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It’s a scenario that Westchester residents can relate to: a heavily mortgaged house, the challenges of balancing work with motherhood, the burden of keeping secrets in a marriage. In The Objects of Her Affection, out this month, the heroine lives in a fixer-upper in Philadelphia with her two children and her husband, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When an ill-advised option ARM sends her mortgage payments through the roof, she does the unthinkable: She steals museum treasures and sells them to a shady dealer in Manhattan in order to pay the bills.
As the wife of a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, debut author and Dobbs Ferry resident Sonya Cobb has certainly followed the writers’ credo to write what you know, although she is quick to point out in her intro that she has never lifted any priceless relics when visiting her husband at work. “Some of this story was inspired by my own journey as a working mother, some by my behind-the-scenes access to museums,” she says, noting that the rest of the book is entirely fiction.
Fellow author DeLauné Michel, founder of the popular Spoken Interludes reading series (staged regularly in Hastings-on-Hudson), calls Cobb “an insightful and moving new voice” with “a smart, entertaining book that had me pinned to my chair until the end.”
