"Eleanor Rushing is a first-person narrative tour-de-force. While Eleanor is blessed with acute powers of observation and the ability to remember everything, her recollections and impressions are nevertheless often at odds with those of the people ar...
Having driven her grown children far from home, cynical widow Jerusha scoffs at their choices in life and finds herself becoming unexpectedly attached to her ten-year-old next-door neighbor, the son of an equally dysfunctional mother. Reprint....
New Orleans's idiosyncrasies have been embraced by the world; Patty Friedmann gives us a tender, hilarious portrait of them in her new novel Side Effects. Set in N.O. Drugstore where hardscrabble black Pigeontown meets stuffy white Tulane, Side Effec...
It’s been seven years, and Eleanor Rushing is still waiting for Maxim Walters, the love of her life, to leave his wife and move into her rambling mansion on St. Charles Avenue. But when she meets Dr. Richard Kimball -- tall, dark, handsome, and a ...
In the midst of the biggest natural disaster in American history--Hurricane Katrina--15-year-old Summer "Sumbie" Elmwood's two-year-old sister disappears from the hospital after open-heart surgery and Sumbie is the prime suspect. But in the chaos of ...
Otto Fisher has ADHD. He’s also adopted. At thirteen, he never thought much about where he came from until his seventh-grade teacher at the prestigious St. Michael’s school in New Orleans asks her class to write about an ancestor. Each student mu...
In this final installment of the Too Jewish Trilogy, Darby Cooper, the daughter of Bernie and Letty whom we met in Too Jewish, has become a bestselling New Orleans author after the turn of the millennium, drawing on the tragedy of her father’s life...
AN ORGANIZED PANIC sets sister against brother, born secular humanist against later-in-life evangelical Christian. The sibling squabble underscores a serious struggle, certainly, but this is another tale told in the darkly humorous Friedmann voice--a...
“Many of Friedmann’s stories contain an admixture of quirkiness, with elements of dark humor. Most of the stories contain startling surprise endings that this reviewer hesitates to explain, lest the surprise be ruined. These stories are truly enj...
During forty years as a psychologist, I've tried to help people avoid the error of simply judging behavior, because this keeps us from deepening our understanding of how uncanny, perverse, complex, and fascinating our human stories really are. Patty ...