Photo: Penguin Publishing Group
In this topsy-turvy era in which normal life feels like a Twilight Zone episode, there's refuge to be found in stories of everyday people going about their lives. Through three novels—2012's Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, 2014's The Vacationers, and 2016's Modern Lovers—Emma Straub has become adept at finding amusement in the mundane, and her newest, All Adults Here, might just be her best yet. It follows three generations of the Strick family, a Hudson Valley-bound clan holding just as many secrets from themselves as from one another.
One of those sparkling personalities is Porter, a pushing-forty goat farmer who has self-inseminated and is eager—though not too eager—to tell her mother, Astrid, that she'll have a new granddaughter. In this exclusive excerpt from the book, we see how Porter arrived at the decision to get pregnant via sperm bank.
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Porter's bathroom smelled like goats because Porter smelled like goats. She couldn't always smell it herself, certainly not when she was with the animals, but once she came home and got into the shower, the steam opened up her pores and the whole room bloomed into a barnyard. It was worse when she smelled like cheese, mostly because other people tended to be more likely to attribute the cheese smell to her own body, whereas when she smelled like the goats, the animals were clearly to blame.
Read the full excerpt on Oprah Daily: Read an Exclusive Excerpt of Emma Straub's Side-Splitting New Novel, All Adults Here
Published 05/01/2020
