Suburgatory

Book excerpt: Suburgatory lampoons the absurdities and contradictions that Linda Keenan has witnessed since leaving New York City, where she was a thoroughly urban CNN news producer for seven years, and settling down as a hapless stay-at-home suburban mother. The original proposal for this book was picked up by Warner Brothers, and you can see their imagining of Suburgatory on the ABC show of the same title. Keenan was forced by the man in her life to leave her beloved New York City for a supposed suburban utopia. Instead she found herself trapped in a place where conformity is king, and where she often felt like she had been taken hostage by an adult Girl Scout troop. So Keenan decided to train her twisted reporter's eye on the strange inhabitants of this new foreign land. Thought of as a local town newspaper or website, Suburgatory excoriates—through satirical local “news stories”—the mostly upper middle class American pieties and parenting obsessions, targeting the all-around bad behavior raging underneath the surface of those obsessively tended suburban lawns and bikini lines.