Jedren, Susan

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JEDREN, Susan

PERSONAL: Female; children: two sons. Education: Attended Columbia University.

ADDRESSES: Home—309 West 102 St., Apt. 2F, New York, NY 10025. Agent—Eric Simonoff, Janklow & Nesbitt, 445 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Computer programmer, author, and former delivery truck driver.

WRITINGS:

Let 'Em Eat Cake: A Novel, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1994.

SIDELIGHTS: New York City native Susan Jedren drew on her own working-class life experiences to write Let 'Em Eat Cake: A Novel, her first book. Like its main character, Anna Ferrara, Jedren drove a Home-Made Cakes truck in New York in the late '70s to support herself and her two young sons.

At the outset of Let 'Em Eat Cake, Anna, Puerto Rican twenty-four-year-old mother of Nick, six, and Joey, four, finds herself with no job, no job experience, and no child-support payments from her philandering ex-husband. She scours New York City for work, and "the job she finds—delivering Homemade Cakes to seedy bodegas by the Brooklyn docks—comes with a Teamsters union card and the likelihood that she'll be mugged or raped on any one of her daily rounds," wrote a contributor to Kirkus Reviews.

Anna is the only woman on the job, and her boss, who doesn't think she belongs, punishes her with the most unsavory assignments. But "when threatened, she fights back with whatever means are necessary. She wields a seltzer bottle and metal cake trays. Eventually she begins to carry the gun given to her by Baby Huey, her coworker and occasional lover," recounted Luanne Rice in the New York Times Book Review. Rice identified "a swashbuckling quality" in Jedren's work, and a contributor to Kirkus Reviews calls it "rollicking, spunky." Despite criticizing a too-neat ending, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly concluded, "This story rings true all the way down to the heat rash that Anna gets from her ill-fitting men's uniform." Luanne Rice similarly noted Jedren's knack for quotidian detail and called the book "convincing in its re-creation of the quirky, roundabout way parents and kids communicate."

"It's all absolutely true," said Jedren in an interview with Meredith Berkman for Entertainment Weekly, adding, "but it's not. Those stories are not true. But all the pieces of my life are in there. That's how I lived." Jedren grew up poor in the Bronx and later worked odd jobs, including a stint with a cake company, before enrolling in a writing program at Columbia University. Her unfinished novel sat in a desk drawer until a chance meeting in 1992 with former classmate Mona Simpson, who remembered her work and urged her to complete it.