatow and not the other way around. She has strong biceps but weak abs. She is aware that her inspiration for this list was the Kevin Costner speech in Bull Durham. She has had sexual fantasies about Richard Ford and they were productive.
If she could switch careers she would be a Broadway musical theater producer or a sommelier. She dresses to the left. She believes that when it comes to hair highlights, cheap is expensive. Her favorite joke is, "What's the difference between a Jew and a Gentile? A Gentile leaves without saying goodbye and a Jew says goodbye without leaving." She also enjoys a very tasteless Katharine Hepburn joke whose punchline is, "How do you turn it off?" Her favorite candy is York Peppermint Patties and she always has a knot in the same section of her hair when she wakes up. She lives in Brooklyn with her family a few subway stops from where she grew up.
Like her at www.facebook.com/amysohn, follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/amysohn, and visit her at www.amysohn.com.
