Rutgers-Camden Novelist Joins Dan Brown on Lists for Hottest Books this Fall

But what critics are noticing in particular is the great power of Grodstein’s prose. The book to be published this November is on the must-read lists of Publisher’s Weekly, The Daily Beast, and Booklist, with scheduled reviews in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, and O The Oprah Magazine.

Grodstein recently became a parent herself. In fact, she learned the day after she had her first child that A Friend of the Family would be published. But why she writes about the parent-child relationship is primarily because she believes it to be the most dramatic of all human connections.

“It’s one of the most permanent,” says the Rutgers–Camden assistant professor of English. “Your spouse might change, you might rotate through best friends, but your mom is always your mom, more or less, and your kid is always your kid.”

The potential within this theme for conflict – perhaps the driving force of fiction – is also tremendous, and Grodstein takes full advantage in A Friend of the Family.

A starred review in Publisher’s Weekly notes the novel’s chilling plot:  “Laura Stern gives birth during a year when neonaticide is happening across New Jersey. Laura's family, especially her father, Joe, fights to keep her out of jail, and after a stay in a mental institution, she spends the rest of her young adulthood on the West Coast. But the novel begins years later, when Laura, now 30, has returned home, marked and haunted by her past, but oddly self-possessed. When she seduces Alec, who has just dropped out of college, his father, Pete, a successful doctor, does everything in his power—including something unforgivable—to break the couple up, convinced Laura's influence will completely derail Alec's already precarious future.”

The Rutgers–Camden novelist says Pete’s voice came to her first. “When I started writing the book, the voice in my head was a 54-year-old internist, suburban, Jewish, and male. I don’t know why that voice started talking to me, but it did, and he kept talking to me until I typed the last word.”

From the very first page, though, she knew Pete's life would intertwine with Laura's, whose character evolved from the haunting neonaticide cases in northern New Jersey, where Grodstein grew up. The Rutgers–Camden novelist is just a few years older than Melissa Drexler, from Forked River, who delivered and disposed of her baby at her high school prom, and Amy Grossberg, a Wyckoff native who did the same in a Delaware motel room.

“Laura and I are the same age, and grew up in the same place…I decided that what she did as a teenager would be something Pete never forgave her for, even though it had nothing to do with him.”

Critics credit Grodstein for handling this difficult material tastefully and with “unusual respect for her characters.” According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout, “Grodstein’s skills at storytelling are unwavering” and A Friend of the Family is “a wonderful and compelling read…You will have a hard time putting it down.”

Luckily for students at Rutgers–Camden, Grodstein shares with them these deft storytelling skills when she teaches the advanced undergraduate course “Writing the Child” and a fiction writing workshop for the MFA program in creative writing.

A graduate of Columbia University, where she earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees, Grodstein is the author of the collection of short stories The Best of Animals (Persea, 2002) and the novel Reproduction is the Flaw of Love (Dial, 2004).

She will be reading from her new book at various venues throughout the country, including the Rutgers–Camden Campus on Nov. 18, during the 2009-10 Visiting Writers Series.

Listen to Grodstein read the opening paragraphs of A Friend of the Family in this audio file.