CR 017: Sophie Brickman on Her Delightful New Satire, ‘Plays Well With Others’
The journalist and author discusses her debut novel and how she made the transition from nonfiction to fiction.
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Sophie Brickman is all too familiar with the at-times maddening world of parenting. The longtime journalist and mother of three has written about the topic for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker, among other outlets. Her first book, Baby, Unplugged, garnered rave reviews from The Boston Globe and Publishers Weekly, which referred to it as “equal parts informative and entertaining.” But when it came time to work on her second book, Brickman couldn’t bring herself to tackle yet another journalistic exploration of the parenting space.
“I had an idea for another nonfiction book,” she says. “As I was writing the proposal for that, I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to sustain my interest for the year or so of reporting I’ll have to do. Maybe I can try something different.’ I thought I’d write something serious about education. I banged my head against the wall for two weeks, and was like, ‘This isn’t coming. Maybe I can make it funny.’ And that was a lightbulb moment. I thought, ‘I can just make fun of all of these things.’ And it came way more naturally to me.”
The result is the recently published Plays Well With Others, a funny, fictional account of a mother who attempts to maintain her sanity as she participates in the cutthroat world of New York City’s private preschool admissions process.
Over a recent Zoom call, I chatted with Brickman about the transition from journalism to writing fiction, her advice for new parents, and what she learned from her father, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Marshall Brickman.
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SANDRA EBEJER: Congratulations on your book! How does it feel now that it’s published and out in the world?
SOPHIE BRICKMAN: It feels crazy. The process feels extremely protracted and very fast at the same time.
Like parenting?
Yeah, totally. It seems to be resonating with people and making them laugh, which was my goal with all of this.
Like the novel’s protagonist, you’re a mom of three, living in New York City, and navigating the city’s education system. How much did you pull from your own life when writing this book?
Not that much, except for what you said there, which is, the protagonist has three kids, she works in journalism, and she’s married to somebody who’s in venture capital. This is my first novel. I haven’t written fiction since college. I’ve been a journalist, so I wanted to [create] a world that I understood and could pull from, but beyond that, this is entirely fictionalized and satirized.
That’s a good segue to my next question, because I know how daunting it can be to transition from the non-fiction realm to writing fiction. What was the process like for you?
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