Who Town

Writing for the Tribune, Sarah Rosen launches celebrities like rote zombies. She describes them as her editor dictates, to anoint the next wave of “it” and “who.” One afternoon Sarah covers the dinner party of Roxy–a sculptor who carves figurine replicas of herself–and something, literally, snaps. Roxy’s sculpture is decapitated by a rolling rack of designer clothes. Lola, Roxy’s haphazard lover–an erotic actress–smokes weed with her bar back boyfriend. And Rick, son of an iconic metal guitarist reluctantly participates in Sarah’s staged news story. Questioning her journalistic role as the ultimate fabricator, Sarah crosses personal and professional boundaries when she meets Roxy for a drink. Through the revolving perspectives of Sarah, Roxy, Rick, and Lola, the reader travels the tenuous thread that links them. Sarah comes from a Jewish family on the poor side of the tracks and dry cleans thrift store designer cast offs so she won’t be found out. Roxy transforms herself from Waspy Connecticut prep into a goth narcissistic monster who lives rent free in her father’s Tribeca building. Rick hides his original collection of Shakespeare plays and his substandard penis. And Lola experiments with sex and drugs in order to forget a pup tent in Texas and a mother’s curse that ultimately drove her to New York City, the land of opportunity. WHO TOWN is a world that blurs sexual identity with ego gratification, artistry and pornography, religious taboos and addiction, and an increasingly falsified media that perpetuates a soul killing cult of insta-celebrity.