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Landing in New York’s high society and underground art scene after her mother abandons her, street-smart sixteen-year-old Geraldine struggles to survive the efforts of three glamorous women who want to save her.

Growing up on the road, it has always been the two of them, locked in dysfunction. Homeschooled, Gerry hasn’t learned much math. Instead, her mother has taught her how to spend the day at a motel’s swimming pool without being a guest or how to dodge paying extra for the chicken on a Caesar salad.

When her mother ditches her, Gerry finds herself in the care of three very different women, who each try to remake her. First, there is her mother’s old college friend Bonnie, who lives in a world of country clubs, The Bachelor binges, and whipped mochas. Then there is Nell, her mother’s estranged sister and a successful artist who pushes Gerry to be ambitious. And finally Finley, an old-money socialite who ushers Gerry into a rarefied world of Manhattan privilege.

A coming-of-age novel that explores unconventional forms of motherhood and caretaking, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s new novel is both a charming comedy of manners and a deeply probing look at the complexities of love, mental illness, and one young woman’s eccentric path to selfhood.

Praise & Reviews

“Culminating with a hard dose of reality, it’s a fresh story of female resilience.”
–Publishers Weekly

"Unequivocally the best book I've read this year. Sarah Blakley-Cartwright's writing is elegant, painful, and funny. A mother-daughter story with all the wit and feeling of Susie Boyt's Loved and Missed. Heavy Cream nails the profound, often horrifying, experience of figuring out who you are in relation to the people who raised you."
—Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair

"Heavy Cream is a moving and brilliantly written novel that explores the imperfect connection between a mother and daughter and questions the role of caretaking—or lack thereof—in the formation of identity. I absolutely loved this smart, spiky story."
—Camille Perri, author of Social Animals

“As a former homeschool kid, I’m always looking out for the Great Homeschool Novel, and I suspected after a couple chapters of Heavy Cream that I’d finally found it. But, actually, this novel turned out to be much, much more. In this aching, witty, vibey, wildly perceptive story of a teenage girl whose sense of self is repeatedly upended by the whims of the four women vying for her love, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright has proven that she might just be the greatest literary writer of adolescence at work today.”
—Stefan Merrill Block, New York Times bestselling author of Homeschooled: a Memoir