Blau says she used her own family as a “launching pad for the novel.’’ She even interviews her own family in the novel’s postscript. Some of the same topics — sex, drugs, and family squabbles — were visited in “Swim Parties,’’ but Blau depicts them in fresh and entertaining ways, even when the subtext is heartrending.
Three adult children in their 20s and 30s have flown in from the East Coast and gather in Santa Barbara to visit their mother, Louise. She’s been hospitalized after suffering a massive heart attack. Louise, 54, is a chain-smoking old hippie. Opinionated, blunt, cantankerous, she’s free-spirited enough to have never swum in a swimsuit. Husband Buzzy is a lawyer but hardly a straight arrow: He used to grow marijuana in the backyard. He promised Louise he wouldn’t tell the kids about her heart attack, but he broke down.
Anna, the oldest, has flown in from Vermont where her cuckolded husband runs a flower shop. Her infant son stayed home. Anna’s been in and out of treatment for drug and sex addictions. She’s only recently forgiven her mother for a “litany of crimes.’’ Younger Portia sympathizes more with their mother, but she’s often blunt, which makes Louise laugh. Portia’s husband, Patrick, has left her, after seven years, for a younger woman — Portia caught him in flagrante delicto. Portia’s daughter, Esmé, stayed with Patrick in the girlfriend’s apartment. The youngest sibling, Emery, a television show producer, arrives with his boyfriend, Alejandro. They plan to ask Anna and Portia for their eggs so they can have a baby — they have chosen the woman who will bear the child.
While visiting Mom, the family jokes and bickers. They eat Louise’s food and incur the wrath of the hospital social worker who, unaccustomed to a splash of good old family fun and bickering, thinks they’re an uncaring family.
