My Old Man - by Amy Sohn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author Amy Sohn, one of New York City's most provocative columnists, comes a hip, contemporary novel about sex, sin, and living in the same neighborhood as your parents.
When twenty-six-year-old Rachel Block started rabbinical school, she didn't think she'd be dropping out after a semester and a half. But when a sick man dies under her counseling, she realizes she's not cut out for the rabbinate. To make ends meet, she takes a job as a bartender in her Brooklyn neighborhood--much to her parents' chagrin. It's the quintessential quarter-life crisis, compounded by the fact that she's still living just blocks from her childhood home.
Then Rachel falls in love with Hank Powell, an iconoclastic screenwriter twice her age. Suddenly she's reassessing her values, her surroundings, and everything she's ever thought about the "right" kind of relationship. Meanwhile, her interactions with her father, with whom she's always been close, have become increasingly strange. Is he distraught that she's dropped out of school? Is he having his own, midlife, crisis? Something's up...and Rachel's increasingly convinced it might be her father's libido.
With Rachel's own relationship getting wilder and weirder and her parents acting like teenagers, it seems that everyone in Cobble Hill is going crazy. A fresh spin on Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, My Old Man is a black comedy about a dysfunctional Brooklyn family coming apart at the seams.

Review Quotes

"[A] fresh and irreverent comic voice."
-- The Boston Globe

"A beautiful writer with equal megadoses of heart and heat, Sohn has produced a perfectly pitched tale of love, lust and the mysterious, comical verities that forever link -- and separate -- the two."
-- Jerry Stahl

"A comic whirlwind...the author has a sharp and playful eye."
-- The New York Times Book Review

"Chatty, clever, and bawdy enough to be refreshingly realistic....Sohn shines as a writer who can tell a snappy story--and what that story means. By book's end she has learned (and so have we) a little about growing up, falling in love, even faith."
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

Amy Sohn's novels include Prospect Park West, Motherland, The Actress, and The Man Who Hated Women. Her articles have appeared in New York, Harper's Bazaar, Playboy, and The Nation. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.