What I'm Reading Now ... A Primer on Raising Adolescents

I realized the other day that when my kids were very young, heck, even when they were still in the womb, I was voraciously reading up on the best parenting practices. Compulsively so.

Then all three of the Picket Fence Post children hit puberty and it dawned on me that it's been quite a long time since I've read anything about childrearing. Two are of my kids are teens, the other's not too far behind. And all hell has broken loose.

After hearing some vivid tales from the Picket Fence Post household, a friend recommended this:


I now feel as though I finally understand why my house is suddenly filled with such loud melodrama ... or, conversely, the eerie silence of sulking and somber offspring. Reading Get Out of My Life But First Could You Drive Me & Cheryl to the Mall? is akin to stumbling upon a helpful translator who's explaining the goings-on that are occurring right in front of my eyes but seem to be in a foreign language.

The Youngest Boy, not liking the cover of the book one iota, was displeased to see me chuckling as I was reading it the other night.

"I'm gonna read that when you're not looking," he threatened.

"Go ahead," I taunted him, "at least you'd be reading a book."

"Grrrr," he muttered as he kicked a dog toy across the family room, "I hate reading."

Talkin' Book-in-Progress & Families 'Over-Sharing' Online

*Cross-posted from Notes from the Asylum*

One of my favorite Boston Globe columnists, Joanna Weiss, invited me to participate in a very cool thing called a "blog hop," where one author "tags" another and the person who's "It" fields questions about her next writing project.

Weiss -- who wrote the sharp and amusing satirical novel Milkshake, about the lunacy of the political and feminist politics surrounding breastfeeding -- is working on a new book about a culture clash involving an uber-rich Boston family and working/middle class Bostonians. You can see what she wrote about her work-in-progress Beantown book here.

Weiss has tagged yours truly to answer some questions about my work-in-progress novel. Thanks Joanna! Here goes:

What is the working title of your book?

The Mortified: A Novel About Over-Sharing.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

After years of reading personal blogs, I became increasingly surprised and intrigued by how many vivid, personal details bloggers revealed online about not just themselves, but about their friends and family members. The notion of what is or isn't considered "over-sharing" fascinated me.

What genre does you book fall under?

Contemporary fiction.
 
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The main character, thirtysomething Maggie Kelly, who has an anonymous and profane personal blog, could be played by someone like Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson on Mad Men), Ginnifer Goodwin (Once Upon a Time, Big Love) or Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under), all of whom I think could deftly balance Maggie's emotional intensity with her desperate and darkly comedic side.

For Maggie's husband Michael -- a kind, career-focused guy who doesn't understand (and doesn't want to understand) what's causing his wife's lingering melancholy -- I picture anyone from James Marsden (30 Rock, 27 Dresses, The Notebook) and Zack Gilford (Matt Saracen from Friday Night Lights), to Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, (500) Days of Summer) playing that role.

The third main character is Michael's mother Dorothy, who I describe as a militant Emily Post in sensible shoes. I could envision actresses such as Kelly Bishop (Gilmore Girls, Bunheads) or Mary Kay Place (Big Love) stepping into Dorothy's petite Easy Spirit loafers.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The Mortified asks readers this question: What would you do if your spouse blogged about how you are a self-centered, unsupportive jerk, who happens to be lousy in bed, and then, after the blog went viral, your mother and your colleagues read the punishingly graphic commentary?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I'm currently in talks with an indie publisher. (*fingers crossed*)

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

A year-and-a-half.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I'd liken The Mortified to something I might read from Jennifer Weiner who, like me, is a former newspaper reporter. Weiner's novel Then Came You, for example, explores the many complex and emotional sides of surrogacy, similar to the way I think The Mortified delves into the consequences of over-sharing online. Fellow New England resident Tom Perrotta's Little Children -- which addresses the loneliness of at-home parenthood coupled with suburban hysteria -- and The Abstinence Teacher -- that tackles the clash of sex education and religious values -- used similarly no-nonsense approaches to analyzing current social issues.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My mother made this off-handed comment about my writing one day, saying, "You used to be funnier." And she was right, at least when it came to my personal blog. Once my children got wise to this thing called the Internet and the handy little tool called Google, I started cordoning off vast quantities of would-be amusing anecdotes behind bright orange traffic cones in an "off-limits" zone. The result of choosing family privacy over material that would've made for good blog posts? Some of the best, funniest tales were banned from the blog, per my children's request.

