Scaffolding - Hardcover

by Lauren Elkin (Author)

A Most-Anticipated Book: The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, BBC, Marie Claire, Frieze, Literary Hub, The Millions, Our Culture, i news

"A subtle, sexy, exquisitely written jewel of a book." --Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Fl?neuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.

Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor--a younger woman called Cl?mentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.

Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood.

Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times--times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of ?ric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we've loved live on in us.

Author Biography

Lauren Elkin is the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse, which was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Granta, Le Monde, and Frieze. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and is now based in London.