When both Elisabeth and Sam meddle in other people’s lives with the best intentions, well, suffice it to say that things don’t go precisely as they had hoped. But Sam, who finds common cause with Elisabeth’s father-in-law in fighting for the overlooked and economically disadvantaged, has her own blind spots in relation to the women she works alongside in her dorm cafeteria. The inequity in the two women’s relationship and status is mostly lost on Elisabeth but not on Sam. Unlike Elisabeth, who comes from a family as wealthy and privileged as it is dysfunctional, Sam, an aspiring artist with an older British boyfriend who may be a threat to her career ambitions, comes from a big, warm, middle-class family and is funding her college education through a scholarship, a cafeteria work-study job, student loans, and off-campus child care work. Eventually she finds a confidante and companion in Sam, a student at the nearby women’s college whom she hires as Gil’s babysitter.
A new mother with a successful career and her babysitter form an unlikely bond in a small college town.Įlisabeth, one of the protagonists of Sullivan’s latest novel, has just moved with her husband, Andrew, and baby, Gil, from brownstone Brooklyn to a remote college town 250 miles away-or as she tells her New York City friends, upstate, “but not, like, cool upstate.”A successful journalist and author, she misses her old friends and community-although she still compulsively devours the postings on her old neighborhood parent listserv-and hasn’t been able to compel herself to make new ones, secretly suspecting she won’t like the other women in her town.
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