But what was happening inside the homes of people who didn't seem to do much holding back on their blogs? Were their husbands or wives unhappy with having their sex lives dissected online? Did their children feel over-exposed? Did their families even know that they were being discussed on a blog? Hence . . . The Mortified, a book about a suburban woman who, to cope with her feelings of being oppressed by matrimony and maternity, started what she thought was an anonymous, brutally honest blog where she would vent her unpleasant feelings about her life's disappointments.

What else about your book might pique the readers' interest?

People who publish very personal information about their loved ones online -- whether on blogs or on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter -- might have a strong reaction to the question of what constitutes "over-sharing." While The Mortified chronicles incidents in various characters' pasts where they were embarrassed by something someone had said about them, the difference is that in the modern era, embarrassing accusations and remarks can now be detailed in blogs and social media. And they can go viral. Mortification via Google.

*Be sure to check out the author who I have tagged as she's working on her very own "Next Big Thing:" Suzanne Strempek Shea, the author of eight books, including five novels, such as Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna and Becoming Finola. Suzanne and I both worked for the same newspaper in western Massachusetts back in the day. I can't wait to read her answers.*

Image credits: Amazon.com, Jack Rowand/ABC.

Bissinger's 'Father's Day' Book: Raw, Honest & Page-Turning

* Cross-posted on Mommy Tracked *

Buzz Bissinger doesn't care what you think about his parenting. Honestly. He doesn't. That's what makes his new memoir, Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son compellingly different from other parenting books.

Bissinger's candor about his failings and how he responded poorly to his son Zach's "serious intellectual deficits" are bracingly real. He's not trying to impress readers with how empathetic he was or what a fabulous, patient father he can be. He's laying all the ugly stuff out there. He isn't concerned if you judge him because he's already done a number on himself as far as condemnatory judgment is concerned.

Bissinger, the author of the widely acclaimed Friday Night Lights, has three sons, adult twins Gerry and Zach, and the college-aged Caleb. However, Father's Day is focused on Zach, specifically on the cross-country trip Bissinger took with Zach in the summer of 2007 in an attempt to get to know Zach who -- despite the fact that he has child-like comprehensive skills, counts on his fingers and doesn't understand much of what he reads -- still remains emotionally and intellectually out of reach to his father as much as Bissinger wished it were otherwise.

There was a three-minute gap between the birth of Bissinger's son Gerry and his son Zach, born three-and-a-half months premature in 1983 and weighing little more than two pounds apiece. Gerry, who was born first, had stronger lungs than his twin brother Zach and, as Bissinger said, the three minutes between Gerry and Zach's births made all the difference in whether Zach's brain got the oxygen it required. It didn't. Zach was hospitalized for his first seven and a half months on the planet.

The legacy of Zach's birth is something which continues to rattle and anger Bissinger, and had -- prior to the road trip with Zach, which he recorded so he could quote their conversations verbatim -- caused Bissinger to mentally check out to some degree when he was with Zach. "It is the most terrible pain of my life," he said. "As much as I try to engage Zach, figure out how to make the flower germinate because there is a seed, I also run. I run out of guilt. I run because he was robbed and I feel I was robbed. I run because of my shame. I am not proud to feel or say this. But I think these things, not all the time, but too many times, which only increases the cycle of my shame. This is my child. How can I look at him this way?"

The book -- which is sprinkled with anecdotes about Bissinger's relationship with his parents and his own career highs and lows, as well as Bissinger's admission that he has anxiety, depression and "mild bipolarity" -- reads like the script for a buddy road trip movie, as Bissinger drove them to an eclectic assortment of places to which he and Zach had connections and Bissinger frequently lost his cool when he foolishly didn't listen to Zach's suggestions on which roads to take because Zach not only has an unbelievable memory but is something of a human GPS.

Motivated to take this odyssey by fond recollections of road trips with his father, Bissinger tried to capture lightning in a bottle and reconstruct those precious father-son moments with Zach. But Bissinger's attempts to connect frequently left him feeling frustrated. For example, what he thought would be the crowning moment of the trip, a night in Las Vegas, fell apart because Zach was overcome and disinterested. Bissinger was angry and disappointed with his son at first, then he turned the fury on himself. It was a Cirque de Soleil show when Bissinger realized that what he'd thought would be one of the best nights of his son's life was crumbling. "Tears fill my eyes, as I face the fact that, all night long, I have done nothing but push my son beyond all limits of what is reasonable and right," he said. ". . . Everything I have learned from and about him on the trip cannot eradicate that so much will always be overwhelming and incomprehensible to him."

