You might recall a post in January wherein I pledged to read one parenting book and one book just for fun every month and then report back on what I thought. Best laid plans. I obviously did not meet my one month goal, but true to form, I did manage to get through the fun book. Where’d You Go Bernadette by Marian Semple is hilarious and inventive, while still managing to maintain soulfulness. The characters are intelligent (or at least crafty), funny, mean and affecting all at once. There are no heroes here though the titular character is a brilliant architect turned stay-at-home mom. Bernadette is a true literary original – in turns caustic, charming, misanthropic and sexy. She abhors Seattle where the novel is set, but her withering gaze is so gleeful in its disgust you can’t help feel aligned with her. Oh, and did I mention she’s a little bit nuts? Semple wrote a classic epistolary novel, and she nails the form – putting a modern twist on it in the process. The story feels ready-for-the-big-screen. I can easily picture it as a Wes Anderson joint. Turns out that Ms. Semple was a staff writer for Arrested Development, the off-kilter masterpiece, and I was not surprised to see it has already been optioned for film. By coincidence, Tim and I had recently ben to Seattle where a close friend had told me about a local radio personality and weather legend, whose very existence seems to only make sense in Seattle. This man comes up in Where’d You Go Bernadette, as he should. Semple gets all of the details exactly right.
Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree is a massive behemoth of a treatise on family and what it means to parent. His focus is on families with exceptional children: dwarves, prodigies, schizophrenics, children conceived in rape, kids with autism and many more. Solomon gives each category of child a chapter of meticulous research. The central question of his work is this: should parents accept their children for who they are, and how much as a parent can you help shape a child to be his or her best self. I DID NOT read this book in its entirety, though I would like to someday. It clocks in at just under 1,000 pages so I dipped in and out of a few chapters and read a few from start to finish as well. The book is fascinating and as a new parent I took lessons from the chapters I read. Each of the parents in Solomon’s book has been dealt a difficult parenting hand – but the overwhelming majority rise to the challenge. As Solomon says, “Parenting is no sport for perfectionists” and Far From the Tree illustrates with great beauty how ordinary people with extraordinary children live each day with a little bit of grace.
This month I am reading a more practical parenting book: No Regrets Parenting, by Harley A. Rotbart. I just got started, but I can already see I am going to learn a lot. The fun read for this month is Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief. What can I say? I live in Los Angeles, the center of Scientology. It should probably be required reading. I’ll report back.
In the meantime, meet Matty the Sloth. He brightened my day.
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