On a recent mercilessly hot June morning, the eastern sidewalk of Central Park West is filled with women in linen and sandals pushing strollers north. It’s a holiday, the kids are out of school, and the city’s parents have hours to fill. So they converge on the American Museum of Natural History, where the doors have just opened. Every entrance is swarmed. Which isn’t a problem for me, or Sophie Brickman, the author of a frothy new novel, Plays Well With Others (William Morrow, August 6), that seems destined for the Hamptons beach totes of every uptown mom — and plenty of regular people who can’t help being a little enthralled with them. We’re members, so we use the museum’s members entrance, the dim cobblestone walkway beneath the front staircase on Central Park West. As we sit and talk, a frizzy-haired 9-year-old girl materializes before us. “Hi!” Brickman says. It’s her eldest’s best friend from school, who was over for dinner the night before. “Boy, this really is a small town,” Brickman says to me.
One that Brickman knows well. She grew up in the same neighborhood as the museum; her father is the screenwriter and frequent Woody Allen collaborator Marshall Brickman. She went, in rapid succession, to Hunter, Brearley, and Trinity, then on to Harvard, where she majored in social studies, a mix of social theory and philosophy. Then, like many Upper West Siders whose parents are more concerned that their children find a passion than a salaried job, she wandered around a bit. She worked as a line cook at Gramercy Tavern before holding various writing and editing roles mostly in food media. Inspired by the experience of raising her first child, she wrote a book about parenting and technology. Chelsea Clinton blurbed it — “This is a book for parents, grandparents and anyone who loves kids or is curious about childhood, including their own” — suggesting it “deserves a place in your bookshelf.” During COVID, she started trying to get her eldest child into private school. (She declines to name which one.) Which is about when she realized that there was fodder for a book there too.
She wrote the novel before her second child applied to private school — and after her first was already situated in the system. It wasn’t a single moment that got her going, Brickman tells me, tucking a strand of the shiniest brown hair I’ve ever seen behind her ear. We’re walking to see the whale. It was many, she says. “You write these essays about your 4-year-old’s strengths and weaknesses, which is a ludicrous task: Is it a strength that my child negotiates one M&M per bite of chicken at dinner? Does that show grit?” She’d heard of parents hiring a coach in preparation for the required “playdate assessments,” but that struck her as absurd because they’re 4, and what if they haven’t had their chocolate doughnut the morning of their all-important interview, and are in a bad mood, and don’t feel like being interviewed? “You can’t control them,” she says. “They’re 4.”
Once her child was actually in the school, she began hearing stories. Those stories sounded like copy. “I’d hear things at the playground, at pickup and drop-off, that made this world seem ripe for satire, ” says Brickman. “There’s outlandish stuff that I amp up a ton.” Like passing a storefront offering tutoring in “Russian Math,” whatever that is. Or attending school functions with tyrannically specific theming (in the book, the preschool throws a benefit in the style of The Great Gatsby — the Baz Luhrmann movie, not the Redford film or the original book; another is called “Burning Man on Park Avenue”). Or the warning Brickman once heard from a parenting influencer never to praise her children for basic tasks, lest they think her love conditional. Once, she heard a rumor that a family’s nanny had been given a sizable bonus for helping to get one of her charges into a top kindergarten and was being promised another if she could pull it off for child No. 2. “I have no idea if that’s true,” Brickman says. But doesn’t it seem like it could be? And if it is, how’s that family going to like seeing it in print?
The book was pitched as in the vein of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Fleishman Is in Trouble. (Like Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Rachel, Annie — the protagonist of Plays Well With Others — suffers a slow descent into madness stemming, in part, from the pressures of the private-school scene.) But to me, it seems closer in spirit to The Nanny Diaries. Like that book, it lifts the veil on that particular, rarefied craziness of life uptown. But authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus published after they’d left their nanny jobs. Brickman is publishing hers while her two older children are still very much enrolled in the types of schools minutely characterized in her book. Meanwhile, she has a preschool-age third child for whom the entire application process will soon begin. People don’t often write satiric tell-alls about worlds they currently inhabit and will occupy for years to come — especially not when their continued presence in that world hinges on the decisions of the people they’re lampooning. (In the book, the protagonist overhears an admissions director saying that Giorgio Armani’s great-nephew is going to get in over hers, thanks to a generous donation to the school.) Brickman claims she’s undaunted. In fact, she doesn’t seem to get why anyone might worry, were they in her shoes. “This is satire!” she tells me numerous times. “Not reportage! I wrote a comic novel.”
Still, there are a lot of similarities between Sophie and her protagonist, Annie. Both are mothers of three and married to venture-capital guys with AirPods perpetually in their ears, making it impossible to know if they’re talking to you or conducting a phone call. Annie’s husband is named Dan; Brickman’s is named Dave. Both couples met at Harvard, after which both men started tech-related venture-capital funds. The book is funny and vivid, but it’s also not exactly flattering. It depicts parents who are willing to fork over donations before their kids are even enrolled to dramatically up their odds of getting in. She describes a catty chorus of moms gossiping on WhatsApp, communicating almost exclusively in emoji, and the depths of nastiness to which an especially competitive fellow mother will sink to one-up you come fundraiser season. She also describes an admissions officer who jokes about the social “horror” of having one’s child attend public school in New Jersey and preschool exmissions administrators who relish reminding parents that even Gwyneth Paltrow and Jackie Onassis’s kids were rejected from their schools of choice.
Arguably most damning of all, the parents at the fictional nursery school breathlessly buy into the ongoing schools’ importance without an ounce of skepticism or shame and suck up to administrators like it’s their job. To Brickman and her novel’s protagonist, the kindergarten-application process may be a somewhat silly but worthwhile hurdle, one the former at various points refers to as “unhinged” and “absurd,” but to a lot of parents, it’s deadly serious. Won’t they take note of these bruising characterizations and go quiet when Brickman chimes in on the group chat, terrified of appearing in the sequel? Why isn’t she dreading ghosted playdates or admissions directors closing ranks? Is her third kid doomed to languish at P.S.-something? Has any of this occurred to her?
Brickman shifts in her white linen shirtdress, adjusting the sunglasses perched on her head, when I bring up her closeness to the material. She looks at me with confusion, maybe a smidgen of pity. “I have many close friends in this ecosystem, all of whom can laugh at themselves,” she says. Then she smirks. “Plus my kid is clearly a genius because he can recognize all of the construction vehicles in the world and knows what a skid steer is. So it’ll be fine.”