Among the hardest parts to read were those where Bissinger tried to speak candidly with Zach about his disabilities, a subject which Bissinger hadn't really thoroughly discussed with Zach in an attempt to protect him. The scene where they returned to a school where Zach had been treated abysmally -- yet Zach didn't realize he'd been treated badly -- was particularly agonizing for Bissinger because it brought him back to a time and place in his life when he felt unable to adequately help his child.

"There is no rose-colored ending to any of this," Bissinger wrote unflinchingly. "There is no pretty little package with a tidy bow. [Zach] will never drive a car. He will never marry. He will never have children. I still fear for his future . . . He is not the child I wanted. But he is no longer a child anyway. He is a man, the most fearless I have ever known, friendly, funny, freaky, unfathomable, forgiving, fantastic, restoring the faith of a father in all that can be."

The portrait Bissinger painted, of lugging along with them the heavy iron chains of his paternal guilt, a bag full of family photos and haunting memories, did eventually offer a glimmer of, not hope necessarily, but poignancy in the end. At the conclusion of the trip when his son Gerry joined the duo, Bissinger found himself moved by his sons' camaraderie in spite of how differently their lives turned out. "Three minutes does define a life, but never in the way I had always imagined," he said. "So many times I never thought I would get there. But we are a family, all different, sometimes divided, sometimes in pain, but unconquerable."

Image credit: Amazon.

Two 'Lunatics,' One Snarky Suburban Dweller & a 'Blueprint' for Feminine Insight, Melancholy

The first one took me along a darkened, twisty trail as girls became teenagers rebelling against their parents and wrestling with their own personal demons, as teens became twentysomethings who still needed their own mothers, to women becoming mothers themselves (or wanna-be mothers) who struggled with their own rocky childhoods and tried not to replicate them with their own children.

The second made me laugh (sometimes at myself) as it took a great big arrow and skewered the not-quite-grounded-in-reality lives of contemporary suburban parents, mothers specifically, who desperately attempt to camouflage their own insecurities about their bodies, their decisions to abandon their careers for at-home parentdom and whether their offspring have what it takes to one-up the kid next door who's taking violin and calculus lessons as well as mastering French and Mandarin Chinese.

The third was just one big, absurd joke of an adventure that two suburban dads unintentionally embarked upon after a wildly intense dispute over an off-sides call during a pivotal moment during a 10-year-old girls' soccer playoff game.

I'm speaking about three new books featuring parents, specifically Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Linda Erin Keenan's Suburgatory: Twisted Tales from  Darkest Suburbia and the novel co-written by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, aptly entitled Lunatics. If you're looking for touching, albeit somewhat depressing insight into the lives of women and mothers, you should pick up Blueprints. However if you're up for laughs at the expense of hyper-suburban parents, grab a copy of Suburgatory. Laughter at bizarre antics? Lunatics.

Of the three books, Schappell's Blueprints is the one I can't get out of my head. It has stuck with me, long after I closed the back cover. Eight, interrelated short stories deftly depict women's journey from girls blossoming into adolescents, to college students grappling with intense adult issues and to mothers of grown children who still need their counsel. In one story, you see a troubled girl who battled anorexia while her mother felt guilty for not recognizing the symptoms sooner. In another story, the girl's younger sister befriended a woman at a playground who also happened to appear in another story as a girl who dropped out of college after she was raped at a party. The most intriguing though, were the stories about Heather Chase who went from being a teenager who was trying to gain popularity through sex, then later put herself romantically between two best friends (it ended badly) and eventually wound up trying to give her own son a valuable lesson in love and trust despite her checkered past.

One hundred and eighty degrees in a different direction, tonally and otherwise, is the deeply sarcastic Suburgatory, the title from which the ABC comedy took its inspiration and name. In the book, Keenan plays the role of the intrepid reporter and reveals odd anecdotes from the alien nation that is suburban parenthood. Many of Keenan's edgy and sometimes profane articles are send-ups of situations or people she observed when Keenan, the former career-centric Manhattanite, was dragged by her husband to the 'burbs after they had a child. A significant chunk of the book involves Keenan's self-deprecating humor, mocking what has become of the formerly hard-charging CNN producer now that she's gone native. It was a fun jaunt after the weightiness of Blueprints.

