BOOK(s): Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son ~ Michael Chabon & Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace ~ Ayelet Waldman
It made sense to read these essay collections co-currently. Chabon and Waldman are married, were recently were profiled in the NY Times Styles section, and also named one among the “annoying literary lovebirds” by Gawker. There are so many reasons I should loathe them: their charming Craftsman-style house in Berkeley, their four hip kids, their literary fame and fortune, the fact that Waldmen writes a lot about parenting. However, Chabon is one of my favorite modern authors (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of my favorite books, ever), and I admire that Waldman admitted in a NYT “Modern Love” column that not only did she still have mad, passionate sex with her husband, she loved him more than her kids, and was able to defend herself after being savaged by every media outlet, mommy, and mommyblogger in the known universe. Seriously, it pissed off a lot of women, but I think it’s a beautifully written essay, where she compares her husband to the sun and her children to the moons. I don’t begrudge her for loving her husband more than her kids one bit. In fact, I think that’s the reason my parents have been married 50+ years.
Still, I must admit that I preferred Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs because we share many of the same interests (e.g. comics, music, reading). He includes essays about all of these topics, along with the bris of his first son, the early death of David Foster Wallace, and how upon entering the MFA program at UC-Irvine at age 22 he was clearly a “little shit”: “Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the mid-sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age. Because I was a bright and would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzsche.” As a graduate school survivor, I knew many of these “little shits” from seminars, constantly playing the game of “my academic wang is bigger than your academic wang, and you sitting over there, since you don’t even have an academic wang, just an academic gash, your opinion on the subject at hand means absolutely nothing”.
I also enjoyed “Verging”, where Chabon recounts sleeping with a 35-year-old friend of his mother when he was 15, and “The Splendors of Crap”, an appreciation of vintage crappy kid entertainment, and how his kid’s crap entertainment differs from his (and is vastly inferior.)
While Chabon’s collection focuses on all aspects of his masculinity - as a son, as a brother, as a single man, as a husband, as a father - Waldman’s Bad Mother is almost entirely mom-focused. While I would normally find this vomitous as a committed childfree person, I enjoyed the collection. Most likely this is because Waldman didn’t write about how cute her kids’ bodily functions are, but about the ugly truths of parenting instead, without being all “Dooce-y” about it. Waldman is a writer (and probably developed the skills from her years as a lawyer), not just a blogger who happened to hit it big and get a book contract.
Waldman’s best essay in Bad Mother is “Breast is Best”, a call to action of how women need to stop judging each other’s childcare choices straight to their faces without having all the facts. She recounts an incident while standing in like at a bakery, giving her infant son a bottle. The woman standing behind her scolded her for not breastfeeding. Waldman, exhausted, broke into tears and explained that it was breastmilk, but she had to feed him from a bottle because of her son’s palate abnormality. “What is it about parenting that allows us to indulge our inner scold? Normally most of us don’t feel particularly threatened about the choices other people make. You live in a split-level ranch, I live in a Craftsman bungalow. I might like your house more than yours - I might even tell a friend I think your house is ugly - but I’d never stop you on the street and tell you to do something about your aluminum siding.”
Another good selection is “Tech Support”, in which she examines the way pregnancy and parenting online were so much different in 1997 as opposed to 2007. In 1997 Waldman participated on a private listserv with about 50 other women due in the month of June; all used their full names when posting. By the time she started writing a column on Salon in 2005, web discourse had completely devolved, something she attributes in part to the ability to hide behind screen monikers and non-identifiable e-mail addresses (like Gmail or Hotmail). Now that there’s no more reliance on “official” e-mail address (like those with .edu or .gov), it’s so much easier to criticize people for their choices. The most painful essay is “Rocketship”, her story about terminating a pregnancy after a genetic abnormality - which may or may have not have manifested itself into physical, mental, and developmental defects after birth - was detected with amniocentesis. After hours of reading and internet research, she finds herself debating “how much defect” she could handle: “I did calculations in my mind of what I could tolerate - physical malformations, fine. Who cares? I measure five feet - I bet there are parents in the world who’d be horrified at the prospect of having a child doomed never to grow taller than that. But developmental delay. That shook me to my core. Mental retardation. I couldn’t go there.”
Yes, I probably should find Chabon and Waldman annoying and smug. But these collections are just so well done (especially Chabon’s, but then again I may be a bit biased) that I’ll just reserve my literary-related hatred for talentless, flash-in-the-pan bloggers with cushy, unnecessary book contracts.
