New Novel 'Marrying The Ketchups' Takes Place At Oak Park Restaurant
OAK PARK, Ill. (April 25, 2022) — An Oak Park restaurant provides the backdrop for best-selling author Jennifer Close’s new novel “Marrying the Ketchups.” The book hits shelves April 26 and centers around a tight-knit Irish Catholic family whose decades-old restaurant faces challenges after the death of its patriarch.
The Sullivan family is falling apart when we meet them in 2017, along with the rest of the country’s semblance of normalcy. Cousins Jane, Gretchen and Teddy are still reeling from the 2016 election when their grandfather Bud dies, leaving behind the restaurant and a grief-stricken wife. As their personal words unravel with career struggles and messy break-ups, their fictional family restaurant at the corner of Marion and Pleasant streets provides a sort of home base - a fitting metaphor for this Cubs-loving family. Oak Park plays a central role in who they are and how they face their futures.
“It seemed like the kind of place where a restaurant like Sullivan’s would thrive,” Close told Patch. “It was important to make sure that Sullivan’s was in a community that would support a family-owned restaurant like this, a place where the neighbors would become regulars.”
Personal and political drama are interwoven in “Marrying the Ketchups,” which creates a sometimes-painful journey back in time to a year when the political seemed to become more personal than ever. Before the Me Too movement, before COVID-19, before January 6, readers will empathize with the Sullivans as they grapple with their own choices amid the added stressors of the divisive Trump years.
And Oak Park is the perfect place to set a novel about a family invested in societal issues. Close makes deft observations about the village’s progressive culture and what sets it apart from surrounding suburbs. “I just tried to remember the things that I noticed when I first came to Oak Park,” said Close, a North Shore native. “The makeup of the families that I saw, the energy, the inclusion.”
It’s an especially apropos time to set a novel inside a restaurant as the industry still struggles with difficulties posed by COVID-19. “I started the book before 2016, so I was well into it when the pandemic hit,” Close said. “There were times I felt bad for my characters as I wrote, knowing they had no idea that a pandemic was coming that would disrupt the restaurant business and be a huge challenge to them.”
As with Close’s other compelling novels, the details of the characters’ every-day lives drive the drama, and Oak Park only adds to that. “I hope that Oak Parkers think that I did justice to the town,” Close said. “I hope that Chicagoans at large enjoy reading about the Cubs and the food and that maybe see some of their own experiences reflected back at them.”
“Marrying the Ketchups” will be released April 26, just ahead of National Independent Bookstore Day.
This article originally appeared on the Oak Park-River Forest Patch
