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Summary
Summary
"Kimberly Harrington deftly and hilariously uncovers all of the lies and bullshit women are told about motherhood. This book made me laugh, sure, but it also made me feel seen." -- Jennifer Romolini, chief content officer at Shondaland.com and author of Weird in a World That's Not
An emotionally honest, arresting, and funny collection of essays about motherhood and adulthood.
"Being a mother is a gift."
Where's my receipt
Welcome to essayist Kimberly Harrington's poetic and funny world of motherhood, womanhood, and humanhood, not necessarily in that order. It's a place of loud parenting, fierce loving, too much social media, and occasional inner monologues where timeless debates are resolved such as Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure ("PRO: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself. CON: They're really crappy.") With accessibility and wit, she captures the emotions around parenthood in artful and earnest ways, highlighting this time in the middle--midlife, the middle years of childhood, how women are stuck in the middle of so much. It's a place of elation, exhaustion, and time whipping past at warp speed. Finally, it's a quiet space to consider the girl you were, the mother you are, and the woman you are always becoming.
Author Notes
Kimberly Harrington is a regular contributor to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the cofounder and editor of the parenting humor site Razed, and a copywriter and creative director. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Medium. She lives in Vermont on purpose.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This funny, angry, and moving essay collection from Harrington, a copywriter and regular contributor to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, considers life for women dealing with motherhood, work, marriage, self-image, expectations, ambition, fatigue, and everything else. "Our culture has set the bar so high that it's hidden in a place where we'll never find it," she writes. Per the subtitle, the writing is often profane, but just as often poignant, as in Harrington's opening salvo, addressed to her children and titled, "I Don't Want to Be Dying to Tell You These Things," which states "you will be disappointed to learn that parents, and adults in general, do not have all the answers." Full of "righteous anger" about how quickly new mothers are expected to leap back into full-time work, nostalgia for the "nowhere-but-here" days spent with toddlers, and grief for lost loved ones, Harrington is at her best in the most personal pieces, including discussions of working from home ("The Super Bowl of Interruptions") and of trying to parent without overpraising children ("Your Participation Trophies Are Bullshit"). The collection also has short throwaways ("Your Cute Wedding Hashtags 20 Years Later") and clever humor pieces, such as an essay presenting motherhood as a job description. All of the topics covered are familiar, but Harrington's approach to them is singular, and readers-particularly those who have been in the motherhood trenches-will smile, laugh, and maybe even shed a tear.(May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The modern motherhood memoir in a series of sardonic spoofs.Creative director and humor writer Harrington reversed the typical American experience of childbearing, working 60-hour weeks while taking care of her newborn children before staying home with them a few years later, when a layoff forced her into freelance work. Using plenty of swear words, as advertised, she chronicles her years on both sides of the mommy wars, tallying the insults of an unenlightened corporate culture and the exquisite tortures of working from home with kids. The narrative features blog-style recollections punctuated with "time-outs": conceptual interludes featuring hashtags, listicles, pretend dialogues, and quizzes ("Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting?"). The least successful of these experiments are still clever, and though her comedic timing often fizzles, the frenzy of styles and self-conscious gimmicks keeps things lively and justifies her career as a professional thrower of ideas at walls. Harrington embraces the bravado and casual irreverence of the advertising industry even as she mocks it, and she never tires of portraying herself as an ill-fitting matriarch, a Don Draper who awoke one day to find himself leading a Girl Scout troop. The author is at her wittiest when transforming her outrageespecially at the sorry plight of mothers in the United States and their "cultural irrelevance" after maternity leaveinto absurd, acerbic commentary. Like all effective satire, Harrington's best bits arise from deep anger, and she reminds readers that, more than meal trains or forced holidays, mothers desperately need policy reform. Too often, her essays switch unexpectedly into truisms and parenting advice for soul-weary breeders, saccharine (if sincere) messages of encouragement that do not pair well with a plateful of sarcasm. Even if many of her observations and experiences prove more common and less funny than the packaging suggests, her quirky, dissenting energy should resonate with parents who find little use for the usual mommy-blogger fare.Bitterly hilarious in spots. