The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club. I'm Emily Bazelan. I am here in New Haven

with one of my favorite writers, Amy Bloom. She is a novelist whose last book is called Where the

God of Love Hangs Out. And I am so excited to report that she is working on a new

book called In Praise of Folly, which sounds splendid. I can personally vouch for that. So, Amy,

thank you so much for joining us. I'm glad to be here. And Hannah Rosen, my beloved colleague in

doppelganger, is with us in D.C. Hey, Hannah. Hi. So we are here to talk about a book called

The Good Mother by Sue Miller, which is, I think, a period piece. It was published in 1986

to absolutely stirring reviews and a lot of conversation. I remember this book because my mother

was really, really obsessed with it and

her friends. They talked about an enormous amount. And even though I was in high school when this

book came out, and I don't really think it's like a high school girl kind of book, I read it and was

really grabbed by it and remember the whole thing vividly. So we thought we would use this occasion of the book's 25th anniversary to think about what it

says about that period of parenting and womanhood, if that's a safe word to use,

and how our understanding of all these things may or may not have changed.

First of all, if this book is a period piece, it seems to me

it's not actually a period piece of the 80s when it was written. It really feels to me like

an early to mid-70s book. And I was wondering, Amy, what you think about that. Well, I think it's a

safe bet that I was probably more sentient in the 70s and the 80s than the two of you.

I had two little kids in the late 80s.

And when I was rereading this book, it did strike me as very much about the late 70s,

although I don't think that that's necessarily a result of the content.

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