My Year With The Stork Club

by Ureen Freely

Mike and Laura are a perfect San Francisco couple of the 1980s. They have put the counter-culture behind them and gotten married. They believe they are in love. Everything is great. But with the arrival of their first child, they become prey to an irresistible force: a Support Group of Mothers so brilliantly organized, so demoniacally caring, so conversant with the endless rules of politically correct child rearing, that it functions like a first-class conspiracy. To say that the Stork Club comes between husband and wife is to understate matters wildly - especially when, after the second baby, Laura goes to work and Mike emerges as the new "primary caregiver" for their children. Taking his wife's place in the group, Mike becomes a vital cog in the Stork machine. In fact, so completely does Mike come to sympathize with and entangle himself in the lives of Laura's soon-to-be-former best friends, their teetering marriages, and ultimately their sexual fantasies that a cataclysm looms on the horizon. In My Year with the Stork Club, Maureen Freely keeps us on the edge of laughter as she negotiates the minefields of marriage among the young and youngish who have raised anxiety to an art form. Irrepressible, wickedly wise, hilarious, it is social comedy at its best.

305 pages, Hardcover

First published June 8, 1993