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From the award-winning author of In the Field, an inquiry into grief, love, housing affordability, and the transformative power of art, in the story of a young theater director who, after her mother’s death, stages Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in her childhood home.
Gwen Rivlin moves back home to Philadelphia in the wake of her mother’s death, and into the big, shabby house with a turret where they both grew up. Her friends tell her it’s too expensive for a 27-year-old theater director, and too suburban if she has any hopes of keeping her social life alive.
Gwen is determined to stay, even when her schemes to make the house more affordable run afoul of the single-family zoning laws and earn the disapproval of her neighbors. To smooth things over, and to assuage her own grief, Gwen stages a production of The Cherry Orchard inside the turret house. She casts friends, coworkers from the local coffee shop, and various community members in Anton Chekhov’s play about a family struggling to hold onto its own real estate.
Through the creation of this beautiful and transitory work of art, Gwen heals old breaches, reevaluates her relationship with her difficult mother, and weaves a new, non-traditional family for herself.
Praise for We're So Lucky to Live Here
"What do you do when your mother dies and leaves you a beautiful house you can’t afford, in a town that’s becoming unrecognizable? In Rachel Pastan’s We’re So Lucky to Live Here, Gwen Rivlin fills the house with strays and stages The Cherry Orchard in the living room. Moving between Gwen’s adolescence and her fraught, complicated present, Rachel Pastan writes with the energy of a sociologist and the soul of a poet. This is a novel about grief transmuted into art, about the families we assemble when the ones we’re born into prove insufficient, and about how a house can be both a burden and a sanctuary. Moving, funny, and wise."—Christina Baker Kline, #1 NYT Bestselling author of Orphan Train and The Foursome
"We’re So Lucky to Live Here beautifully explores overlapping ideas of community, loss, memory, and change. Rachel Pastan’s novel is both an intimate, compelling mother-daughter story and a broader, sharp-eyed look at the ways in which people live now––or try to live. This is a highly enjoyable, observant, memorable book. — Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings.
“I love novels about old houses, and novels about mothers and daughters, and novels about grief and its wily ways. Rachel Pastan’s warm and lovely new book gives us all three and makes the joining of these themes feel both fresh and inevitable. A beautiful novel by a wonderful writer.”—Ann Packer, author of Some Bright Nowhere
“We’re so lucky to have We’re So Lucky to Live Here, a gorgeous novel about love and grief, about literature and life, about community and independence. How do we say good-bye to those we love, and wrestle all our prickly, long-held resentments? This unputdownable novel shows Pastan at the peak of her considerable powers."”—Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley
PRAISE FOR RACHEL PASTAN
In the Field: “The novel, sensual, stirring, suspenseful...a story splendidly imagined, but with all the dimension and complexity that comes from the author's original fascination and respect for the real-life character."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Rachel Pastan has written a compelling and compulsively readable tale about a complex woman's path to success in biological science, showing us, through subtle social conflicts and in lucid evocative prose, the difficulties of entering any field as an unconventional, impassioned participant."—Harold Varmus, Lewis Thomas University Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine; Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine
Alena: “Creepy and entrancing.” —John Irving, author Queen Esther
“Alena is so eerie and elegantly suspenseful that I could see myself rereading it…every few years.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“A brilliant takedown of the self-serious art world. —The New York Times Book Review
Lady of the Snakes: “A marvelous, fearless book.” —Ann Packer, author of Some Bright Nowhere
“The perfect summer book.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
This Side of Married: “A wedding bouquet of great wit and affection.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings