Tuesday, February 26 at 7:00pm

Lucinda Rosenfield and Liesl Schillinger discuss sisterhood and family to celebrate Rosenfield's new novel, The Pretty One. Refreshments and snacks provided!

About The Pretty One: Olympia Hellinger (“the pretty one”) is a professional museum gallerina and single mother; Perri (“the perfect one”) fires on all cylinders, running a three-child household and a home organization company; and Gus (“the political one”) channels her energies into activism and the Legal Aid Society of New York. Relations among the three alternate between affection and judgment. Perri and Gus question Olympia’s decision to single-parent (and harbor hidden guesses about who the father really is); Gus and Pia can’t get over Perri’s terrible choice in clothes. And Perri and Pia are united in their conviction that Gus is an incorrigible gossip. After a fraught New Year’s brunch and a freak accident that lands the girls’ mother, Carol, in the hospital, the bonds among the three sisters threaten to fray.

Their personal lives begin to unravel, as well. Olympia’s loneliness intensifies as her thoughts ricochet between the anonymous donor who fathered her child and the married man with whom she had a years-long affair. Perri, overcome by stress and feeling unappreciated by her husband, decides to flee her Westchester manse, lured by sexts from an old lover. And Gus, who’s ostensibly gay, begins to doubt her sexuality after she finds herself attracted to a frat-boy type. Sinfully funny and unexpectedly heartfelt, The Pretty One is a charming and absorbing story about the intimacy and distance among sisters—and how, despite the daggers thrown, we learn to get along with the ones we love.

Lucinda Rosenfeld is the author of the novels What She Saw . . ., Why She Went Home, and I’m So Happy for You. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Creative Nonfiction, Slate.com, Glamour, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two young daughters.

Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based writer and literary critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The London Independent on Sunday, and other publications here and abroad. Her translation of the novel, Every Day, Every Hour, by Nataša Dragnić, was published in May, 2012 (Viking).