Her latest offering, The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund (Dutton Adult), follows a reluctant hedge-fund wife whose pampered life comes to screeching halt after a night in Williamsburg.
1. What inspired The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund?
I started to notice a spike in conspicuous consumption that surpassed anything I’d seen growing up in the eighties. You know when Bud Fox asked Gordon Gekko [in Wall Street], “How many boats can you water-ski behind?” I felt like people devised ways to answer “many”: overthe- top birthdays for one-year-olds, It Bags for every day of the month, chauffeurs… something had to give. The other Manolo had to drop.
2. With the hedge-fund world reeling, do you feel that The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund captured a moment we’ve passed?
There’s obviously not the same hyperbolized overabundance nowadays, but it’s not like all that berserk excess is such a distant memory—it’s more like [recent] historical fiction.
3. Why do you set your novels on the Upper East Side?
They say write what you know, and I know New York. I couldn’t write about anywhere else without feeling like a faker. I once had an editor suggest something about suburban ennui with a comic spin, and I felt trapped in an elevator even discussing it. I get suburbaphobia. I’d rather live in a shitty studio in Manhattan or Brooklyn than in a mansion in Greenwich or Locust Valley…. I’d be dangling by a noose within a week.
4. A running theme in all your books is carving out a New York life beyond the confines of the Upper East Side. Why keep exploring that?
I feel like I sometimes hear people bashing New York or what they perceive to be “the scene,” and it drives me crazy. There are thousands of scenes!
5. What’s next for you?
My daughter, Sadie, and I cowrote a book that’s in the works at Dutton Children’s Books; they’re hiring an illustrator now. That excites me more than my “real” work because it was all her idea and it’s truly a fabulous, hilarious, heartwarming story.