Lunatics, by contrast, is on an entirely different planet than the other two books. By humor columnist Dave Barry and Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel, this strange novel was inspired by Barry's experience at his daughter's soccer games and Zweibel's experience with his son's Little League. The two writers assumed the voices of the two main characters and alternated chapters in their characters' voices. Zweibel wrote the part of Phillip, a mild-mannered, married pet store owner and father who made a controversial call as a referee at a youth soccer game that changed the outcome of the playoffs. Barry gave voice to the other character, the hot-headed Jeffrey, who went into a rage after Phillip called Jeffrey's daughter off-sides after she made what would've been the tying goal in a playoff game.

Out of their unhealthy obsession with youth sports, the unlikely pair formed an involuntary team as their story hurtled from a suburban book club where the women had perhaps a bit too much vino (and barely talked about the book), to being on the run from the police in Central Park, to assisting in a Cuban revolution and playing starring roles at presidential nominating conventions. While Lunatics can spark genuine laughter, especially at the beginning before it launched itself into absurd locales, if you're not comfortable with jokes about flatulence, bodily functions and crazy journeys, this might not be the read for you, although a soccer dad you know might thoroughly enjoy every part of it.

Image credits: Simon & Schuster, Amazon and Penguin.

Originally posted on Modern Mom.

Author Urges Parents to Go Forth and Multiply . . . More Often

My latest pop culture column this week over on Modern Mom and Mommy Tracked is my response to reading Bryan Caplan's book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

Caplan used a multi-pronged approach to try to persuade parents who already have kids to have more. "Today's Typical Parents artificially inflate the price of kids, needlessly worry and neglect the long-run benefits of larger families," Caplan argues. Some of his main points:

If you chill out, being a parent is fun and not excessively hard (except for the very beginning). We've made child-rearing overcomplicated by all of our hovering, carting children around to a bazillion things and vigorously pursuing kid-enrichment efforts, Caplan says. After pointing to a whole bunch of studies saying that parents' child-rearing doesn't wind up having much impact by the time the kids are grown -- except how they perceive you and their childhood -- he said there's no point in making ourselves crazy by trying so hard. ". . . [B]y adulthood, the fruits of parents’ labor is practically invisible," he wrote. "Children who grew up in enriched homes are no smarter than they would have been if they’d grown up in average homes."

And if you take this more relaxed view of parenting and just enjoy your kids, adding another one won't be such a big deal. Or so Caplan says.

We, as a society, are more well off than the larger families were in the 1950s, so why are we letting financial concerns stop us from having bigger families? Caplan says: "Big families are more affordable than ever, because we’re more than three times richer than we were in 1950. You can see our mounting riches in our homes. Compared to the tiny dwellings of the Fifties, modern families live in castles, with air conditioning. Why hasn’t the size of our families grown in step with the size of our houses?” He added “our real incomes have more than tripled since the 1950s."

(My respon$e would be one word: College.)

"How many kids will I want when I'm sixty?" His pull-at-your-heartstrings admonition is for parents not to determine their family size when they're overly fatigued by raising young kids, a phase which he says passes relatively swiftly when you look at the general scheme of things. Instead, the author wants you to imagine that you're 60 and are looking at your offspring -- and potential makers of grandkids -- and decide your ideal family size from that vantage point. "Many of the benefits of children come later in life," he said. "Kids have high start-up costs, but wise parents weight their initial sleep deprivation against a lifetime of future rewards -- including future grandchildren."

More kids means more people with new ideas, outlooks and talents eventually entering the workplace and supporting the nation's retirees. "Our population and our standards of living have risen side by side for centuries, and it's no coincidence," he said. ". . . The source of new ideas, without a doubt, is people -- creative talent to make discoveries, and paying customers to reward their success. More talent plus more customers equals more ideas and more progress."

After reading this book, I was intrigued by the studies which he said showed that parents' child-rearing has little impact on their children's intellect, future financial/career success and personalities, but I was still stuck on the whole issue of the cost of college, which I didn't think was sufficiently addressed in the book. His notion, that Americans should have more children than we do, seems contrary to the assertions made by many groups including environmentalists and feminists.

What do you think? Should we be having more kids or not? Do we make parenting too hard and discourage ourselves from expanding our families?