Suburgatory

Publisher's Summary

The title behind the new ABC TV Show Suburgatory excoriates - through satirical local news "stories" - the mostly upper-middle-class American pieties and parenting obsessions that surround raising the perfect child amid the anxiety of an America in decline.

©2011 Linda Keenan (P)2011 Tantor

Critic Reviews

"Linda Keenan is the smartest, sassiest girl you know times ten, after two shots of tequila. Her brazen, ballsy look at life in the suburbs is more than laugh out loud - Suburgatory will make you shoot milk out of your nose, then immediately re-up the lease on your townhouse in the city." (Karen Karbo, author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel)

Hilarious Observation of our Culture

What made the experience of listening to Suburgatory the most enjoyable?

It is not what I expected. I read it because I so enjoyed the television series. And of course, it is VERY different from the series. However, they are both absolutely wonderful. Just two very different ways of telling these stories.

What did you like best about this story?

I grew up in a very different, less affluent, West Coast suburb. And yet I could see glimpses of things I knew, and far more enjoyed laughing at the things that differed greatly from my own experience. I could see people I knew in this, if only they'd had more money and a superficial education.

What about Cassandra Campbell’s performance did you like?

She has the perfect voice for these stories. I actually thought she was the same person who read another book I recently listened to about a female reporter living in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Turns out it was a different reader. I wonder if they know each other? Their voices and intonations are very similar.

Any additional comments?

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from the doing the things that men have always done. If a story seems moral, do believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil... If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty."
-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried