Cassandra Neyenesch on A Little Bit Bad
38m
Join Brooklyn-based writer and curator Cassandra Neyenesch as she presents A Little Bit Bad, a dazzlingly wild, darkly funny debut about desire and obsession, motherhood and marriage, and the irresistible intoxication of blowing up your life—Big Swiss meets All Fours with a murder mystery twist.
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbour's anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she's pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he's fifteen years younger, she's terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered.
As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like theirs ever be the mother her children deserve? And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?
In conversation with journalist and author Rachel Johnson, join us for an evening exploring erotic awakening and the messiness of desire, what it means to blow up your life and live with the consequences, and how Cassandra turns the suspense genre on its head—making a murder mystery that's as much about the complexities of motherhood and marriage as it is about who did it.