My writing group has been especially productive, and I’m happy to bring to your attention the hilarious new book by Susan Coll: Beach Week, which deserves to shoot to the top of your summer reading list. Susan swooped through our group, bringing in chapters that made me laugh out loud, then totally rewriting them, turning them sharper and making me laugh even harder. It was a joy to watch this book unfold and to watch these D.C. suburban parents get skewered.
Here’s the book description from Susan’s website:
"Ah, “beach week”: a time-honored tradition in which the D.C. suburbs’ latest herd of high school grads flocks to Chelsea Beach for seven whole days of debauched celebration. In this dark comedy, ten teenage girls plan an unhinged blowout the likes of which their young lives have never seen. They smuggle vodka in water bottles and horde prescription drugs by the dozen. Meanwhile, their misguided, affluent parents are too busy worrying about legal liabilities to fret over some missing pills or random hookups.
"Susan Coll satirizes a new teenage rite of passage, in the process dismantling the lives of families in transition. Beach Week is a hilarious, well-observed look at the end of childhood and the human need to commemorate it—expensively."
She has a number of readings at the beach (lucky duck!) and an upcoming reading in DC, where I will be, sitting in the front row, laughing:
Thursday, July 8, 7 p.m.
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Details here (scroll down).
Here’s a funny piece Susan wrote about her fear of Facebook.
And here’s Susan’s blog about…parking! (Yes, also funny!)
