In life and fiction, a late-blooming novelist makes peace, happily, with L.A.

On the Shelf
Good Company
By Cynthia DâAprix Sweeney
Ecco: 320 pages, $28
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The novelist Cynthia DâAprix Sweeney turned 60 last August. How did she celebrate?
âI cooked dinner for my family,â she recalls with an only slightly rueful smile.
Sweeney and her husband, Mike, a longtime head writer for Conan OâBrien, left their New York City home in 2009 for Los Angeles. While COVID has put a damper on big birthday plans, Sweeney is surprisingly sanguine about life in Los Feliz. âI can walk in Griffith Park, for example,â she tells me via video call. âWeâve been able to see friends outside on our patio.â One of their two sons works in food service but âjust got the vaccine. That was a happy moment for our family.â
Itâs been a happy few years for Sweeney, pandemic and dislocation notwithstanding. Her debut novel, âThe Nest,â came out in 2016, when she was 55 â and had just finished her MFA at Bennington Writing Seminars. Acclaimed as âfetching,â âbiting and addictive,â âThe Nestâ became a bestseller and was optioned by Amazon Studios. Such success might lead a writer to stress over the dreaded sophomore slump. Not Sweeney.
âI want people to like it; I hope they see whatâs good about it,â she says of âGood Company,â her new novel about an acting troupe and a marriage in trouble. âBut I wrote the book I wanted to write. No book can be good for everyone. I feel pretty great about it, to be honest.â
The strife and self-doubt of middle age â that went into the book. âI donât think itâs any surprise that shortly after I did something in midlife that changed my life â getting my MFA, moving across the country â that I found myself writing a novel about hitting a moment in life when not everything is possible anymore.â
The two longtime couples at the center of âGood Companyâ each hit the wall of the empty nest. âIf you have kids and they go off to college or careers, itâs a sort of reassessment period for a marriage.â
Over the past 20 years, industry shifts have funneled more novelists into TV rooms than ever. Itâs salutary in many ways â beginning with health insurance.
Spoiler alert: Sweeneyâs marriage survived her own reassessment. âI married someone whose career took off while mine was just going along at the same pace,â she says. âIt was very evident, when we had children, who was going to stop working because I wasnât making enough money to support a family.â
Along came âThe Nestâ to lift Sweeney out of her empty nest and level the playing field of her marriage. And they had already made â and learned from â the big move.
âWhen we relocated to Los Angeles, I had to move six months ahead of my husband so our oldest son could start high school in his new city,â she says. âMike was alone in Brooklyn; I was alone with two kids in L.A. It was a complete nightmare, and we learned how not to act when separated by 3,000 miles, information that I hope never to have to use.â

By the time the dust cleared and Sweeney looked around, some of her peers werenât so lucky. âA weird thing happened as I was starting to work on âGood Company,ââ she says. âA lot of my friends started to get divorced. And I remember thinking, oh, I thought we were all smarter than that, that thatâs why we got married later.â
She funneled their discontent into the novel, along with something that actually did happen to her â a small loss, in the scheme of things, that provides the novelâs opening beat and abiding symbol. What else could it be but a wedding ring?
âIâd been working on this book in its early stages and was feeling kind of depleted after the paperback tour for âThe Nest,ââ Sweeney recalls. âA friend suggested taking the summer off, and I did, so I went on a business trip with my husband to Israel. I left my engagement ring and wedding ring in the hotel room and never got them back.â
Sweeneyâs wedding band had belonged to her grandmother. âJust this tiny little worn-down white-gold band,â she says. âNo amount of insurance could replace it.â On her return, she heard so many stories from other people about lost pieces of jewelry that a long-lost ring felt like a resonant way to start a story about lifelong bonds breaking apart.
With a new memoir, âYouâre Leaving When?,â the writer-actress contemplates illness, middle age and an empty nest, humorously.
âGood Companyâsâ protagonist, Flora Mancini, finds an envelope containing a photo â as well as the wedding ring her husband of 20 years said he lost in a pond long ago. The story of the ring prompts a narrative flashback to the coupleâs salad days, as they struggled to keep Julianâs New York theater, Good Company, in the black â then flashes forward to their move to Los Angeles after Flora lands a stable and lucrative voice-over gig on an animated sitcom.
Moving to L.A. also means reconnecting with Floraâs even more successful best friend, actor Margot Letta, whose partner, David, is a cardiologist recovering from a severe stroke. When Flora and Julianâs daughter Ruby (âmy favorite character,â Sweeney says) graduates from high school, David presents her with a jewel, a tiny gold human heart that opens to reveal the girlâs namesake gemstone. And yet another significant piece of jewelry reminds the couple of whatâs always been at stake in their union.
Over the course of âGood Company,â two unions are tested. Whatever their fates, Sweeney felt it was important to recognize that from the vantage point of middle age in the 21st century, the end of a marriage is not always synonymous with failure. âAny relationship that lasts long enough to make the participants happy and possibly create a family is successful,â she says. âIf people in a relationship find they want different things, that doesnât negate whatâs come before.â
âGood Companyâ is a quieter, more wistful novel than âThe Nestâ â the California counterpart to the first novelâs very New York drama. With its inheritance plot, real-estate frenzy and aura of zero-sum conflict, âThe Nestâ was sharp and funny, noisy and big. Sweeney embarked on her second novel with the goal of lingering longer with her characters and going a little deeper. âI wanted it to be a more focused kind of book.â
One continuity between the two books is the centrality of family â something always on Sweeneyâs mind. She and her three siblings remain close; her motherâs extended Italian family was happy and all-enveloping, with a grandmother who had seven siblings and grandfather who had nine. When I say it sounds like the inspiration for her fictional theater troupe, she says, âThatâs a good comparison, because everyone had their own role. âThe Nestâ is about the family you are born into versus the family you choose, while âGood Companyâ is about choosing how you make your family.â
Sweeneyâs next book will likely circle back to the root of her family fixation â her original hometown of Rochester, N.Y. Will it be the Great Rochester Novel we never knew we needed? âMaybe!â she says with a laugh. âMy first novel was definitely all about New York. Iâd hoped my second would be more about California, but itâs kind of a hybrid. Iâm just not finished with the East Coast, I guess.â
But for the moment, sheâs happy where she is.
Readers thought Stephanie Danlerâs debut novel, âSweetbitter,â was autobiography. The reality, in her memoir âStray,â is far more painfully dramatic.
Patrick is a freelance critic who tweets @TheBookMaven.
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