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Selling this book as a book about motherhood would sell it short. It is not about any one thing. Rather, it is a meditation on a full, beautiful, and messy life. In her first book, Harrington, a contributor to the New Yorker and McSweeney's, writes about being a woman in her twenties, thirties, and forties; about being a working woman, wife, and mother; about being a person who struggles daily with anxiety and worry for her future, her death, her children's safety, and her marriage. No piece in this collection of short vignettes is much like another. Some are heartfelt and honest (describing what it's like to wash the body of a family member who has died or to have regrets about raising children in the social-media age), while others take on a satirical, fantasy-like quality (imagining a pilot berating, over the in-flight intercom, a mother for her personal failings). Chapters will make readers rotate through laughter, tears, and cringing, and are all written with refreshingly honest and bold abandon.--Spanner, Alison Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Harrington's first book of essays explores parenting, marriage, childbirth, education, unemployment - and the special slice of hell that is navigating two toddlers through a rest area bathroom. Harrington is a veteran of the mommy wars who, fascinatingly, has fought on both sides. She worked 60hour weeks with a newborn and later took time off to stay at home with her family. She has had her 3-year-old daughter literally cling to her coattails to try to stop her from leaving for the office; she has experienced the brain-splitting act of making a conference call while her children roughhouse unsupervised in the next room; and she understands that staying home with small kids means you "coordinate, plan and do almost everything," yet "crash face-first into bed every night feeling like you've accomplished basically nothing." She has felt the sting of scorn that comes after telling a guest at a cocktail party that you're a stay-at-home mom, or that your kids are in day care: "It's an awful word; it's a hard one to get out. It's where babies go to die on their first day." She knows that working mothers are always apologizing to their children: '"I'm sorry I'm away from you. I'm sorry I have to make money, even though sometimes what I'm doing is stupid and utterly pointless.' But also 'I'm sorry that I'm probably really enjoying at least part of it.' " In trying to justify both sides of the conflict, Harrington occasionally ends up sounding mad at the world. Her point is that the world of child rearing is unfair - mothers have no guilt-free options - but she sounds vitriolic rather than vehement. Harrington excels in the short, funny lists that punctuate the book (i.e. "Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting?") and conveys true heartbreak in longer, more personal pieces on topics like her miscarriage and having a child with Asperger's. Other chapters, like "It's Complicated" and "As Young as We'll Ever Be," are more generic and feel like filler. Too often Harrington's crisp, perceptive sentences are followed by three or four more that say pretty much the same thing, dulling her otherwise stylish prose. Even so, the book is thought-provoking and memorable. The chapter about the day she finally made good on her threat to turn the car around if her children didn't start behaving will stay with you for a long, long time.
Table of Contents
| First | |
| I Don't Want to Be Dying in Order to Tell You These Things | p. 3 |
| Jobs | |
| Fuck. This. List. | p. 9 |
| Job Description for the Dumbest Job Ever | p. 17 |
| The Super Bowl of Interruptions | p. 23 |
| I Am the One Woman Who Has It All | p. 33 |
| Undone | p. 37 |
| Dear Stay-at-Home Moms and Working Moms, You're Both Right | p. 45 |
| Time-Out | |
| Just What I Wanted, a Whole Twenty-Four Hours of Recognition Once a Year | p. 55 |
| "If Mama Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy": Revised and Expanded | p. 59 |
| Vows | |
| Tiny Losses | p. 65 |
| If You Love Your Grandparents, Go Visit Them | p. 81 |
| Let's Have the Wedding Later | p. 89 |
| It's Complicated | p. 95 |
| Time-Out | |
| Your Cute Wedding Hashtags Twenty Years Later | p. 105 |
| Kids, It's Time You Knew the Truth-Your Mother Is a Real Piece of Work | p. 107 |
| Showdowns | |
| Overshare | p. 115 |
| Thank You for Including Me on This Meal Train but Unfortunately I'm a Horrible Person | p. 125 |
| Your Participation Trophies Are Bullshit | p. 129 |
| September 17, 2010: The Day I Turned the Car Around | p. 137 |
| The Ghosts of Halloweens Past | p. 147 |
| Time-Out | |
| Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting? | p. 155 |
| Are You Sure There Isn't Something Else I Can Do Before the End of the School Year? | p. 157 |
| Schools | |
| The Walls That Define Us | p. 163 |
| Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure | p. 169 |
| The Punching Season | p. 173 |
| Please Don't Get Murdered at School Today | p. 179 |
| I Don't Care If You Go to College | p. 183 |
| Time-Out | |
| What Do You Think of My Son's Senior Picture That Was Shot by Annie Leibovitz? | p. 189 |
| Anne-Marie Slaughter Is My Safe Word | p. 193 |
| Bodies | |
| Who Does That? | p. 201 |
| If You Can Touch It | p. 209 |
| As Young as We'll Ever Be | p. 219 |
| Hot-Ass Chicks | p. 225 |
| Ashes to Ashes | p. 237 |
| Time-Out | |
| Fifty-One Things You Should Never Say to a Mother Ever | p. 251 |
| Is There a Parenting Expert on This Plane? | p. 257 |
| Freedoms | |
| Do You Have Faith in Me? | p. 263 |
| Thirteen with Dudes | p. 269 |
| Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should | p. 281 |
| Last | |
| You Are All the Joy | p. 289 |
| When I Die | p. 301 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 305 |
