The Porno Girl

Brazen and sharp-witted, Merin Wexler's linked stories bind mothers, daughters, and wives wrestling with a fear of intimacy in sexual and family relationships.

These are women and teenagers caught in the pivotal conflicts of their lives, questioning and testing out their desirability, and their fitness as wives, mothers, and friends.

Merin Wexler touches a nerve, capturing longings and terrors that are both all-too-familiar and usually kept private. A new mother finds herself inexplicably drawn to the local porn shop, her baby strapped to her chest. A career mom decides to have a second child to keep her nanny. A teenaged babysitter sleeps with the dad to get closer to the mom. The glamorous proprietress of the summerhouse next door takes advantage of her infatuated teenage neighbor to suppress her feelings of estrangement from her indifferent husband. Wickedly funny and unsettling, The Porno Girl is a work of startling insight by a gifted young writer.