Heavy Cream

Abandoned by her mother in New York, sixteen-year-old Geraldine falls under the influence of three women, each seeking to form her in their image.

"Heavy Cream is funny, deeply felt, and positively effervescent, brimming with life and color and texture—I was repeatedly struck by its humor, its compassion, and its candor." —Claire Lombardo

Growing up on the road, it has always been the two of them, locked in dysfunction. Homeschooled, Gerry hasn’t learned much math. Instead, her mother has taught her how to spend the day at a motel’s swimming pool without being a guest or how to dodge paying extra for the chicken on a Caesar salad.

Gerry learns how to pass and adapt, but when she is abandoned in the city, Gerry finds herself in the care of three very different women, each intent on shaping her into competing and incompatible selves. First, there is her mother’s old college friend Bonnie, who lives in a world of country clubs and chintzy domesticity. Then there is Nell, her mother’s estranged sister and a successful artist who insists on ambition and self-invention. And finally Finley, an old-money socialite who ushers Gerry into the rarefied world of Manhattan privilege.

A coming-of-age tale that explores unconventional forms of motherhood and caretaking, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s new novel is both a charming comedy of manners and a deeply probing look at the complexities of love, mental illness, and inheritance, and one young woman’s eccentric path to selfhood.