“Evocative and Novelistic”

Because the PPW bike lane is The Most Important Issue Ever it’s de rigueur for it to appear in any and every news story about Park Slope.  Here’s a little bit of a Patch interview with author Amy Sohn about the neighborhood and her next book.

Will the bike lane debate to make an appearance in the book?

You know, I thought a lot about it. Brian Lehrer told me to do it. The bike lane is referenced, but not a major plot. I am definitely interested in old versus young in Park Slope, and there’s a bit of that in the book, in a different context. But I wasn’t sure the lane was rich enough for a story of its own. The one image that stood out to me in the New York Magazine article about the lanes was the woman with the camera on her roof, filming the “low ridership.” That was very evocative and novelistic. I love the idea of her rage being so strong she’s counting riders. So maybe I’ll sneak her in somewhere. One thing that Suleiman Osman, author of “The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn,” pointed out was that the dividing lines of debate regarding the lane don’t really match up in an easy way. The lane-haters don’t fit into an easy category and the lane-lovers don’t either.