Abby and Patrick welcome writer Daniel Lavery to talk about his superb new book Women’s Hotel. Lavery’s novel conjures a now-vanished institution (low cost, long term residential communities for working women) in a since-disappeared landscape (midcentury New York City) and populates it with a cast of memorable characters whose entanglements, solidarities, and mixed fortunes dramatize the very contingencies of family, community, and human life itself. Abby and Patrick talk with Daniel about how he came to conceive of the project, his influences and inspiration, his method for producing such rich characterizations, the question of style, and more. It’s also a chance for the three to explore the psychoanalytically rich themes and topics the book takes up, from the desire for recognition to anxieties over conflicting social mores to substance abuse to family estrangement to religious preference and much, much more.

Women’s Hotel is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/women-s-hotel-daniel-m-lavery/21024970

Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:

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Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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